The Terminology of Chinese Associations
The terminology of Chinese associations in Shanghai in the period under study reveals a plethora of social, economic and religious connotations and complicates the task of describing the broad scope of phenomena related to native-place identity[56] Distinctions among Chinese association names have been understood to reveal the underlying nature of associational practice. In contemporary usage, however, quite different terms could be interchangeable. This flexibility provides evidence of the relatedness of the forms beneath the names and of the fact that the formal and informal associations denoted were not discrete but overlapping.
Huiguan, gongsuo. Huiguan, the most studied institutional expression of native-place sentiment, were formal associations of sojourning fellow-provincials. Huiguan were established in Beijing as early as the late Ming by sojourning officials and scholars. Outside Beijing, particularly in centers of trade, huiguan were more commonly established by merchants, who patterned their meeting halls on the politically acceptable meeting halls of sojourning Confucian scholars. This was the case in Shanghai, where huiguan appeared as early as the seventeenth century and increased in number during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[57]
[55] After 1927 the new Nanjing government attempted to regularize commercial associations with a "commercial association law," followed by an "industrial and commercial trade association law" and "detailed regulations to enact the industrial and commercial trade association law" (1929 and 1930), requiring all trades to establish new commercial associations by 1931. Despite changes in association structure, many organizations informally retained earlier habits. Xu Dingxin, "Shanghai gongshang tuanti," 545-61.
[56] In addition to huiguan (meeting hall) and gongsuo (public office), common names for native-place and trade associations included those which expressed the religious, judicial, charitable, benevolent and fraternal functions of the associations: dian (temple or sanctuary), gong (palace or temple), ge (pavilion), lou (building, also restaurant), tang (hall, office or court), bang (gang, band or clique), hui (association or religious society), dang (clique, faction, gang or party), she (altar, organized body or society).
[57] One Shanghai association, the Guan-Shandong Gongsuo, was established as early as 1654-61 (SBZX, 509). The term huiguan refers both to the organization of people and the characteristic architectural form in which the association conducted its business.
The fact that nearly all Shanghai huiguan were established by so-journing merchants helps explain the interchangeability of huiguan and gongsuo , the latter a term many huiguan employed in reference to themselves, despite the fact that gongsuo is often considered to denote trade associations, not specifically associations of fellow-provincials. In Shanghai huiguan and gongsuo could be used interchangeably because of the overlapping of trade organization with native-place ties. It is useful, therefore, to represent most huiguan and gongsuo as organizations of fellow-provincials which also expressed trade interests.[58]
Bang . The term bang encompasses a broad range of meanings and occurs equally in reference to formal organizations of regional and trade identity like huiguan and gongsuo , similar but informal groups, and illegal associations like gangs, which were also frequently organized along axes of regional identity. The term kebang , "guest bang" (that is, outsider merchant group) occurs in reference to groups of merchants from areas outside their city of operation. Other records distinguish between wobang , "our bang" and tabang or waibang , "other bang" or "outside bang." Bang also frequently occurs in the compound bang-pai , or faction. In huiguan and gongsuo records, bang is employed in reference to subgroups within the association itself (regional and trade subgroups) and in reference to corresponding groups outside the association. In records and literature emanating from outside the associations, bang often means regional or trade communities, at times huiguan or gongsuo specifically.
The term bang and its use in regard to associations of fellow-
[58] Local gazetteers (see, for example, Shanghai xian xuzhi [Continuation of the Shanghai county gazetteer] [Shanghai, 1918; reprint Taipei, 1970] [hereafter referred to as SXXZ], 3:1) grouped huiguan and gongsuo together for this reason. Linda Cooke Johnson (Cities of Jiangnan , 162-67) distinguishes between common trade and native-place organizations, arguing that sojourner associations (huiguan ) were located outside the walled city, whereas "insider" trade associations were located within the city. She also suggests that trade associations did not provide religious services. The exceptions to these rules make the argument unpersuasive. Guangdong and Fujian huiguan were located within the city walls prior to the Small Sword Uprising, and a Zhejiang-Zhe-Shao huiguan was located there afterward. On the religious functions of trade associations, see Li Qiao, Zhongguo hangye shen chongbai (The worship of gods in Chinese trades) (Beijing, 1990). I would suggest that social scientists recognize the complexity of social practices like naming and accept a certain "fuzziness" here rather than force multidimensional social understandings into an inappropriate either/or categorization (economic or particularist), which reflects a way of thinking foreign to the members and contemporary observers of these associations.
