Changes in Elites Over Time

The resources and strategies discussed in the previous section may be considered the stock of an elite repertoire of practices. Actual practices varied as conditions changed, and Chinese elites changed as well during the entire period from Ming to Republic. The chapters by Brook and Rowe indicate that periodic political crises of rebellion, war, and dynastic change destroyed old families and created conditions favoring social mobility. They find that the Yuan-Ming transition in the fourteenth century was probably even more disruptive in this respect than the seventeenth-century transition from Ming to Qing.^[70] In the nineteenth century, the Taiping Rebellion again loosened elite social structures in large parts of China; this time when the character of social institutions was beginning to change. The more fundamental transformation was, of course, part of larger processes of economic, social, and political change: commercialization, increased foreign trade, militarization, functional specialization, growing and politicized voluntary associations, and the shifting political context of republican China. During most of the late imperial period these processes changed the elite without fundamentally altering the elastic social structures. Toward the end of the nineteenth century they began to transform social structures as well. Here we consider various dimensions of these changes, their impact on Chinese elites, and their effect on elite relations to the state above and the general populace below.

The Growing Importance of Commerce . Although some have traced China's commercial revolution to the Song,^[71] the really dramatic growth in local markets, handicraft production for the market (especially cotton textiles), interregional trade, and a vigorous money economy began during the Ming. Population growth, new crops (corn, sweet potatoes, tobacco), an extended reign of peace, and the influx of silver from the New World fueled this expansion. The new commercial activity affected Chinese elites in several ways. It provided an important new avenue to elite status. Some merchants like the Fan family of Shanxi and the salt merchants from Huizhou made enormous fortunes during the seventeenth and eighteenth century through government

monopolies in salt, copper, and other commodities.^[72] More fortunes were made in trade beyond strict government supervision: first in grain, then in handicraft products (especially cotton cloth and silk), and, in the southeastern coastal provinces, in foreign trade with Japan, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia.^[73]

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, references to parvenu merchants are often colored by classical Confucian disdain for profit making—the attitude that formally relegated merchants to the lowest stratum of the social hierarchy. Some literati certainly felt compelled to protect their status against the challenge of commercial wealth,^[74] but literati disdain for mercantile activity eventually became more pro forma than real. Already in the Ming sumptuary laws were breaking down, merchants were purchasing degrees and interacting with gentry, and gentry families were rising from merchant backgrounds.^[75] By mid-Qing times gentry families commonly engaged in usury and trade, and merchant families supported Confucian academies and gentry publishing projects. The cultured sons of merchants were accepted into the gentry elite, and merchants eagerly assimilated the norms of the literati, bought land, and joined in philanthropy and other public works.^[76] The social/cultural fusion of merchant and gentry elites was largely accomplished in the commercialized zones by the end of the eighteenth century, setting the stage for broader political collaboration in the nineteenth.

In the nineteenth century, trade with the West opened up further commercial opportunities, which were effectively exploited by some established trading families. The merchants of Foshan, west of Canton, provide an interesting example of the elite transformation that resulted from this process. With backgrounds in handicraft production and trade with Southeast Asia, these merchants were among the first licensed by the Qing to trade with the British in Canton. When the treaty ports were established in 1842, following China's defeat in the Opium War, such men had skills and connections to work as compradors for Western firms.^[77] Ambitious men from Canton and other coastal entrepots like Ningbo followed opportunities for foreign trade in Shanghai. Although these treaty ports were marginal to Chinese society as a whole, many successful Chinese business-elites escaped marginality by acquiring official titles, purchasing land, and becoming patrons and philanthropists in their home towns; some advised officials on the new problems of intercourse with the West. Such men were strategically located to insert themselves into a changing nineteenth-century elite, which required men with particular specialized expertise as well as the classical cultivation that had traditionally qualified one to rule.^[78]

The gradual erosion of literati exclusiveness was further illustrated by the massive sale of examination degrees in the late nineteenth century. As a result of the Qing's desperate efforts to raise revenue, one-third of the gentry class had purchased their degrees, and two-thirds of the official establish-

ment had qualified by the "irregular" route of purchase.^[79] As merchants routinely purchased examination degrees and official titles, and as venality of office undermined Confucian assumptions about bureaucratic qualifications, merchants and gentry were increasingly drawn together in various local arenas where they were routinely identified by a newly popular term: shen-shang , or "gentry-merchants." Bell's article shows how, in the twentieth century, this new hybrid class became an integral part of an emerging business elite, engaging in bourgeois practice but also relying on well-established elite strategies of networking and local management.

