The Ningbo Area, Northeastern Zhejiang

The city of Ningbo lies south of Shanghai and Hangzhou, near the coast, in the northeast corner of Zhejiang Province (see Map 8.1). It is part of the Lower Yangzi macroregion, the most highly urbanized and affluent section of the country on the eve of the twentieth century.^[13]

Ningbo was a historic seaport. A leading center of foreign and coastal

[12] The term "domestic cycle" refers to the expansion and contraction of the household unit resulting from births, adoptions, marriages, and deaths. Thus in a joint family system, the nadir of the domestic cycle may find a household reduced to a single married couple and their very young offspring. By contrast, at the peak of the domestic cycle this same household may expand to encompass three or more generations, including a senior married couple, several married sons and their wives, and the offspring of those marriages. Although most Chinese families aspired to the Confucian ideal of a joint family, in which parents shared a household with married sons and their offspring, in reality, both class and the domestic cycle modified household composition. For the classic discussion of the domestic cycle, see Maurice Freedman, "The Chinese Domestic Family: Models," in The Study of Chinese Society: Essays by Maurice Freedman (Stanford, 1979), pp. 235–39. Susan Greenhalgh develops an empirically based model of the economic advantages accruing to large households in her article "Is Inequality Demographically Induced? The Family Cycle and the Distribution of Income in Taiwan," American Anthropologist 87, no. 3 (1985).

[13] See G. William Skinner, "Regional Urbanization in Nineteenth-Century China," in G. William Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 1977), pp. 211–49, esp. 236–43.

Map 8.1.
Ningbo and Its Hinterland, ca. 1930.

trade as early as the Tang dynasty (618–906), it prospered in the late eighteenth century as a port for the coastal trade in local fish, salt, and rice. A history of Yin County, of which Ningbo was the seat, says that Ningbo trade began a new phase of growth early in the nineteenth century, as merchants from Fujian, Guangdong, and the Lower Yangzi Delta "gathered there like the clouds," while Ningbo traders left home for Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Suzhou, Shanghai, Hankou, Niuzhuang, and cities along the southeast coast, sometimes sojourning for years at a time. They also took up residence in Japan, Luzon, Singapore, Sumatra, and what is now Sri Lanka, opening shops and intermarrying with local women.^[14] The Ningbo diaspora coincided with the growth of foreign trade along the China coast.^[15] By 1800, Ningbo traders had established a foothold in Shanghai, founding a well-endowed native-place association to look after the needs and interests of its sojourning population there.

During the late imperial period, the Ningbo region (including the counties of Fenghua and Yuyao) was the home of manufactured goods sold all over China, as well as in Southeast Asia. Ningbo furniture, Fenghua woodcarvings, and Yuyao iron pans took their place beside Hangzhou scissors and Shaoxing wine as the best of their kind in the interregional domestic market. These were artisanal crafts, produced by masters and their apprentices in homes and small shops. Some traced their origins to a famous founder (Yu Xiaoxia, the late Qing bamboo carver of Fenghua, for instance) or shop (the Renhe iron pan forgery in Yuyao, founded in 1662).^[16]

In late Qing times, Ningbo women's handwork was also famous throughout the country and in Southeast Asia. Ningbo women produced handwoven cloth, rush mats and matting, hats made of straw or bamboo splints, and the canopies of oiled-paper umbrellas. All were counted among the local specialities that made Ningbo famous. Women also staffed the elegant mansions of the famous Ningbo elite: the bankers, financiers, and shipping magnates whose life-style matched their money: "there were more maids in the homes of wealthy Ningbo families than anywhere else in the empire."^[17] In sum, a complex division of labor, balancing agriculture, industry, and service and

[14] See Xinxiu Yin xianzhi (1877), 2:5b–6b. On the history of the port of Ningbo, see Shiba, "Ningbo and Its Hinterland," pp. 391–439. On Ningbo's development since the mid-eighteenth century, see Susan Mann Jones, "Finance in Ningpo: The ch'ien-chuang , 1750–1880," in William E. Willmott, ed., Economic Organization in Chinese Society (Stanford, 1972), pp. 52–55, and literature cited therein.

