PART THREE
REPUBLICAN ELITES AND POLITICAL POWER

Seven
Patterns of Power:Forty Years of Elite Politics in a Chinese County

Lenore Barkan

In recent years scholars have revealed much about the nature of China's early twentieth-century local leaders and the ways in which they interacted with state authorities. However, major questions concerning pre-1949 politics in the Chinese countryside remain unresolved. Most important, what was the overall pattern of change in the composition and activities of twentieth-century local elites as well as their relationship to the state and other social and political groups, and why did this pattern emerge?

Through a study of local leaders in North Jiangsu's Rugao county from the beginning of the twentieth century until the late 1930s, this essay addresses these questions. The evidence from Rugao suggests that early twentieth-century China witnessed neither consistent local-elite growth and expansion nor persistent local-elite disintegration. Instead, this period of rapid change saw China's local leaders both reacting to and capitalizing on ever new sets of political relationships within a constantly changing national context.

Initially, historians portrayed the late Qing dynasty as a period of social turbulence and governmental decay.^[1] Moreover, they argued that there was further disintegration after the 1911 overthrow of the Qing and the subsequent inauguration of the Republic. China became politically fragmented, and because military concerns dominated governmental thinking, other programs for education and economic development got short shrift. Only with the Communist revolution of 1949 was China again united.^[2]

The portrayal of local elites during this period was equally unflattering. Chinese and Western writers frequently referred to local leaders as "rotten gentry" or as "evil gentry and local bullies."^[3] Later historians, particularly those writing about the turbulent North China plain, characterized local leaders as selfish, violence-prone individuals solely interested in enriching their private coffers and increasing their personal power. Moreover, the

historians claimed that local elites' pursuit of individual advantage contributed to the increasing fragmentation and disintegration of both local society and national polity.^[4]

Kuhn, Mann, and other scholars subsequently challenged or modified this unpromising picture in a number of ways. They argued that after the devolution of power, a by-product of gentry involvement in suppressing mid-nineteenth-century rebellions, there was a long-range trend toward governmental reassertion of control over local elites. Begun by the Qing, and continuing unevenly under the Republic, this effort was characterized by growing central fiscal control and extended state bureaucracy at the district and even village levels. Often cited manifestations of the trend include the organizations established by New Policy reforms at the end of the Qing, such as local educational associations and chambers of commerce and the elected assemblies and councils set up in name of "local self-government." These scholars further proposed that a second phase of state assertiveness occurred after the Nationalists seized power in 1927. Through reforming the tax system, particularly the abolition of lijin and the imposition of a business tax, abolishing dibao (local constables), and establishing subdistrict government offices, the Nationalists sought to strengthen the central government's administrative and fiscal control over local leaders still further, albeit with somewhat disappointing results.^[5]

Other historians stressed the local elites' progressively stronger initiatives that resulted in a new "public" sphere of activity, neither fully autonomous nor completely controlled by higher-level officials. In post-Taiping Zhejiang province, Rankin argued that an increasingly active, commercialized, and differentiated local leadership ultimately challenged the imperial dynasty and contributed to its overthrow. In Nantong county, Jiangsu province—next to Rugao—Bastid found that county-level gentry, led by the well-known reformer Zhang Jian, were reform-minded rather than conservative and were genuinely concerned with the well-being of the entire society rather than their own personal security and power. Similarly, Schoppa drew a picture of Lower Yangzi valley elites who in the first decades of the twentieth century sponsored a complex process of association building, social management, and elite participation in local politics.^[6]

A still more complex picture was drawn by those writers who carried questions concerning the nature of local leadership into the 1930s. I found that although local leaders continued to engage in many of the same activities as their earlier counterparts, the considerable services performed by local leaders narrowed, and the importance of security activities, particularly at the subcounty level, increased.^[7] Geisert expressed doubts about the Nanjing government's progress in implementing its plans for local reorganization,^[8] and Duara suggested that what amounted to incomplete state making had a deleterious effect on rural communities by encouraging the rise of entre-

preneurial, subadministrative "state-brokers" who profited at the expense of both government and peasants.^[9]

Such findings partly reinforced the older view of an increasingly violent local elite and a progressively deteriorating local society. But they also made it clear that it is difficult to discern consistent patterns of growing elite leadership capacity, increasing state control, or advancing social disintegration amidst the rapid changes of the first half of the twentieth century. Instead, they indicated the importance of viewing both state and local societal actors not as isolated entities, but as parts of a larger network of social and political relationships in which a change in one area produced variations in others. On the basis of my study of Rugao, I would suggest that these changes be grouped into five periods:

Period I (Early twentieth century until 1915): Local elites between state and society . Local leaders concerned themselves with reform, but were very sensitive and responsive to issues raised at national or provincial levels. Because the central state still existed (in fact until 1911, and as an ideal until 1915) the most prominent local leaders directed much of their attention toward reform at central or provincial levels rather than reform originating in their own areas. Many local changes were mandated by the center or province, but as state control weakened, local elites had some latitude to take increasing initiative and sponsor reform in their local domains.

Period II (1915 to 1924): Local-elite triumph . This was the golden age of local-elite leadership. The central state had almost totally disintegrated leaving local leaders on their own, and opposition to local-elite rule had not yet appeared at the bottom of the system. As a result, local-elite leaders devoted their energies to building up their local areas. The result was a burst of road building, hospital construction, land surveying, new business ventures, and other projects.

Period III (1925 to May 1927): Rise of the opposition . Now instead of being threatened from the top of the system, local leaders, for the first time, were threatened by disaffected elites forging ties to the masses outside existing social channels. As students, Communists and Nationalists organized; they criticized both local leaders and their programs, putting local leaders increasingly on the defensive.

Period IV (May to October 1927): Attack and retreat . During this period local leaders, under attack by Communists and Nationalists, resigned local leadership posts and withdrew from public affairs. In addition, the newly installed Nationalist government in Nanjing attempted to substitute its officials for local leaders.

Period V (October 1927 to March 1938): Local leaders return . The Nationalist government defeated the left-wing opposition. However, because the new officials proved ineffective, the Nationalists were forced to rely on

local leaders. Although local leaders became increasingly powerful, they were neither as innovative nor as independent as in the late 1910s and early 1920s; they were no longer concerned with social change and made no new local investments. Instead, confronted with both pressure from the Nationalist government above and potential opposition inside local society led by continuing Communist and student movements, the local leaders worried about their own security. Consequently, a bifurcated power system, split between local leaders and the Nanjing regime, became an obstacle to effective local government.

This periodization of local elites reacting to and operating within a larger political environment aims to resolve the apparent conflict between those scholars who portray early twentieth-century China as a country marked by disorder, violence, and instability and those who discern either growing state control or increasing local leadership capacity. It also emphasizes that throughout the first several decades of the twentieth century, local leaders were only one of several forces active in Rugao. In Period I, the Qing state was still an effective force; however, in Period III, revolutionary elites in the united Communist and Nationalist parties challenged the existing local-elite establishment. After the spring of 1927, Communists, acting alone, continued to exert revolutionary pressure while the Nanjing regime attempted to gain political control through the Nationalist county government.