This changing relationship of merchant and gentry elites in China is particularly important for comparative history· Robert Forster provocatively noted at the Banff conference that trade and commerce appeared more respectable in China than in Europe before 1900; this observation is an important corrective for those still believing in the efficacy of classical Confucianism's anticommercial bias. There is no question that the Chinese gentry was more open to mercantile wealth than the nobility of continental Europe, but the parallel to England—where the purchase of a country house and the assumption of a proper life-style could qualify wealthy merchants for gentry status—is striking indeed· Because this allegedly "open" English elite is often credited with both England's political stability and the country's economic modernization, it is fair to ask why a seemingly comparable Chinese elite had the former effect, but not the latter.^[80] We suggest three things that seem to distinguish the Chinese and English cases.

First, the type of trade accorded proper status differed in the two countries. The 1700 edition of Edward Chamberlayn's Angliae Notitia , the standard reference of the day, dropped all disparaging comments on "shopkeeping" and proclaimed that "in England as well as Italy to become a merchant of foreign commerce, without serving any apprenticeship, hath been allowed as no disparagement for a gentleman born, especially to a younger brother." But domestic wholesale or retail trade was clearly beyond the pale.^[81] By contrast, the Ming and Qing dynasties periodically restricted and prohibited foreign trade. The prohibitions were demonstrably ineffective and not seriously enforced for long periods by the Qing, but they still left those engaged in foreign trade open to disparagement as "criminal merchants and sly people ... [who] secretly trade with foreigners in prohibited goods."^[82] But because China was a single empire, long distance domestic trade was comparable to foreign trade between the countries of Europe—and was also capable of producing great wealth that brought high status. The Chinese in effect reversed the European evaluations of domestic and foreign trade, which certainly inhibited the sort of overseas trade that fueled so much of Europe's early modern expansion.

Second, the greater Chinese acceptance of domestic commerce may also he related to the structure of Chinese commercial enterprises, which main-

tained a reasonably firm separation of ownership and management. We see some of this among the salt merchants described by Zelin, but they seem perhaps more involved in day-to-day management than many Chinese merchants, especially those with gentry aspirations.^[83] Xue Shouxuan in Bell's article deliberately sought to end this separation as part of his new "bourgeois practice." Because earlier Chinese "merchants" left most direct commercial dealings to their managers, they were less tainted by money grubbing and freer to pursue the cultivated life-style of the gentry.

Finally, the economic geography of merchant-gentry relations was different in England and China. The landed gentry who ruled England through the mid-nineteenth century were always closely tied to London, where they maintained townhouses, rubbed shoulders with the great merchants, invested in banking and overseas ventures, and formed the connections which made England "a nation of aristocrats and squires ruling in the interest of bankers and overseas merchants."^[84] In effect the structure of elite power in England concentrated capital and influence in London, where it fueled the nation's economic modernization.

In China, a different structure prevailed. The most powerful commercial interests in China were not concentrated in the nation's capital, nor did they derive from the Jiangnan economic heartland. The typical Chinese merchant was a sojourner. Merchant groups from Huizhou (in the hills of southern Anhui), from Jiangxi, and from the interior northern provinces of Shanxi and Shaanxi dominated much trade in the early and mid-Qing. They were joined by Fujianese and Cantonese from the southeast. Later, Ningbo merchants rose through coastal and foreign trade and banking during the nineteenth century. Thus, the Chinese merchant was always something of an outsider, who met the gentry on the latter's ground and, almost inevitably, on the latter's terms. As an outsider, the merchant was also relatively dependent on bureaucratic favor, which left him vulnerable to sometimes extravagant demands for "contributions." The wide range of sojourning also meant that investments were not concentrated in one or a few centers.^[85] Sojourning merchants might sometimes trigger the rise of local entrepreneurs, but they also remitted a substantial portion of the profits of commerce back to widely separated, and in some cases peripheral, areas from which they had come.^[86] In fact, the differing merchant-gentry interaction in China deflected the London-style concentration of wealth by returning some capital to the hinterland.

In this context the sort of entrepreneurial elite described by Bell in Wuxi and epitomized by Zhang Jian in Nantong is so important. In the twentieth century, these local gentry-merchant elites began operating their own enterprises in the economic heartland. Not only were profits kept in areas of potential economic development, but money also began flowing from land to commerce; most critical, this all happened in a context where commercial

and industrial elites were not outsiders, but the dominant elements in the local political arena.