[15] On the history of European trade at Ningbo before the nineteenth century, see H. B. Morse, The Trade and Administration of China (London, 1921), pp. 226, 271–72.

[16] See China Industrial Handbooks: Chekiang (hereafter CIH:C; Shanghai 1935, repr. Taibei, 1973), pp. 739, 680. A detailed account of local protoindustrial specialties appears in Shiba, "Ningbo and Its Hinterland," pp. 424–27.

[17] See Tang Kangxiong, "Ningbo de niumu," in Zhang Xingzhou, comp., Ningbo xisu congtan (Taibei, 1973), p. 255.

based on the complementary spheres of male and female production, supported a flourishing local economy in Ningbo and its hinterland.

After the treaty of 1842 that opened Chinese ports to European trade, Shanghai became the central port of foreign trade for the Lower Yangzi region. Ningbo lost its preeminence as a port of foreign trade and became part of Shanghai's greater metropolitan trading system. But by then the city already had a well-honed financial connection to Shanghai. Ningbo bankers and financiers in Shanghai helped their home region ride the coattails of Shanghai's success. In 1877 the same currency exchange rates linked the economies of the Lower Yangzi cities of Suzhou, Hangzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai.^[18] Until the end of the period of this study, Ningbo's economic fortunes rose and fell with Shanghai's.^[19]

Meanwhile, the local economy of the Ningbo region was also changing. By the early twentieth century, the region had become part of a commercial cotton belt stretching along the coastal edge of the province. Ningbo City, located at the mouth of the Yong River and (after 1914) at the terminus of the Shanghai-Hangzhou-Ningbo railway, grew into an important cotton center.^[20] Widespread conversion of paddy land to cotton cultivation turned six of Ningbo Prefecture's seven counties into net rice importers. Market dependency throughout the area increased because of specialization in commercial cotton growing.^[21] Additional commercial crops produced in the area included medicinal herbs, peaches and plums, salt (manufactured under government control), tong oil, silk, and tea, while fishing remained the mainstay of the southeastern portion of Yin County and coastal Zhenhai and Dinghai counties.^[22] Traditional crafts—metal and leather work, shipbuilding, woodcarving, furniture making, and mat and hat weaving in the city and its hinterland—also continued to draw members of peasant households into the commercial economy, either as male apprentices in artisans' shops or as home handicraft workers.

French, English, and American missionaries arrived, accompanied by merchant compatriots eager to export local crafts. Exposure to new international markets varied within the Ningbo region, depending upon local trans-

[18] Xinxiu Yin xianzhi (1877), 2:5b–6b.

[19] Yin xian tongzhi (1936), "Shihuo zhi," p. 277.

[20] The railroad, begun in 1909, was partially completed in 1914, except for a critical bridge link over the Cao'e River, which was not in place until after 1933. The city of Ningbo in 1933 was home to 20 cotton firms, each handling between $0.5 million and $1.5 million worth of cotton fiber yearly. See CIH:C , p. 218.

[21] CIH:C , p. 1943.

[22] See Himeda Mitsuyoshi, "Chugoku kindai gyogyoshi no hito koma—Kanpo hachi nen Kin ken no gyomin toso o megutte," in Toyo 8 (Tokyo, 1967): 66–67; on the commercial economy of Zhenhai, see Zhenhai xianzhi , suppl. Xinzhi beigao (Preface dated 1924, published 1931), 42:30a, 55–57; on Dinghai County, see Dinghai xianzhi , "Yuyan zhi" (Preface dated 1923, repr. Keelung, 1963).