If one thinks of each of these as groups occupying a political "arena," then the relationship that existed between these arenas during each period can be illustrated as in Figure 7.1. To describe the character and activities of local elites through these five periods, I will focus on two of the most important members of Rugao's twentieth-century elite: Sha Yuanbing, one of the most active pre-1927 local leaders, and Sha Yuanqu, one of the most important post-1927 political actors. Examining the changes in the lives of Rugao's notables and the context in which they operated also provides information relative to three more general questions: First, what were the social and economic characteristics of local leaders during the late Qing and Republican periods, and in what types of activities did they engage? Second, what kind of relationships did local leaders have with higher levels of government, as well as other locally active social and political groups, and what was the resulting pattern of elite-state and elite-society relations? Third, how did the characteristics of local leaders and their relationship to both the central state and other social and political groups change over time?

Rugao County, Jiangsu Province

Rugao county is located in North Jiangsu. Stretching between the Yangzi River and the Yellow Sea, in the 1920s and 1930s it was on the periphery of the Lower Yangzi macroregion.^[10] Thus it was close enough to Shanghai for

Figure 7.1.
The Relationship Between Political Arenas in Twentieth-Century
Rugao County

news of its affairs to be printed frequently in Jiangsu and Shanghai newspapers but far enough away from major urban centers to have retained its traditional rural character.

In 1930 Rugao reported a population of 1,356,777 individuals, of which, based on 1929 figures, at least 183,268 were urban residents.^[11] A few years later Rugao was said to be home to more than 1.5 million people, making it both Jiangsu's and China's most populous county. About 70 percent of the population engaged in agriculture. Of these, the vast majority were tenants (75.4 percent). Only a small minority were either half-owners and half-tenants (7.7 percent) or owner-cultivators (16.9 percent). Moreover, plots were not large: 50 percent of the households cultivated between five and ten mu (one mu equals one-sixth acre), 30 percent between ten and twenty mu , and 15 percent between twenty and thirty mu ; 5 percent tilled between thirty and fifty mu , and only a very few over fifty.^[12]

Although little use was made of machinery or chemical fertilizers, farmers in Rugao were relatively productive and prosperous. In an average year, the county was self-sufficient in food grains. Until the early 1930s, the biggest crops were rice and cotton. Barley, wheat, beans, corn, and sweet potatoes were also important. In the early 1930s, when weather conditions changed, farmers substituted more drought-resistant crops (like cotton, corn, soy-beans, and peanuts) for rice. By 1934 "very little" rice was grown in Rugao.^[13]

Rugao produced abundant cotton, but unlike neighboring Nantong, the county never developed permanent facilities to process this raw material into finished or even semi finished goods.^[14] Rugao's two best-known agricultural specialties were turnips and processed ham. But every August, with clockwork regularity, the turnips caused massive outbreaks of typhoid and other serious diseases when they were eaten raw after being washed in contaminated water. The hams were good but definitely inferior in quality to those produced in Zhejiang and Yunnan.^[15]

In political terms Rugao was no more distinguished. Under the Qing dynasty it was part of a prefecture dominated by its more influential neighbor to the southeast, Tongzhou.^[16] By 1927, even though it was China's most populous county, the Jiangsu government still considered it a county of lesser status than Nantong, the new name of Tongzhou.^[17]

Rugao's Local Elite: the Older Generation

Because scholars disagree over what constitutes the local elite, it is impossible, when studying a particular area like Rugao, to start with an a priori definition of the local elite and then use it to identify the particular individuals who meet the definition's requirements.^[18] Instead, I will define the Rugao local elite as those individuals considered elite by contemporaries who lived in or wrote about the county. According to this criterion, it quickly

becomes apparent that several families, including the Shas, the Mas, and the Zhus, dominated Rugao politics from the later Qing until the Japanese occupation and that among these the Shas were preeminent.^[19]

The Shas were a well-established kinship group, some of whose members had been part of the Rugao gentry since at least the early Qing. Although not among the most successful in passing the examinations, by 1873 Sha family members had acquired various gongsheng degrees and purchased other degrees or honorific titles. Several had served as magistrates or held other low-ranking official posts, and some had local reputations as scholars or poets. The 860 establishment of a home for chaste widows (jingjie tang ) in a Sha family building probably indicates that Shas were involved with locally managed public institutions. Finally, the incorporation of the top family members into district gentry networks is demonstrated by the presence of a Sha in the compilation committees of both the 1837 and the 1873 Rugao county gazetteers.^[20]

By the early twentieth century the most notable local leader in Rugao was a member of the Sha family named Sha Yuanbing. Contemporary newspaper articles refer to Sha Yuanbing in more adulatory terms than anyone else in the county, and later materials reinforce this impression of Sha as the most highly esteemed early twentieth-century Rugao leader. Even current Rugao residents still regularly refer to Sha not only as a "local gentry" (difang shenshi ) but as a "big gentry" (ju shen ) or an "old gentry" (lao shen ). Several writers state unequivocally that Sha Yuanbing was the most prominent among Rugao's pre-1927 gentry.^[21]

Sha Yuanbing was born in 1864. He passed the jinshi examination in 1894 and entered the Hanlin Academy. Throughout his adult life, Sha continued to pursue learning. He maintained a large, locally famous library of several hundred volumes, collected paintings and calligraphy, and belonged to a local literary society that often met at the Sha house. Sha's son reports that during the day his father involved himself in public affairs, but after he returned home he always had a book in his hand and never stopped reading.^[22]

Steeped in traditional scholarship, Sha nonetheless was open to new ideas, including those from Japan and the West. During the 1898 reform movement, he was part of the Shanghai Agricultural Society (Nong hui), which met for five years under the direction of reformer Luo Zhenyu. Members translated foreign magazine articles concerning agriculture and published them in the journal Nongxue bao as well as other periodicals.^[23]

In addition to promoting new learning, Sha set a high moral tone for the county. He vigorously opposed the use of even ordinary tobacco, and in 1924 led a local gentry association called the Society to Prohibit Smoking (Jinxi zhiyan hui). The Society disliked cigarettes "because they cost so much, were a drain on the local economy, and had no redeeming value." Sha also hated gambling, to the extent that people close to him did not dare gamble publicly

and other gamblers, seeing him coming, would quickly hide their gambling devices to avoid being chastised.^[24]

Sha's credentials as a local leader in the early twentieth century thus rested on several foundations: He enjoyed the status conferred by possessing the highest examination degree; he was a man of landed wealth, and he had a high reputation for learning and probity. These attributes were not affected by the abolition of the traditional civil service examinations in 1905, and until his death in early 1927 they provided him with the symbolic capital that underlay his local influence and legitimized his socially derived authority.