provincials are significant not because it denotes a specific type of organization but because in its broadness it describes the quality of the group, that is to say, that the group acts in the manner of a clique, faction, or gang. This quality was recognized as both natural and potentially negative (because self-interested). Although the term is often used in a neutral sense, it is not accidental that in accounts recording unruly behavior of regional and trade associations the associations are referred to as bang , and not as the more respectable huiguan and gongsuo , which appear more frequently in gazetteers and in stone inscriptions left by the associations. Unfortunately for the historian trained to find identity in well-defined naming practices, this renaming of the association in accordance with its phase of behavior provides instead the idealized construction of what the members were doing at a given moment.[59]
New Terms in the Twentieth Century . A variety of new terms and associational forms—shangye lianhehui (merchant federation), gonghui (public association), youyihui (friendly society), xiehui (society, consultative committee), tongzhihui (comrades' association)-appeared in the twentieth century, beginning around the time of the Revolution of 1911. New and different forms of native-place associations appeared under all of these new names, reflecting Shanghai residents' striking capacity to adapt the native-place organizational principle to new circumstances and to integrate new social and political elements into their traditions and practices.[60]
In addition, a term employed to denote a new and self-consciously '"modern" form of general native-place association came into existence, the tongxianghui (literally "association of fellow-provincials"). The full
[59] The politically oriented term dang occurs less frequently in reference to associations of fellow-provincials, though, like bang , it could be used to suggest the negative characteristics of private associations. Unlike bang, dang is rarely neutral. Accounts of the Small Sword Uprising of 1853, for instance, refer to Cantonese and Fujianese bang and dang . In such contexts the meaning is similar to banghui , or hui ; that is, gangs and secret societies. In these accounts of the uprising, seven participating huiguan appear most frequently as seven bang or hui . As a result, it can be difficult to understand the specific connections between huiguan and secret societies, all organizations involved being sub-sumed under the same rubric.
[60] Examples are the Sojourning Guangdong Merchants' Federation (Yueqiao shangye lianhehui), the Federation of Jiangsu Public Groups (Jiangsu gongtuan lianhehui), the All-Zhejiang Association (Quan Zhe gonghui), the Subei Tongxiang Friendly Society (Huaishu tongxiang youyihui), the Jiangxi Self-Government Comrades' Association (Jiangxi zizhi tongzhihui) and the All-Anhui Consultative Committee (Quan Hui xiehui), all of which were active in Shanghai during the 1920s (SB, November 1926, May 1927).
name of these associations, lü Hu tongxianghui (association of fellow-provincials sojourning in Shanghai), evokes again in the Republican era the permanence of (often ascribed) regional identity and the perceived transience of (often permanent) residence.
Terminology and Interpretation: Guilds and Landsmannschaften . The dual nature of huiguan and gongsuo , which most commonly incorporated both native-place and common-trade ties, has resulted in a controversy over the basic nature of these organizations, reflecting a certain historiographical essentialism. This controversy has been expressed through variations in the western terminology which scholars have employed to characterize Chinese associations. Consideration of Chinese terminology therefore cannot alone describe the scope of the problem. We must also discuss western terminology.
In their efforts to comprehend and classify Chinese native-place and trade associations, scholars have employed two western-language terms, "guild" and "landsmannschaften, " to convey the nature of the groups involved. "Guild," which suggests an essentially economic organization, has been favored over "landsmannschaften, " which expresses the primacy of regional bonds.[61] This discrepancy in terminology results not only from the different economic arguments that have surrounded the associations but also from the fact that there appears to be no western term that incorporates both landsmann and trade characteristics.
It is not surprising that the Europeans frustrated in their attempts to expand trade with China adopted the term "guild" to describe the Chinese protective associations they encountered which rebuffed their attempts to penetrate Chinese markets. European interests were primarily commercial, and it was in this realm that they encountered the Chinese associations. The term "guild" offered the most obvious analogy to their historical experience. Their own economic interests, therefore, caused them to view native-place ties as an incidental and subordinate feature of Chinese guilds. They did not, in general, seek to investigate or understand the linguistic, religious and cultural basis of these associations.[62]
[61] The use of the term "guild" is not restricted to western historians: Japanese scholars refer to girudo ; Chinese scholars, to jierte .