port and location. For example, by the turn of the century the counties along the steamer route connecting Ningbo to Shanghai—Zhenhai and Dinghai—were drawn into migration and occupational networks flowing to Shanghai. Ningbo's inexpensive coastal access to Shanghai meant that local people of all classes could travel regularly to the economic center of the realm.^[23]

In Ningbo's interior, the impact of foreign trade spread more slowly, first into Yuyao County, to the west of Ningbo City, with the partial completion of a rail line through the county that linked Hangzhou to Ningbo City. By the 1920s Yuyao had become the central producer of cotton for new local industry. Fenghua County, by contrast, remained a relative backwater. Situated off to the southwest, at the head of a shallow network of waterways that drained into the Yong River Basin, the county drew scornful comments from visiting foreigners in 1918. They complained about its cobblestoned streets (hard even to walk on), its shallow waterways, and the high cost of overland transport (a macadam road linking Fenghua to Ningbo was completed only in 1929).^[24]

These differences in regional economic change show up sharply in survey data from the early 1930s. Consider, for instance, three of the counties just mentioned and compare the mix of agriculture and industry in each. In 1933 the county of Yin, where Ningbo was the county seat, ranked third in industrial development among administrative units in Zhejiang Province (after Hangzhou, the provincial capital, and the coastal county of Wenzhou to the south). Yin County was home to more than 20 kinds of local industry: cotton weaving (including towels), knitting, oil pressing, brewing (soy sauce and wine), cotton spinning, rice husking, tea firing, flour milling, food canning, printing, ice making, ironmongery and related industries, glass, soap, lacquer, matches, brass and tin wares, straw matting and hats, rattan and bamboo wares, wooden furniture and implements, umbrellas, electricity, dry-cell batteries, and tinfoil (used mostly for making what foreigners called joss paper to be burned in sacrifices and at funerals). Yuyao County, by contrast, listed only 12 specialties; and Fenghua, six.^[25] Three of Fenghua's six local

[23] On the efficient steamer launches connecting Yuyao, Ningbo, and Zhenhai with the Chusan Islands (Dinghai County) as early as 1904, see the North-China Herald , May 27, 1904: 1097. Steamer traffic between Shanghai and Ningbo was carried by a French line catering to "middle and upper class" Chinese travelers, causing the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company to upgrade its own facilities for Chinese travelers in order to compete (North-China Herald , March 15, 1907: 548–49). The triumphal entry of the first Ningbo-owned and Ningbo-operated steamer into Shanghai in 1909 is described in the North-China Herald , July 10, 1909: 123–24. The Ning-Shao Steamship Company's Shanghai-Ningbo route carried up to 3,000 passengers in steerage (North-China Herald , June 12, 1909: 609).

[24] On the road, see Yin xian tongzhi , "Yudi zhi," p. 719; on earlier conditions, see Shina shobetsu zenshi (hereafter SSZ ), vol. 13, Zhejiang Province (Tokyo, 1919), pp. 100–101.

[25] See Zhongguo Shiyebu, Guoji Maoyiju, Zhongguo shiye zhi: Zhejiang sheng (hereafter ZSZZ ; Chinese industrial handbook: Zhejiang province; Shanghai, 1933), section geng : 6–10; CIH:C , p. 477.

industries—tea firing, handmade paper making, and bamboo and stone carving—were cottage industries catering to a domestic market. A small power plant and a factory for canning bamboo shoots (opened after 1920 and closed in 1931, in a pattern characteristic of the early local industries during this period) were the lone outposts of industrialization in Fenghua. In 1933 Fenghua was still exporting 65 percent of its rice to other areas, while Yuyao, the most important cotton-producing county in the region, imported 95 percent of its rice in the same year.^[26]

In this commercialized part of Zhejiang Province, then, after the impact of foreign trade and early industrialization, three types of local economy coexisted, dominated respectively by an urban industrial and commercial labor market (Yin), a mixed economy of commercial agriculture and cottage industry (Yuyao), and a preindustrial economy based on rice agriculture and traditional crafts (Fenghua).