Other prominent Rugao leaders referred to as gentry during the later Qing and early Republic had similar characteristics. Like Sha, many came from well-established local families and were Qing degree holders who, even after the fall of the dynasty, remained active in education. Huang Qiwu, leader of the 1911 Revolution in Rugao, was a xiucai who in 1904 went to Japan to study medicine. While in Tokyo he met Sun Yat-sen and became active in Sun's Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmeng hui). After returning to China he spent four and a half years teaching in a Nanjing normal school before returning to Rugao, where he continued to teach in the Rugao Normal School and became known for his calligraphy. He also is listed among the investigators (shen cha ) of the 1933 gazetteer.^[25]

Similarly, Mao Guangsheng was the offspring of a venerable Rugao family that dated to the end of the Ming; its members frequently appear in the pages of Rugao's gazetteers.^[26] After obtaining a juren degree during the first decade of the twentieth century and studying herbal medicine, Mao read Rousseau, developed an interest in political reform, and became a follower of Liang Qichao.^[27] Still others include Zhang Fan, holder of a gongsheng degree, who helped found the Rugao Normal School and was one of its assistant principals;^[28] and Deng Pujun, a shengyuan , and also a noted calligrapher, who became an expert on Buddhism after retiring from politics and traveled to many counties to instruct prisoners in its doctrines.^[29]

Rugao's Local Elite: the Younger Generation

Those gentry active during the 1910s and the 1920s were mostly men of broad learning who cultivated widespread intellectual interests and could act in many different realms. Their descendants, however, received more technical educations and had narrower bases of authority. Many of this latter group were graduates of normal schools. Sha Yuanqu, a younger relative of Sha Yuanbing and an active post-1927 leader, graduated from the Nantong Normal School, one of the most progressive schools of its day.^[30] Following his graduation, Sha Yuanju, like Sha Yuanbing, became active in running Rugao's schools, but he never became as preeminent as the older Sha. The existing sources contain neither a single mention of his participation in

literary or cultural activities outside the realm of his official duties nor any reference that would make him appear a model of social and civic virtue. Thus, after 1927, even though a small group of relatively highly educated individuals such as Sha Yuanqu continued to dominate Rugao, symbolic capital derived from traditional cultural pursuits was apparently replaced by new and perhaps less symbolically potent authority derived from technical expertise.

Another group of local leaders received a legal education, and most of Rugao's early lawyers became important local leaders. Zhang Xiang, active in both local and provincial affairs, was one of the first five lawyers in Rugao along with He Sen, Hu Zhaoyi, and another probable member of the Sha family, Sha Xunyi. Less admired, but nevertheless powerful, was Xu Guozhen, a blind lawyer, who, after his fertilizer factory went bankrupt, fled to Rugao's sandbars where he continued to amass both wealth and power by managing reclaimed land.^[31]

Cong Peigong, a poor gongsheng at the end of the Qing but a powerful Rugao local actor by the 1920s, got his start in a technical class. Cong graduated from the Rugao Normal School's special training course in surveying. He then was appointed to the Grand Canal's North Jiangsu Engineering Office (Jiangbei yunhe gongcheng ju). Later, a friend introduced Cong to a past Jiangsu governor by falsely claiming that Cong's father and the governor had received juren degrees in the same year. With the governor's support, Cong was appointed head of the county surveying office (qingzhang ju ) in 1921. Subsequently he was put in charge of building Rugao's first public roads. Although he developed a "great reputation" in these posts, it was largely as a wealthy technician.^[32]

Similar changes can be seen in other families like the Mas, who, in the twentieth century, gradually moved away from their gentry origins. The nineteenth-century Mas were literati. At least one Ma was a gongsheng and an elementary school teacher, and another was a juren , who with Sha and others, helped set up the Rugao Normal School.^[33] The most locally prominent was the wealthy gongsheng Ma Jinfan, who participated in compiling the 1873 Rugao gazetteer and helped raise money for educational and religious institutions as well as various public works. He also set a moral tone for the community through his efforts on behalf of the blind and the orphaned.^[34] The prestige Ma derived from his moral stature and community activities was much the same as that enjoyed by Sha Yuanbing about three decades later.

Aside from their scholarly interests, the Mas were among both Rugao's largest landowners and those wealthy families who owned and rented out about one-third of the buildings in Rugao city.^[35] Mas also became active in the chamber of commerce founded at the end of the Qing. The man from this kin group who was best known for public activities in the twentieth century,

Ma Jizhi, had less impressive credentials than his older relatives. He held numerous political offices but was known for neither his learning nor his devotion to public service. Widespread and detailed contemporary sources never mention any educational achievements. More recent writers describe him as avaricious with a gift for political trickery; furthermore, they accused him of using one of Rugao's long-established charitable institutions "to carry out small favors and to fish for fame and compliments" and called him Rugao's "number one evil gentry."^[36]

From the above examples, one can see that the abolition of the Qing examination system and the demise of classical education that supported it changed the characteristics of Rugao's gentry. Prior to 1905, Rugao's local leaders were trained as generalists and could easily wield authority in many areas. In contrast, after 1905, Rugao's local leaders were much more likely to be trained in a profession like teaching, law, a technical field, or business.^[37] Although local-elite members continued to come from the same few families, the change from generalist to specialist reduced each individual's symbolic capital and divided authority into much more discrete arenas, making collective elite domination of a particular locale more difficult. Consequently, the entire system of local-elite domination became more vulnerable to challenges from either the top of the system (i.e., the state) or social groups whose members previously had not held local power.

This shift from generalist to specialist was not sudden. Gentry members trained under the old examination system such as Sha Yuanbing, Huang Qiwu, Mao Guangsheng, and Deng Pujun continued to dominate the county until the mid-1920s. Simultaneously, throughout the 1910s and 1920s, the number of specially trained modern school graduates only increased slowly. Not until after the arrival of the Nationalists in 1927 did elites with these new credentials dominate Rugao. The coincidence of the Nationalist's arrival with changed local leadership made the late 1920s a more significant watershed in Chinese local history than it might otherwise have been.^[38]

Because generalists continued to dominate Rugao through the mid-1920s, the gradual change in the characteristics of Rugao's local leaders is important. If local leaders are generalists, changes in programs and policies, even when involving western ideas and modern technology, can be made without changing personnel; the same individuals can merely alter their activities. Because change does not threaten their power or authority—quite the contrary, it often enhances it—generalists promoting the overall well-being of their particular local area can be receptive to new ideas. Prior to 1927, by supporting the establishment of modern schools and businesses, China's degree-holding gentry could add to their symbolic capital and hence their local prestige. Therefore Sha Yuangbing's combination of high traditional status, interest in Western-style reform, and, as we shall see below, impor-

tant outside connections made him a logical leader in establishing new institutions in Rugao.

However, if local leaders are specialists, new programs or policies necessitate a change in personnel and threaten local-elite dominance. As a result, existing leaders are likely to oppose such change. After 1927, any call for innovative organizations and programs meant that a new group of individuals appeared on the local scene to challenge local-elite control. That Sha Yuanqu and others like him became conservative upholders of the status quo should not be surprising.

Thus, the changing characteristics of Rugao's elites partially explain why Rugao's pre-1927 elites appeared more receptive to new ideas and its post-1927 leaders more hostile. That explanation is not sufficient, however. By following Sha Yuanbing and Sha Yuanju through the five periods of local politics we can see how outside forces also affected Rugao's leaders.