[62] The transcript of a trial in which British opium merchants unsuccessfully sued the Chao-Hui Huiguan (an association of opium merchants from Chaoyang and Huilai counties) for monopolizing trade reflects the Chinese merchants' exploitation of the persistent inability of the British to comprehend the nature of the Chinese association. When the British characterized their imagined "Chinese guild," the Chinese merchants used the ways in which their association did not fit the British model to "prove" that no such association existed at all. See NCH, September 1879, October 1879; H. B. Morse, The Gilds of China (London, 1909; reprint Taipei, 1972); Herbert Giles, Chinese Sketches (London, 1876); D. J. MacGowan, "Chinese Guilds or Chambers of Commerce and Trades Unions," Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 21 (1886-87): 133-92.
The native-place characteristics as well as the noneconomic functions of these associations have accordingly been cited as evidence of irrational, particularistic or monopolistic tendencies of Chinese guilds.
Such views dovetail with historical and sociological models of the catalytic role of cities and urban associations in the development of capitalism. In particular, Weber's linkage of China's apparent failure to achieve capitalism with the failure of Chinese cities to resemble European cities—in other words, their failure to develop economically "rational" urban associations and a "commune-autonomous" form of urban settlement—has spawned numerous meditations on the nature of Chinese cities and their relation to European cities. William Rowe's study of Hankou represents the most significant recent scholarship in this vein. Because Weber stressed the particularism of Chinese business ties, arguing that urban citizenship could not develop in communities of sojourners, native-place associations have been a natural focus in studies of Chinese cities.[63]
Japanese historians like Niida Noboru and Imahori Seiji have stressed the importance of regional ties in Chinese "guilds," asserting that although common native place was not an essential condition for membership, common local-origin was nonetheless a general rule. Imahori Seiji, echoing Weber's arguments, emphasized that the closed and reactionary quality of these associations stifled China's economic development.[64]
Ho Ping-ti's major study of Chinese regional associations, developed in response to this dominant trend in Japanese historiography, empha-
[63] Max Weber, "Citizenship," in General Economic History (Glencoe, Ill., 1950), 315-51. For a detailed discussion of these arguments in the context of a critique of Weber which does not dispute Weberian logic, see Rowe, Hankow: Commerce and Society , 1-16. In light of recent western scholarship on the rural and regional preconditions for the development of industrial capitalism, this debate on the role of Chinese cities may appear somewhat .quaint. See, for example, T. H. Ashton and C. H. E. Philipin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1985); Steven Hahn and J. Prude, The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation : Essays in the Social History of Rural America (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1985).
[64] See Niida Noboru, "The Industrial and Commercial Guilds of Peking and Religion and Fellowcountrymanship as Elements of Their Coherence," Folklore Studies (Pe-king) 9 (1950):197; Rowe, Hankow: Commerce and Society , 267; Susan Mann, "Urbanization and Historical Change in Modern China," MC 10 (January 1984):90.
sized the importance of regional ties in Chinese associations. He chose the German term landsmannschaften to describe huiguan and called gongsuo landsmann guilds.[65] Although he emphasized the primacy of nafive-place ties in his choice of terminology, his assessment of the significance of these ties differed sharply with Japanese interpretations and (though not explicitly) the superimposition of Weberian typology on the Chinese historical case. The novelty of Ho's argument was his assertion that in China native-place associations played a critical positive role in economic development by facilitating interregional and social integration. Important recent work by Susan Mann on the Ningbo financial community and by Marie-Claire Bergère on the Shanghai bourgeoisie demonstrates the adaptability of traditional native-place organization to the needs of modernization.[66]
Recent scholarship by Chinese historians has addressed and restated these various arguments. The dominant trend in contemporary Chinese scholarship suggests that in the nineteenth century the nature of Chinese commercial and handicraft associations changed. Du Li and Xu Dingxin argue that feudal and particularist associations became increasingly democratic and that the significance of native-place ties gave way to more "rational" commercial alignments. This argument must be seen in the context of the abiding preoccupation with the "sprouts of capitalism" in Chinese historiography, supporting arguments that China developed or was developing an indigenous form of capitalism, in accordance with Chinese interpretations of Marxian stages of economic development.[67]
[65] Ho, Zhongguo huiguan shilun ; Ho Ping-ti, "The Geographic Distribution of Hui-Kuan (Landsmannschaften) in Central and Upper Yangtze Provinces," Tsinghua Journal of Chinese Studies n. s. 5 (December 1966):120-52.