Militarization and the Rise of Military Elites . In the mid-nineteenth century, the threat of rebellions throughout China led to organized militia for defending the established order. Philip Kuhn has studied this process of militarization in the Middle Yangzi valley, and in this volume Edward McCord has documented the phenomenon in Guizhou. In provinces like Hunan, the gentry under Zeng Guofan seem to have maintained firm control of militia networks, but McCord shows that in Guizhou militia networks were an avenue for new men to enter the elite. The same was probably true in Anhui and in North China—where the orthodox gentry were weaker than Hunan, and the state had to rely on new elements to combat the threat of rebellion.^[87]

The militarization of local society was not a continuous process. McCord shows that the Liu family abandoned much of its original militia base in the late nineteenth century to concentrate its power on patronage networks and promote educational and other reforms. Elsewhere, he has demonstrated the discontinuity of local militarization between nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hunan.^[88] However, clearly by the early twentieth century the status of military men was rising significantly, as nationalistic ideology preached the need both to train a new core of military professionals and to spread military training and values among the general population.^[89] This late Qing rise of the military was the foundation for the rise of the men who would dominate China during the warlord era and (to a somewhat lesser extent) under Chiang Kai-shek's Guomindang.

How much did the militarization of national and provincial elites affect the nature of local elites? Here the record is surely mixed, with military power playing a fairly minor role among the Lower Yangzi elites. On the frontiers, where coercive resources were always important, they seem to have become even more so in the twentieth century. On the peripheries and in North China,^[90] where gentry and commercial elites were weak, local elites did become significantly militarized. In an era when modern rifles were readily available from foreign suppliers and provided a weapon to check or challenge the state or other rivals that was infinitely more threatening than the swords, spears, and flintlocks earlier dissidents could wield, local military elites became a serious force to be reckoned with. This greater power of military technology did not, however, normally increase the status of local militarists. The small-scale local commanders were too close to bandits and "local bullies"—and their use of coercive power was too destructive to the fabric of local societies—to be legitimate. When militarization occurred in once relatively settled societies it had a different social impact than did the military force integral to newly forming frontier societies or long incorporated into peripheral community structures. In the twentieth century, externally trig-

gered militarization was likely to erode communities rather than strengthen them. The character of elites, new or old, was also compromised as they substituted more direct forms of domination for cultural hegemony.

Functional Elites . The twentieth-century rise of business and military elites was the most visible example of a process wherein discrete functional elites arose alongside (or in place of) the old gentry elite. But the process was not simply elite functional specialization creating a pluralist society; occupations were not that separate. Averill refers to his great households as "small-scale conglomerates." Xue Shouxuan, described by Bell, was not only an industrialist but also a landlord, a scion of a prominent gentry family, and a member of the new Nationalist regime. Functional categories do not show how elites diversified to protect their interests. They underplay the importance of networks and associations linking elites together and may overstate the social distinction between merchants and gentry in the late Qing and Republic.

Nonetheless, increasing evidence of specialization clearly begins before the twentieth century. Benjamin Elman has argued that the eighteenth-century complex of academies, libraries, and printing houses in the Lower Yangzi supported a prestigious group of professional academics.^[91] The medical profession provided respectable employment for upwardly mobile men or sons of gentry families who would or could not follow the standard examination route—much as the younger sons of English gentry families became attorneys in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.^[92] Merchants specialized in particular trades or in banking. Local management, another respectable career, might involve special skills in water control, famine relief, or philanthropic activity. Law and administration required more and more specialists during the Qing, including respectable occupations such as private secretaries in the bureaucracy, less respectable jobs such as clerks, and clearly disreputable callings such as the pettifoggers (songgun ) who serviced the everyday lawsuits of ordinary citizens.^[93] Specialization was slowly redefining the acceptable range of elite occupations, but on the whole it elaborated established gentry and merchant roles. Skill in certain approved occupations might bring social approbation, but it did not markedly improve status unless combined with other factors—birth, education, social connections, personal rectitude—that were commonly accepted social markers.

There are, however, serious indications that elites were becoming more functionally specific in the twentieth century; certainly professional elites were becoming more prominent and more organized . Various "worlds" (jie ) of educators, merchants, industrialists, journalists, lawyers, and financiers emerged as publicly identified and frequently organized contenders for influence in the new China. The elite functional repertoire broadened, and the required level of expertise increased with greater specialized training. More important, functional competence was gradually becoming an independent

source of status. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, elites may have been significantly involved in commerce, but such involvement did not per se contribute to elite status. Commerce provided the wealth a family might use to seek status through scholarly or philanthropic activity or education for the exams. By the twentieth century, with the formation of chambers of commerce and the official encouragement of trade, commercial or industrial prominence alone was likely to earn one a position among the local elite. As this shift took place during the late Qing New Policies and the early Republic, one finds hybrid cases in which upper-degree holders like Barkan's Sha Yuanbing, with local standing and presumably also business interests, headed chambers of commerce and other new organizations influential in local affairs; thereby they conferred status on these institutions while simultaneously receiving influence from them.