Period I: Local Elites Between State and Society

From the 1898 reform period until two years after the 1911 Revolution, Rugao's local leaders both reacted to and were involved in reforms generated at the central and provincial levels. Sha Yuanbing, although not the only reform-minded Rugao gentry, was clearly the leader of these efforts. Sha's extralocal ties dated back to his success in the metropolitan examinations and appointment to the Hanlin Academy. At that time he formed one particularly crucial personal relationship. The major Jiangsu reform leader, Zhang Jian, also passed the examination in 1894 and was also a Hanlin.^[39] This "same-year" (tongnian ) tie presumably was the basis of Sha's long association with Zhang and his projects. As a friend and close associate of Zhang Jian, Sha was a member of the Shanghai-centered Jiangsu provincial reformist network, which interlaced with networks of elites in adjacent provinces to become a vigorous political force in central China. Zhang Jian was the central, best-known figure in the Jiangsu network, although he was surrounded by other high-status, wealthy gentry and merchants. Like Sha, these men were not only involved in joint projects in Shanghai or Nantong (Zhang Jian's home and the center of his reform projects) but were also active in other macroregional associations in Shanghai and presided over organizations in their native areas.^[40]

Sha's earliest reform activities were concentrated in education. He and Zhang Jian met with Zhang Zhidong in Nanjing to discuss schools in 1902. During the first decade of the new century Sha set up Rugao's first major modern educational institutions: the Rugao Normal School (shifan xuexiao ), the Rugao Middle School (zhong xuexiao ), and the Yizhong Commercial School (Yizhong shangye xuexiao). The quality of these schools was compar-

atively high, and the Normal School became relatively well known throughout the province. In addition, Sha's schools—all located in the county seat— were important because they produced modern trained personnel who were sent to work in other, more backward areas of the county.^[41]

Sha also became active in both provincial- and national-level political movements. He was part of the Jiangsu railway movement, a nationalistic effort by Jiangsu gentry members to raise private Chinese capital for provincial railway construction as an alternative to foreign loans.^[42] He belonged to the Shanghai-based Society to Prepare for Constitutional Government (Yubei lixian gonghui), founded in 1906 by reformist gentry and merchants from several provinces and the Jiangsu Educational Association. In 1909 Sha's many progressive provincial-level activities and similar efforts in Rugao led the small number of Rugao county voters, which probably included many of his close associates, to elect him to the newly established Jiangsu Provincial Assembly. In the years following the 1911 Revolution he was reelected to the 1913 assembly, whose members selected him as assembly president, and in 1914 he was chosen an alternate Jiangsu representative to the lower house of the National Assembly.^[43]

Sha's close association with Zhang extended to business affairs as well. He was one of a small handful of gentry who supported Zhang Jian's early industrial projects, including the Dasheng cotton mill in Nantong. Because of these and other commercial ventures, Bastid places Sha among the most active Jiangsu provincial-level entrepreneurs. Eventually, Sha's reputation earned him a position on the Shanghai chamber of commerce.^[44]

Within Rugao itself, prior to 1911 Sha headed Rugao's local self-government association and the Rugao chamber of commerce. Shortly after the 1911 Revolution, he was one of thirty people who made plans to set up a Rugao agricultural association (Rugao xian nonghui).^[45] In 1911, his local political prominence convinced other local leaders, such as Huang Qiwu, that Sha's support was essential if Rugao was to join the revolution. Subsequently, Huang persuaded Sha to support a declaration of independence from the Qing dynasty and to become involved in the revolution in Rugao.^[46]

In November 1911 after the last Qing magistrate left the county, Sha gathered together the county's prominent citizens (renshi ) for a meeting. They decided to follow the example of other counties and set up a temporary military government general headquarters (Rugao xian linshi junzheng zong siling bu). Sha was put in charge of political affairs and subsequently served briefly as county magistrate (xian zhishi ).^[47] However, presumably because he became involved in higher-level politics, Sha soon gave up his Rugao post. Although he continued to be politically active and to hold many lesser positions, Sha did not again officially head the county government.

Although probably the most distinguished, Sha was not the only Rugao

gentry member to be drawn into the vortex of both district and higher-level political events during the first decade and a half of the twentieth century. Large numbers of Rugao's local leaders were benefactors of the mainly privately funded modern schools. Many of these same individuals, especially those with Qing degrees, also joined the schools' faculties. Moreover, provincial and national organizations such as the Society to Prepare for Constitutional Government, and the Jiangsu and national political assemblies all had several members—in addition to Sha—who were from Rugao.^[48]

In sum, opportunities opened up by the 1898 reforms, the constitutional movement, the 1911 Revolution, and the creation of the provincial and national assemblies incorporated Rugao's local leaders into overlapping movements for political change at the national, provincial, and local levels. Whether confronted with the state-initiated late Qing reforms and the constitutional assemblies or with the 1911 Revolution against the state, Rugao's leaders consistently showed that they were responsive to outside movements and willing to implement new ideas in their local arena.

The gentry have been called the link between the traditional Chinese state and the society it governed.^[49] In the early part of the twentieth century, even though the programs formulated in Beijing and elsewhere changed dramatically, Rugao's gentry, showing impressive flexibility and adaptability, continued to function effectively as the link between center and locality. Only when the political structure changed did the role of the gentry alter significantly.

Period II: Local Elite Triumph

Following the 1913 failure of the Nationalists' Second Revolution and Yuan Shikai's consolidation of control in Beijing, the political power of the Chinese central state declined dramatically. Between 1913 and 1915 Yuan abolished the representative assemblies, breaking the last major structural link between national and provincial capitals and their constituents in the hinterland. Without formal functions at higher levels, Rugao's gentry, like Sha Yuanbing, returned to their home counties. Because no activist national or provincial government competed for their attention or demanded their services, for the next ten years Rugao's leaders concerned themselves almost exclusively with building up their local area—including politics, water conservancy, education, taxation and finance, land surveying, road building and maintenance, electrification, newspapers, small-scale industry, and charity. As might be expected, Sha Yuanbing was a leader in these efforts.^[50]

Starting in 1914 Sha headed Rugao's Water Conservancy Committee (Shuili hui). Given water's importance to both Rugao's agriculture and its transportation, this may have been one of Sha's most important positions; he often either mediated among Rugao's citizens or negotiated with outside

bodies on behalf of Rugao residents.^[51] Likewise, Sha was instrumental in bringing electricity to Rugao. In 1916 Sba, along with Zhang Jian, raised 50,000 yuan and built the first electrical generating station in Rugao. Sha was its director. Several years later, at least in part as a result of disputes with Zhang Jian, the company neared bankruptcy; Sha saved it by personally buying one thousand shares at 100 yuan each. Until his death in 1927 Sha continued to head the reorganized company, which made a small profit under better management.^[52]

Sha also concerned himself with the county's finances. Although there is no evidence that he managed county funds directly, after the 1911 Revolution Sha was heavily involved in land resurveys and land tax reassessment projects carried out in the hopes of increasing county collection of tax revenues. In 1914 Sha and others set up a surveying office (cehui ju ) within the county government to survey all of Rugao's topography. By 1917 the work of the office was completed. Subsequently, from 1921 until his death in 1927, Sha headed the office that supervised land surveying and land tax adjustments (qingzhang ju ).^[53]

To improve community health, Sha actively supported both Chinese and Western medicine. In 1922 he was made honorary chairperson of the newly established Rugao Traditional [Chinese] Medical Society (Zhongyi gonghui). He founded and headed the Rugao public hospital that treated local citizens using Western techniques. And, in 1926, shortly before his death, Sha made fund-raising plans to acquire land for hospital expansion.^[54]

