Laborers' Associations

Ningbo workers serving foreign employers (Siming Changsheng Hui)

Ningbo seamen (Shuishou Jun'anhui)

The Ningbo association represented the pinnacle of native-place organization and powen While other native-place associations did not have the wealth or population to support such extended organizational complexity they nonetheless followed a similar, if simpler, model.^[54]

Although these examples suggest a variety of specific and often complex organizational arrangements, they also demonstrate the general rule of economic organization by both trade and native place. The irreducible units in each case are groups defined in terms of a single trade and a common native-place identity. Because of the dual nature of these economic and social units, they could be integrated into either overarching trade or native-place associations (or, frequently, both). Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as new associations formed and old associations faded away in the rapidly developing and constantly changing economy of Shanghai, these basic native-place trade units were involved in processes of fission or recombination with other (either same-native-place or same-trade) units. Such associational restructuring followed the rise and decline of specific trades, the diversification of sojourner economic strategies, and the influx of different immigrant populations. There was no clear trend in the direction of either overarching trade associations or overarching native-place associations

[54] In the 1930s the much smaller Jiangxi Huiguan was organized around thirteen trades, each of which contributed one director. Inside the huiguan , each director had an office marked "Jiangxi Huiguan ——— Trade." The trades included carpentry, bamboo articles, enamel, lacquer, tailors, canvas workers, silk and pottery (interview with Shen Yinxian, Shanghai, October 1983).

until 1931, when the Nationalist government enforced laws to regularize trade associations.^[55]