As the Republic progressed and elite functions proliferated, more and more elites were defined by their competence in functional roles rather than by their embodiment of gentry cultural ideals—that is, by their jobs and occupations rather than by their backgrounds and behavior. We see this at the village level in the new "professional" brokers described by Duara; in the villages, these new elites do seem to be new men—upwardly mobile hucksters. We see it at the county level in the silk industrialists of Wuxi and the succession of Shas of Rugao. At the county level it is striking, as Barkan, Bell, and Rowe all indicate, that new functional elites were drawn so often from old elite families. Now more occupations conferred elite status and more routes provided upward mobility, particularly through the army. New men appeared, but elite, or at least near-elite, families were often best positioned to acquire new skills. Long-established patterns of elite flexibility and adjustment to changing conditions meant that even when the nature and institutions of the elite changed, there was still continuity in personnel. Though the social continuity of the old elite was broken, the biological continuity of elite families was often preserved. Averill describes a particularly interesting variation of this process: young men who were able to challenge the old order due to the respectability and status they commanded from their family positions within it.

Finally, we should note that in many cases, this emergence of functional elites in the twentieth century is described as the rise of less legitimate, less prestigious elite types. This is certainly true, and the new men out to make their fortunes were likely to be more openly exploitative than established elites. Even so, legitimacy is a normative judgment, and not all change represented social erosion. Normative standards are always slow to change, but they do, in time, catch up with social realities. We should remember that it was late in the nineteenth century, one hundred years after the onset of the industrial revolution, before English industrial elites were regarded as respectable.

The Emergence of a Public Sphere of Local Elite Activity . The imperial state had always been extremely suspicious of independent elite associations, though in the late Ming, the Jiangnan elite had managed to transform scholarly and cultural networks into organizations for quite overt political activity. The Qing cracked down severely on any associational activity that looked at all political, but they did not prohibit all organized gentry activity on the local level. Philanthropic associations—including foundling homes, societies providing support for widows, and famine-relief bodies—were the most important types of local elite organization. Angela Leung has pointed to the seventeenth-century emergence of united welfare associations (tongshan hui ), as local gentry and merchants took over responsibility for moribund governmental institutions in Lower Yangzi cities and towns. Although the Qing reasserted state interest in welfare in the eighteenth century, the resulting united welfare agencies (tongshan tang ) were run by local elites under official supervision.^[94] Even during the height of Qing state power in the eighteenth century, local elites were gradually outstripping bureaucratic authorities in other arenas as well, such as the small, but important, community-oriented water control projects of the Yangzi valley and South China.^[95]

State policy did much to encourage this tendency toward extrabureaucratic elite initiative. Madeleine Zelin has shown how the eighteenth-century Qing government pulled back from giving county magistrates adequate funds to run local government and fully control local arenas.^[96] In the nineteenth century, the Qing further compromised its authority by delegating certain tax collection powers to local gentry, merchants, brokers, and guilds.^[97] Commercial taxes in particular were collected outside the bureaucracy, and, as they became increasingly important, the fiscal power of merchant and gentry groups expanded.

The mid-nineteenth century certainly represented a major watershed in the growth of autonomous local-elite power. Philip Kuhn has shown how elite autonomy was enhanced by militia building in this period. Though the militarization may not have been permanent, Susan Mann's work on taxation, William Rowe's on Hankou guilds, and Mary Rankin's on elite initiatives during the postrebellion reconstruction further demonstrate the emergence of increasingly autonomous structures of local-elite power in the last half century of the Qing.^[98] Rowe and Rankin have analyzed this process in terms of a growing, community-focused "public sphere" of organized elite activity between the official bureaucracy and the private sphere of families, kin groups, and business enterprises.

If the Qing actively discouraged any overt political role for local elites before the 1890s, the 1902-1911 New Policies of the Qing government explicitly permitted elite political mobilization in local assemblies and councils and also gave them larger powers in education, economic development, and public security. Elite mobilization of this period built upon the "public sphere"

activities and networks of the nineteenth century, but the new political context of the reform period fundamentally altered the import of elite behavior. China's defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, the threat of partition in the 1897-98 Scramble for Concessions, and foreign occupation of the capital and of Manchuria in the wake of the Boxer Uprising gave rise to an unprecedented wave of nationalist sentiment. The rise of the Chinese press fanned this sentiment; general politicization of elite activities followed—a politicization that soon promoted hostility to the Qing dynasty. Provincial assemblies, local chambers of commerce and educational associations, study societies, and political associations, really proto-parties, provided powerful institutional bases for political opposition and helped bring about the republican revolution of 1911.