In the commercial realm, Sha was no less innovative. Although most studies of the Nantong area have focused on the well-known entrepreneur Zhang Jian, they have failed to note that Zhang was only one of a larger group of gentry, some in outlying counties like Rugao, who throughout the 1910s and 1920s raised capital locally to invest in larger factories in major cities such as Shanghai, as well as in new commercial ventures in their own areas. Sha's investments were widespread. In addition to helping capitalize Zhang Jian's Da Sheng Weaving Mill in Nantong, he invested in a drugstore, a ham factory, an oil pressing mill, a flour mill, an iron foundry, a Shanghai steamship company, a local steamship company, a local old-style bank (qian-zhuang ) and several land reclamation companies along the coast of Dongtai county north of Rugao. One of Sha's ventures, the Kuang Feng Ham Factory was very successful; its product was sold in Shanghai and the United States—perhaps through its own storefront in San Francisco—and received a prize at an international fair in Honolulu. Although it later went bankrupt, this company laid the foundation for what is still one of Rugao's major industries: the curing and processing of ham and other types of sausage.^[55]

Sha also effectively linked Rugao and the remaining higher levels of government. For example, in 1915 the provincial government approved a petition by Sha and another gentry member for an addition to the local land tax.

Later, in 1926 Sha turned over to the provincial governor a Rugao grain merchants' request that a particular tax be abolished. Again, Sha's wish was granted and the tax abolished.^[56]

In short, after returning to Rugao, Sha engaged in various activities including politics, public works, finance, medicine, and commerce. Several characteristics of Sha's activities are notable. First, he never concentrated on one type of endeavor but spread his energies over a broad field. Even when innovative, Sha remained a generalist. Second, Sha took part in reform efforts and consciously brought new ideas, organizations, and technologies into Rugao. As a result, in the 1910s and 1920s under the leadership of its traditional gentry, Rugao started to move into the modern world.

Third, there is no evidence that Sha moved from progressive civil activities into the more coercive and militaristic ones that have been said to mark the twentieth-century decline of China's gentry class. Because Rugao escaped the depredations of the Taipings in the mid-nineteenth century, as well as those of marauding warlord armies in the early twentieth century, Rugao remained peaceful during Sha's lifetime. Undoubtedly, Rugao's lack of involvement in military affairs allowed Sha's reforms to proceed apace and protected him from having to worry about security affairs. He did not have to raise a militia or personally control troops.

In conclusion, a description of Sha's Rugao activities provides further evidence to support the image of elite activism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China. Like his Zhejiang counterparts studied by Rankin and Schoppa, Sha Yuanbing increasingly engaged in activities outside the fields of traditional learning, including commercial and industrial affairs. Also like his contemporaries, Sha's widespread efforts in areas like public health, water conservancy, and finance created a new and expanding "public realm," in which initiative and control lay with local leaders, not the state.

The question remains, what effect did Sha's activities have on the relations between local elites and the state? Did they increase the power of local-elite leaders or add to the authority of the state? Sha's many public offices and private enterprises were all officially sanctioned. However, the impetus for Sha's activities came less from the state than from the reformist networks centering about Zhang Jian and the still larger complex of overlapping gentry-merchant networks linking activists in Rugao, Nantong, Shanghai, and other part of Jiangsu and beyond.

In other words, when the central state organization disintegrated, gentry such as Sha Yuanbing could no longer link that organization and the Chinese populace. Instead, after 1915 Sha's local prominence derived from his high-gentry status, his outside connections, and the particular context of the last years of the Qing and the beginning of the Republic. That period first favored the rapid expansion of the "public realm" through the new reformist associations and organizations and then, when central power disintegrated,

allowed elites in districts such as Rugao to continue their activities locally. Whether such social mobilization might build into a force able to create a new Chinese state depended, however, on a favorable environment continuing, unlikely in the volatile political climate of the Republic.

Period III: Rise of the Opposition

Starting with the 1919 May Fourth Movement, and gaining momentum in the mid-1920s, new ideas and organizations traveled up the rivers and canals of North Jiangsu from Shanghai and Nanjing, to Nantong, and then on to Rugao. Spread initially by students, and later by the Nationalist and Communist parties, these increasingly radical ideas and organizations welled up to challenge the power of China's local leaders.

The first challenge came in May 1919 when students at the Rugao Normal School, in response to requests from their Beijing counterparts, formed a Rugao student association and announced a boycott of Japanese goods. Gu Dengzhi, a local gentry member related by marriage to Sha Yuanbing and chief stockholder and manager of Rugao's largest purveyor of foreign products, the Datong department store (Datong shangdian), failed to comply. Much to the surprise of local residents, the students confiscated and burned his store's large stock of foreign goods.^[57]

After 1919, despite threats to withhold their degrees and the dismissal of their principal, most of Rugao's students continued to acquire radical publication and agitate for change. In 1922 Rugao students attending schools and universities in Nanjing and Beijing set up the Common Peoples' Society (Pingmin she), which included many future members of Rugao's Nationalist and Communist parties. One of its goals was to "attack corrupt gentry." In both the newspapers and the courts, the association accused many of Rugao's local leaders—including Li Yaqing, Yu Dasan, Mao Jie, Fang Ziying, Pan Shushen and Sha Yuanqu—of unscrupulous and illegal behavior.^[58]

In 1925 the nationalistic May Thirtieth Movement echoed throughout Rugao, leading to student-staged demonstrations not only in the county seat but also in many other towns. Local leaders, especially those involved in merchandizing foreign goods, were among the movement's targets. In neighboring Nantong, a Rugao student, Xu Jiajin, was selected to head the Nan-tong joint student association coordinating demonstrations and other related events. After the excitement of May 30 died down, Xu, now a Communist Party member, took part in the 1927 Nanchang and Guangdong uprisings and then returned to Rugao to join its newly organized Communist Party.^[59]

Xu was not atypical. In the wake of the May Thirtieth Movement many Rugao students and teachers, initially in places like Shanghai and Nanjing, later in Rugao itself, joined the Communists. As a result, the Communist

Party became increasingly active, first within Rugao city where it encouraged a worker's movement and after 1925 in the Rugao countryside where it started to organize peasants.^[60]

The party members typically were graduates of a normal school, in Rugao or elsewhere, who had been introduced into the party during their studies. After being assigned to teach in or head an elementary school, often in a remote part of the county, they quickly founded party branches and started to recruit new members among the school's other teachers and students. The first such party branch was set up in summer 1925. A year and a half later, on New Year's Day 1927 the Rugao County Communist Party Committee (xian wei ) was formally established.^[61]

Simultaneously, while the two parties were joined in a united front, many Communists participated in local Nationalist party politics. Starting in 1926, in alliance with left-wing Nationalists, they set up Rugao Nationalist Party branch organizations and in January 1927 the Rugao county party headquarters (xian dangbu ).^[62] Both Nationalist and Communist Party programs called for exposing and removing Rugao's "evil gentry."