[66] Susan Mann Jones, "The Ningpo Pang and Financial Power at Shanghai," in Elvin and Skinner, The Chinese City between Two Worlds , 73-96. Mann's study examines how traditional locality and kinship ties within the Ningbo community not only adapted to meet the needs of modernization but also provided important resources for the developing financial power of the group. Her conclusions regarding the utility of native-place ties in the development of modern finance have been reinforced by Marie-Claire Bergère's study of regional ties and the development of modem industry in Shanghai (L'âge d'or de la bourgeoisie chinoise [Paris, 1986], 148-59).
[67] This argument is reflected in several essays in Zhongguo zibenzhuyi mengya wenti lunwenji (Compilation of papers concerning the sprouts of capitalism in China), ed. Nanjing daxue lishixi Ming-Qing shi yanjinshi (Nanjing University History Department, Ming-Qing History Division) (Nanjing, 1983). See also Xu Dingxin, "Jiu zhongguo shanghui chaoyuan" (Trends in the development of old China's Chamber of Commerce), Zhongguo shehui jingjishi yanjiu (Research on China's social and economic history) x (1983):83-96. In such arguments we may observe the irony of Chinese historians reconstructing Chinese phenomena to fit western categories. Xu has modified his position, admitting the uneven evidence for progressive evolutionary trends in his more recent work (see Xu Dingxin, "Shanghai gongshang tuanti").
Rowe's detailed study of Hankou concurs generally with this most recent judgement of mainland Chinese historians, although Rowe is more preoccupied with Weberian than with Marxist categories. Rowe .Employs Weber's categories regarding urban requirements for the development of capitalism but rejects Webers conclusion that Chinese cities were irredeemably alien to the dynamic western model. He argues that .(at least in cities like Hankou), China was developing an indigenous form of capitalism, which was expressed in the rationalization of economic behavior. In his choice of the word "guild," Rowe minimizes native-place organization and sentiment by insisting on fundamental economic primacy, and he suggests that by the late-nineteenth-century Chinese guilds increasingly fulfilled Webers prescriptions for rational economic behavior.[68]
Rowe at once agrees with Ho Ping-ti's assessment of the positive economic role of huiguan and denies the other major element of Ho's :argument, the primacy of the native-place tie. Whereas Ho suggested a separate model of "rational economic activity" based on the particularities of the Chinese case, Rowe's study concludes with the suggestion that apparent Chinese peculiarities aside, urban organization in Hankou 'by the late nineteenth century had come to resemble the European model.
Rowe's argument for a process of "de-parochialization" and "indigenous rationalization" in Hankou's native-place and trade associations, .like the arguments of Du Li and Xu Dingxin, depends on a formalistic typing of associations. These studies deduce the presence or absence of native-place sentiment or organization largely on the basis of an organization's name, on the formal existence of new trade associations or on 'the basis of gazetteer accounts which provide fragmentary and uneven ,descriptions of association structure or constituency. Such focus on the names and formal structure of organizations can be highly distorting because native place was commonly an informal (though integral) component of new forms of trade association. This may only be evident through an examination of organizational behavior. In 1925, for instance, Chaozhou merchants had a Sugar and Miscellaneous Goods 'Trade Association in addition to their huiguan . But this did not mean a
[68] Rowe, Hankow: Commerce and Society , 252, 283-85.