Republican elites controlled even greater organizational resources in private associations and quasi-governmental professional associations (fatuan ). These resources could. as proposed by Strand in this volume, lead to the appearance of a "civil society," a more autonomous successor to the public sphere, in which independent groups might organize, explicitly pursuing the interests of their members. A new type of local politics emerged in this civil society, a constituency politics of associations as interest groups, which threatened to replace the old politics of networks and personal relations. This politics developed in the cities of core areas, but as Averill's article indicates even the peripheries were ultimately affected by the new politics, with revolutionary consequences.

At the same time a new mass politics emerged, capable of threatening elites from below but using the same organizational forms that elites devised to press their interests against the state. Whereas the Qing had quite successfully prohibited open political activity for some 250 years, politics dominated the twentieth century; the genie was out of the bottle, and the forms, structures, and discourse of elite politics changed irrevocably. Once the public pursuit of private interest was legitimized, once elites began to function as representatives as well as patrons, once appeal was made to progress and change as well as harmonizing accommodation to cultural norms, the polity began to be transformed in ways that presented both new opportunities and new challenges to local elite dominance.

The Fragmentation of the Elite . The late imperial gentry elite was arguably the most unified (though not uniform) elite in the world. Even while it included more than the degree holders who had passed the state-administered examination system, those degree holders set the behavioral norms and defined the life-styles that set the elite apart. The examination system unified the gentry nationally, guaranteeing a comparable number of lower degrees to each county and providing preferential quotas of upper degrees for isolated and underdeveloped provinces on the frontier.^[99] No clerical, aristocratic, or

military elite challenged the dominance of the gentry; and the commercial elite imitated, joined, and slowly transformed the gentry—but did not compete with the gentry for local power as a separate group.

The late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century transformation of the elite placed unprecedented strains on elite unity, however. The emergence of a public sphere of elite organization provided a growing number of local arenas for elite activity. Elites came increasingly to focus on their separate local arenas as much as on the national examination system. But the environments, the resources, and the interests of these local arenas differed markedly, encouraging differences in elite behavior as well. Both Rankin and Schoppa have noted a widening gap between economic cores and peripheral zones. The cores benefited more from the commercial expansion of the nineteenth and twentieth century and recovered more quickly from the rebellions. When new schools were established to replace the examinations abolished in 1905, official funds favored the provincial capital. Core elites demonstrated the will and the resources to finance schools in their own communities, and the peripheries fell further and further behind. The same was true of other associational activity. Core elites organized more quickly, more extensively, and more effectively and managed to press their agendas in higher political and economic arenas.^[100]

Although Rankin and Schoppa have stressed the gap between core and periphery, others have stressed the rupture of urban and rural elites. Esherick has emphasized the role of an "urban reformist elite" in the 1911 Revolution, and Kuhn has written of a modernizing "new urban elite that found it increasingly hard to identify itself with the problems of rural China."^[101] In fact, there is substantial overlap between these urban-rural and core-periphery cleavages. The major urban centers were all in regional cores, and the elites of these cities diverged most markedly from those in peripheries. The urban elites were more commercialized, more functionally differentiated, more likely to be trained in modern schools and affected by Western culture, and more committed to models of economic modernization that favored the cities and the cores. These characteristics often put them at odds with the elites of less developed rural hinterlands, who were more concerned with protecting their own security against a rising tide of bandit attacks and communist insurgency than they were with the core elite's fancy blueprints for economic development and political reform. To the hinterland, the urban elites were "false foreign devils"; to the cities, the rural elites were "local bullies and evil gentry."^[102]

Just as important as these broad social fissures in the elite were more particularistic splits that came with the functional differentiation of the elite and its politicization. Warlord struggles could make bloody affairs of such divisions in the elite; and the ideological polarization of the 1920s tended to color a wide variety of local factional quarrels. With different functional

groups represented by their own associational structures, and with political groups forming factions to compete for political advantage, it was inevitable that the old elite would lose some of its former cohesion. We should not overstate those divisions, however. Broad consensus still existed on who the elites were and what qualified them to rule; but the challenge to that consensus was growing, and the internal solidarity of the elite was not as strong as it had once been.