Initially, Rugao's local elite reacted aggressively to the rise of societal opposition. Following the May Fourth Movement, Sha Yuanbing successfully had the progressive head of the Normal School replaced by a local leader, Pan Shusheng, who opposed student activism.^[63] After the establishment of the Common Peoples' Society, Pan made a special trip to Nantong to talk with Zhang Jian about ways to counter the society's influence. As a result, a rival Silence Society (Jing she) was set up under the aegis of the county education department. It tried to dissuade students from becoming interested in politics or interfering in societal affairs.^[64]

Following the May Thirtieth Movement, however, the local-elite response began to change. Instead of continuing to struggle with their increasingly organized and active opponents, many previously influential individuals withdrew from public life. Several others died. Just months before Nationalist armies reached Rugao, depressed because his favorite son had died of scarlet fever, frustrated by the difficulties of his various financial enterprises, and angered because students in the schools he had founded were demanding reforms he opposed, Sha Yuanbing turned to Buddhism for solace. He spent his last months secluded in his residence where he died in February 1927.^[65]

In the mid-1910s, the link between local leaders and the state was broken, but that between local leaders and local society remained intact. During the late 1910s and early 1920s, due to their reformist activities, local leaders appeared to strengthen their bonds to local society. However, after the mid-1920s, as a result of escalating attacks from below and the natural attrition within the aging local elite, the link between local leaders and local society weakened. In May 1927 when the Nationalist armies reached Rugao, they confronted an increasingly isolated local leadership. Moreover, for the first

time the leadership consisted primarily of individuals educated in modern schools; thus, the leadership lacked the accumulated status, prestige, and symbolic capital of its forebears.

Period IV: Attack and Retreat

As they swept across the countryside of central China, the Nationalists, often in alliance with the Communists, attacked many local leaders. As a result, it appeared that the Nationalists might sunder completely the ties between rural elites and the Chinese population, and that without connections to either state or populace, these heirs to China's gentry would lose their political and social importance.

In Rugao, Nationalist attacks on the local elite began shortly after the revolutionary army arrived in the county and quickly became widespread. Beginning in the second half of 1927, the Nationalists and others associated with them accused local-elite members in many districts of misappropriating public funds, squeezing and oppressing the people, or colluding with the forces of Jiangsu warlord, Sun Chuanfang.^[66]

After a particular individual was labeled an "evil gentry" (tulie ), a request was sent to the county government for his arrest. If incriminating information surfaced in a government investigation, police then apprehended the individual and held him for trial. Cases started in the county courts but were frequently appealed to higher levels, including the province's most important judicial body, the Jiangsu High Court. During this time, sometimes two or three years, the accused languished in county or provincial jails. Bail appears to have been unknown.

The case of He Sen, a well-known gentry member and district (qu ) head from Lifa, was typical. In July 1927 sixty people accused He before the county government of being an "evil gentry" because, they alleged, he had given money to an officer of Sun's army. Several days later He was arrested and jailed. At the same time a county party representative posted a notice saying that if the general public had any evidence against He, it should be reported immediately. In July 1928 the case went to trial. He was found guilty, sentenced to four years in prison, deprived of ten acres of his land, and stripped of his civil rights.^[67] In another case, Cong Peigong received similar treatment.^[68]

But not all gentry members had their cases tried in court. Some were subjected to much more spontaneous and sometimes harsher treatment. After the arrival of the Nationalists, Deng Pujun got together with a priest and organized a Buddhist Study Society. Apparently for a while the society successfully obtained recruits among Matang's "shop clerks and young women." But Deng's success angered the area's "students" (probably a euphemism for young Nationalist Party followers). They gathered in front of

Deng's gate shouting slogans like "Down with Deng [and others]... who kill people, set fires, and do not have good hearts." Deng was scared. He closed his doors and refused to emerge, sending someone else to negotiate with the students. These negotiations apparently involved the provincial party's propaganda department, as well as the provincial party headquarters.^[69]

Although some county-level leaders such as Mao Guangsheng, Zhu Guangyue, and former Jiangsu Governor Han Zishi were accused of being evil gentry and/or arrested, most Rugao elites attacked by the Nationalists, like He, Lu, and Deng, were district-level, not county-level, leaders. Most local leaders within the county seat were too well protected, either militarily or politically, to be attacked. Others probably had sufficient funds to buy their safety. Outside the county seat, local leaders in the villages and towns were more vulnerable. As a result, subcounty rather than county elites were attacked more often by Communist or other left-wing members of the Rugao Nationalist Party, and the attacks were more severe.^[70]

However, the arrival of the Nationalists affected even county-level leaders who escaped persecution. Because the Nationalists set up a new county government organization and staffed it with appointees from outside the county, many county leaders lost their posts. Sha Yuanqu resigned as head of the education department, and Ma Jizhi lost his post as Rugao city's chief official, although he may have been replaced by a relative.^[71] Others, such as Fang Ziying, were ordered arrested for conspiring against the Nationalists and fled to Shanghai.^[72] Existing sources do not reveal their fate, but after March 1927 the names of many of Rugao's leading gentry disappear from the public record, presumably because their social and political responsibilities passed to other hands. Thus, the events of 1927 left few of Rugao's pre-1927 local leaders untouched and gave the Nationlists a potential opportunity to forge a completely new link between state and society that bypassed members of Rugao's pre-1927 elite.

Period V: Local Leaders Return

The year 1927 and the few years following may well mark one of history's more significant "missed opportunities." In February 1928 Rugao's Nationalist Party, more concerned with ideological purity than organizational effectiveness, purged all leftists and radicals from its ranks. The remaining party members preoccupied themselves with intraparty feuds, rather than reforming society. During the remainder of the Nanjing Decade, the numerically insignificant Rugao party failed to play an important role in local politics. Similarly, China's Nationalist government made many apparent far-reaching organizational reforms after 1927, but in localities like Rugao it failed to back up these reforms with the necessary money, personnel, and determination to implement them.^[73] Therefore, neither the Rugao Nationalist Party

nor the Rugao county government became an effective agent for the provincial and national governments they were supposed to represent. Nor was either a visible link between the Nationalists and rural society. The Nationalists' failure to establish their presence at the local level enabled Rugao's local leaders once again to dominate Rugao's countryside.

The first indication that Rugao's local elite was winning their battle came in February 1928, when the Communists left the Nationalist Party organization and legal accusations against local-elite members dropped precipitously. By mid-1930 new legal charges against local leaders were uncommon, and old cases were being dismissed.^[74]

Between 1928 and 1930 bandits or Communists sometimes physically attacked members of the local elite, particularly those who lived or were traveling in Communist-controlled areas outside the county seat. Sometimes these attacks were isolated events directed at one or two individuals;^[75] other times, the local elite and their lands were part of bandit or Communist battlefield objectives.^[76] But the Nationalists' defeat of the Rugao Communists in fall 1930 apparently ended even this threat to local leaders. Few other organized attacks on the local elite occurred throughout the remainder of the Nanjing Decade.

Perhaps the best example of what happened to county-level local elite members after the arrival of the Nationalists is provided by Sha Yuanqu. As we have seen, by December 1927 Sha no longer headed the education office, but this dismissal did not mean that Sha was no longer active in educational affairs. Quite the contrary; in that month Sha was appointed one of nine members of an education office executive committee (Jiaoyu xingzheng weiyuanhui), a post he presumably used to watch over his old domain.^[77]

Moreover, Sha moved quickly to expand his power. A year after he lost his education office post, Sha, at the request of the county magistrate, agreed to set up and run a county relief organization (jiuji yuan ), a traditional local-elite function. Eight months later, on August 1, 1929, he became head of the public property management office (Gongkuan gongchan guanli chu). Finally, in February 1932 he regained his old job as head of the Rugao education office.^[78] The comeback of at least one member of the Rugao local elite to the position of power he had occupied before 1927 was now apparently complete.