separation of native-place and economic functions. The apparent formal distinction between trade and native-place association (tempting for a historian eager to discover a decline in the native-place organization of trade) was in fact illusory. When the Shantou Finance Board wrote to the trade association in 1925, for example, the huiguan drafted the response. Other glimpses of how formal institutional divisions may collapse into common native-place identity are revealed by the placement of documents in archival collections. In the Shanghai Archives, for instance, the archive of the Hu She (association of sojourners from Huzhou, Zhejiang) includes the meeting records, trade rules and regulations for the Shanghai Municipal Silk Trade Association (Shanghai tebie shi chouduan ye tongye gonghui ) and the Shanghai Huzhou Silk Gongsuo (Shanghai Zhe-Hu zhouye gongsuo ).[69]
Because the primary focus of the present study is social rather than economic, models of economic development from feudalism to capitalism (Weberian and otherwise) are not an overriding concern. Nonetheless, the process of investigating the social behavior of huiguan and gongsuo and the availability of important new sources have led me at least peripherally into these debates. In two respects—in affirming the persistent native-place segmentation of Shanghai's urban community and the importance of native-place links which transcended Shanghai's borders—the findings of this study challenge those of Rowe which suggest the attenuation of native-place ties in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the displacement of native-place identity by an emergent urban "Hankou" identity.[70] As the story of the forms and
[69] CHYB. Bean-trade documents similarly demonstrate that despite the apparent unifying structure of a bean association in the 1920s, certain regional bang participated in paying taxes while others did not ("Shanghai douye gongsuo cuixiutang jilüe," 13-14; SBZX, 366-68; Shanghai shi dang'anguan (Shanghai city archives), ed., Shanghai shi dang'anguan kaifang dang'an quanzong mulu (Catalog of the open archives of the Shanghai City Archives) (Shanghai, 1991).
[70] The different conclusions of Rowe's study of Hankou and this study of Shanghai cannot be explained by differences between the two cities. Although Shanghai's commercial boom occurred later than Hankou's, Shanghai experienced commercial expansion since at least the sixteenth century (as part of the extended Yangzi delta urban network centering on Suzhou). In other respects the two cities resembled each other. Both were prominent commercial centers; both have been described as "vanguard" localities; and both attained an economic importance which outstripped their administrative importance. Shanghai was one step higher than Hankou in Skinner's hierarchy of administrative central places (a county seat rather than a market town). Nonetheless, it did not surpass Hankou in the numbers of officials assigned to the city. It may be that Rowe overestimates late-nineteenth-century weakening of native-place ties because he uses a Weberian vocabulary which presumes a contradiction between particularistic ties and economic rationality. Such an assumption need not be made in the context of a study which demonstrates the "modernization" of Chinese mentalities. Although Mary Backus Rankin (Elite Activism , 89) describes a transformation of consciousness which led elites to think "beyond local boundaries," she recognizes that "Zhejiang merchants in Shanghai still retained the attributes of sojourners through the last decades of the Qing dynasty."
sentiments of Shanghai urban organization told in the following pages will demonstrate, the idea of the native place remained a potent organizing principle as late as the 1930s. Moreover, native-place sentiment was not rigid but was a remarkably flexible axis for the coalition of a variety of social organizations, ranging from "feudal" to "modern" types, if these stifling labels must be used.
The fact that people retained their native-place identity did not mean they could not also develop broader (particularly national) identities. They would, and the how and why of this process is integral to the story in this book. The transformation of urban identity was a process of accretion of identifies, not the displacement of native-place identity for newer, more "modern" ones. It was precisely in this process of adoption and accommodation that understandings of both tradition and modernity were forged and transformed.
The city of Shanghai did not conform to Weber's typologies of cities, European or Chinese. Perhaps more important, freedom from Weberian straight jackets permits the exploration of certain unique features of Chinese urban social and economic formations. The story of the enduring but shifting formations of native-place sentiment expressed through changing Shanghai urban institutions raises new issues of multiple and variable urban identities; connections between communities of fellow-provincials in Shanghai and their native areas (connections critical to the comprehension of both locations); connections between urban elites and non-elites through native-place ties; and the relation of native-place associations to the maintenance (or disruption) of urban order.
Finally, recognition that native-place sentiment and organization were important and enduring in Shanghai during the Republican era permits an understanding of modernization which does not presume the withering of traditional ideas and practices. Instead, we will be free to trace the ways in which "tradition" was not fixed but dynamic, not given but constructed, and the means by which elements of "traditional" Chinese culture helped facilitate and structure the process of radical social transformation we associate with modernity.