Ma Jizhi, prior to 1927 the head of the Rugao city executive committee, followed a similar, though not identical, path. In August 1927 Ma helped raise money for an emergency medical clinic. A year later he became one of the five directors of the Rugao chamber of commerce and a year after that (1929) the head of the School of Commerce run by the association. In May 1931, when the chamber of commerce was reorganized, Ma still maintained his place on its executive committee and in 1936 he was publishing a local newspaper. Although Ma never regained his original post, clearly he continued to play an important and influential role in Rugao affairs.^[79]

Many other members of important Rugao families also continued their activity in local affairs. However, the resulting pattern of elite dominance was distinctly different than that existing previously. Most conspicuously, local-elite members no longer controlled Rugao's formal political structures. In late 1927 and early 1928 the Nationalists abolished many elite-dominated institutions and replaced them with new bureaucratic offices. The pre-1927 executive committee and county governing committee, as well as all the district governing committees and executive committees, ceased to exist. After mid-1927 all power, in theory, belonged to the magistrate's yamen and the new series of specialized subordinate offices, such as the finance office and the reconstruction office. At the district level all authority was vested in a district office head appointed by the magistrate rather than in the chair of an executive committee chosen by local leaders.

With a few exceptions, like the reappointment of Sha Yuanqu to the education department, the Nationalist government did not appoint old local elites to these new institutions, particularly at the district level. The lists of district heads from between 1927 and 1929 contain very few names of individuals whose careers can be traced back before the arrival of the Nationalists.^[80] But the old local-elite members did not simply vanish from the scene when the Nationalists cut their official government ties; instead, many stayed on, performing the same functions that they had before 1927. Often they successfully competed with their official government counterparts for power and prestige.

The most obvious example of such competition was the rivalry between the county government's new finance office and the local elite-controlled public property management office. In theory, the finance office oversaw the collection and disbursement of county funds. However, all cash collected from supplemental taxes (and in Rugao supplemental taxes yielded eighteen times more silver than the regular land tax) went to the public property management office, an officially established but elite-run organization with a broad and vague mandate to "manage public funds and public property and make sure that benefits accrued from their collection and expenditure." Although the provincial government initially made significant attempts to reform the finance system, it never brought the public property management office under county government control or even obtained a part of the supplemental tax revenues for county government use. When a major public project was undertaken, the project's organizers frequently appealed both to the county government and to the management office to provide the funds. Usually, the latter came forward with the most cash. Finally, in 1933 the provincial government recognized the status quo. It abolished the county finance office, unambiguously leaving control over local funds in the hands of the "upright gentry" rather than of government officials.^[81]

Moreover, local elites were no longer reformers. Although they continued

to help collect funds—albeit at significantly reduced levels—to support education and other public services, they rarely attempted to initiate institutional change. When innovations were introduced, they were usually short lived. For instance, an old local-elite leader opened and ran a dog pound, which for several years reduced the incidence of rabies in the county; after he died, the dog pound closed, and rabies once again increased. Neither the government nor another local leader moved in to fill the gap.^[82]

Members of Rugao's elite also no longer appeared to promote new commercial ventures. Instead, younger men specifically interested in new business opportunities and only peripherally concerned with the other policy areas in which old members of the local elite had played a vital role, became business organizers and managers. For example, in April 1933 a new, larger electrical plant opened outside Rugao city. The stockholders of the company were "all enterprising local young men," a different group from that which had owned the old electric company and chosen the venerable Sha Yuanbing as its chair in 1926.^[83]

Similarly, in spring 1928 a "local person" started raising capital to buy a steamboat that would ply the canal waters between Rugao city and the coastal town of Juegang. He planned to raise 14,000 yuan by selling 140 stock certificates worth 100 yuan each. By December, the cash had been raised and the service started. At no point is local elite involvement with this enterprise ever mentioned.^[84]

Furthermore, in direct contrast to their decreased participation in formal political organizations, after 1927 the local elite took increasing responsibility for local defense. After the Nationalists arrived in Rugao the number and size of local militia, generally at the subcounty level, increased dramatically for two primary reasons: the Nationalists appealed to local-elite members to organize militia against Communists and bandits; and local elites feared that the only way to protect themselves and their lands was to organize their own military forces.^[85]

After the defeat of the Communists, at least some locally organized militia remained, possibly even increasing in size. Prior to 1927 weapons were controlled by either the provincial soldiery or the county police. Local gentry had to appeal to either county or provincial officials if they wanted military support. During the 1930s these officials depended on the militia controlled and funded by the local elite, particularly to maintain order outside the county seat.

Finally, Rugao's rural leaders appear to have had fewer ties to elites in other areas such as Nantong and Shanghai and to have been less able to work out arrangements with officials to solve local problems. Unlike Sha Yuan-bing, Sha Yuanqu had no known connections to well-known personages such as Zhang Jian. He was not part of a Lower Yangzi elite network and did not participate in Shanghai organizations.

Probably because Sha Yuanqu lacked outside connections, there is no record of requests for him to intervene with higher-level officials on behalf of others in the county. Without effective elite brokers and mediators, local turmoil increased. Under the Nationalists, disputes over water rights that had been successfully handled for hundreds of years suddenly became major issues resolved unfavorably for the people of Rugao. Although Rugao was always known as a litigious county, the number of lawsuits filed under the Nationalists reached alarming proportions. The traditional gentry-centered system of dispute resolution had broken down.

In sum, the role of the local elite in formal political organizations, public service institutions, and commercial efforts declined, while the local elite's responsibility for public security—not a traditional area of Rugao local-elite strength—increased and local-elite activities outside the official realm took on new significance. Whereas from about 1915 to 1927 the only effective claimants to power and authority in Rugao were generalist local leaders whose hegemony rested on displays of traditionally sanctioned elite culture, wealth, outside connections, and actions on behalf of their communities, the local leaders after 1927 had to compete with the similar claims of modern school graduates, new-style businessmen, students, Communists, and Nationalist government officials. Although their quasi-official control over areas like county finances, coupled with control over some means of coercion gave Rugao's local leaders more power than any of their competitors, it left them with only a weak claim to legitimate political authority.

Because the Nationalists neither drove this local elite completely from power nor incorporated them fully into official government organizations, a bifurcated power structure resulted—one official, the other unofficial—that in part immobilized both sides. On the one hand, the Nationalists commanded an organizational network incapable of implementing their programs. On the other hand, because the local elite were now fragmented and unable completely to insert themselves into the formal Nationalist political structure, their links with both higher levels of government as well as Rugao's population were broken and their effectiveness as local leaders curtailed.

Conclusion

Most peasants living under Rugao's local leadership from the 1898 reforms until the Japanese invasion probably concluded that over forty years not much changed: the gentry-led reforms of the 1910s and 1920s were largely confined to the major towns; the small local Nationalist government apparatus and party had little impact outside the county seat; and Rugao's major families like the Shas, Mas, and Zhus continued to be the county's largest landlords and most powerful—and to the peasant most visible—social and political actors. Moreover, no major structural change in landlord-tenant

relationships appears to have disrupted peasant lives. From 1927 to 1930, in the southwestern part of the county and along the coast, Communists and bandits created disturbances and challenged the local power structure. But because the Communists undertook military actions rather than programs for social change, their impact was also probably negligible from the peasants' point of view.

However, from the standpoint of local leaders, much had changed between 1898 and 1938: they received specialized training in Western knowledge rather than a generalized education in the Chinese classics. Because of this training, as well as competition from other societal groups, they engaged in a different mix of activities than their predecessors and had far fewer interactions with individuals and officials outside the county. Local leaders continued to hold sway in their own increasingly circumscribed local arenas, but as a result of the changes generated by the late Qing reforms and the pressures applied on them by students and Communists as well as Nationalists they became both more conservative and more isolated and ceased to function as an effective link between state and society.

From the peasant point of view, the revolutionary war of the late 1940s was the first watershed that significantly altered their lives; from the local-elite point of view the divide was the events of the mid-1920s. Until 1925 local elites—sometimes in response to provincial and central initiatives, sometimes acting on their own—ultimately determined what happened in China's local arenas. After 1925 local leaders' ability to act was restricted by forces at both the top and the bottom of the system.

Just as the impact of abolishing the examination system was not felt until twenty years after the event, so the importance of the increasing attacks on China's local leaders was not immediately apparent. However, the difficulties encountered by local leaders under the Nationalists, under the Japanese, and ultimately under the Communists fragmented local leadership. Some fled; at least one, Ma Jizhi, committed suicide; and several others, including Huang Qiwu and Mao Guangsheng, supported the Communists. By the time the Communists permanently occupied Rugao in 1948 very few local leaders held unchallenged positions of power and prestige.

What then can one say about state building during this period? Generally I would say that it did not take place. From 1911 to 1927 counties such as Rugao had capable leaders who might have participated in a state-building enterprise, had there been an effective, legitimate central and provincial leadership with whom they could connect, but this leadership did not exist. Although the lack of higher-level leadership initially gave local leaders the freedom to experiment, its absence ultimately deprived them of any way to maintain their fragile enterprises without government resources and protection. Although the Nationalists provided a more unified organizational struc-

ture, the failure of this higher-level national system to generate effective local leaders similarly precluded success.

In other words, for state building to occur, both central and local components must be effective and present. During the warlord period an effective local, but an ineffective national, structure existed. During the Nationalist era the national structure was potentially effective, but the local structure was not. Only in 1949 did the Communists integrate local and national political organizations and begin modern Chinese state building.

Eight
Mediation, Representation, and Repression: Local Elites in 1920s Beijing

David Strand

Capital cities are necessarily well supplied with elites and individuals with elite aspirations and pretensions. Late imperial and early Republican Beijing attracted and held its share of power seekers. In addition to thousands of men with official positions in the central political apparatus, tens of thousands of others journeyed to the city as examination candidates under the empire and as politicians and aspirants for public office under the Republic. Over four hundred hostels for natives of particular provinces or counties stood ready to receive politically minded sojourners.^[1] In 1922, a Beijing newspaper complained about a superabundance of unsavory gentlemen or "bureaucratic gangsters" (guanliao liumang ) with outsized ambitions who hung about the city angling for a post in the Republican governmental apparatus.

[They] all live outside Qian Gate in various big hotels and inns. Most are southerners or men from Tianjin. They are on prominent display in theatres, public parks, restaurants and even cheap amusement areas, impersonating the relative of some official or calling themselves the friend of some politician. They have taken over the brothels, parks and restaurants where they hold big gatherings, throw money around or cheer on favorite actors and actresses with gifts and applause.^[2]

Until 1928 when the Nationalists moved the capital to Nanjing, the city remained "clotted with government and crowded with bureaucrats."^[3] In a population of over one million, approximately eight thousand individuals held official and support staff positions in ministries and bureaus.^[4] As many as one hundred thousand others, of the sort caricatured above, sojourned in Beijing in the hope of capturing a job or sinecure.^[5]

Within this mass of office holders and seekers, the weight of which gave

Beijing a "heavy official atmosphere," lay a harder kernel of administrative and political elites.^[6] These ministers, political faction leaders, and generals attempted to control and use the government and the city as the regime's immediate physical and social foundation to further their own political ends.^[7] In addition to struggling to dominate cabinets, ministries, parliaments, and military strongpoints in the capital's vicinity, power holders based in Beijing appointed police chiefs, invested public and private funds in economic ventures, subsidized and intimidated the local press, extracted and extorted money from city residents, and manipulated public opinion. The logic of the situation invited local economic and social notables to become the simple agents of higher elites.

However, the picture of a strong state dominating a weak or compliant society, in this case the local-level political field encompassing the city of Beijing, distorts the actual relationships between state and society and higher and lower elites prevailing during the Republican period. The last Chinese dynasty, the Qing, had been overthrown in 1911 by a diverse revolutionary coalition that immediately lost control of the Republic to strongman-bureaucrat Yuan Shikai. After Yuan's death in 1916, the Beijing-based regime hosted a succession of short-lived warlord governments. In 1926 Nationalist armies, led by Chiang Kai-shek, marched north with their Communist allies from Guangzhou in a drive to defeat the warlords. In the midst of this Northern Expedition, Chiang purged the Communists. By summer 1928, the Nationalists had succeeded in unifying the country from their new capital in Nanjing. Beijing ("northern captial") had been renamed Beiping ("northern peace"). (For events after June 1928 described below, I use Bei-ping rather than Beijing.)

The Republican regime based in Beijing in the 1910s and 1920s had weakened with each passing crisis. Heir to late Qing policies favoring bigger and more expensive government and yet unable to govern either Chinese society or itself, the Republic succeeded mainly in provoking the ire of citizens reluctant to cede it taxes, loyalty, or simple obedience.^[8] The Nationalist successor regime in Nanjing formally resolved the contradiction between centralizing bureaucrats and rebellious citizens by creating a one-party state that both administered and mobilized. In practice, the Nationalists added to the factionalism and immobilism of the early Republic a remarkable capacity to lead popular rebellions against themselves and punish natural allies among the monied and propertied classes.^[9] Local elites who looked to Republican regimes for authority and guidance were rewarded with contradictory displays of power and impotence, advancing and collapsing government agencies, and support for and attacks on the existing social order.

Republican regimes, in short, showed "the combination of power and fragility" that distinguishes the contemporary third world state.^[10] Power based

on modern military organization and bureaucracy was sufficient to intimidate domestic challengers who lacked these assets. Yet both Beijing and Nanjing succumbed to foreign threats and to active and passive resistance by domestic forces. Under these circumstances, local elites, although rarely in a position to challenge higher-level political authority directly, were often able to blunt or parry that power. This "politics of accommodation" at the local level is a natural by-product of the confrontation between a "weak state" and "strong society" in which "social control is vested in numerous local-level social organizations" and where the local rules of the game are "dictated by critically placed strongmen—landlords, caciques, bosses, money lenders" and other local elites.^[11] In the process, local elites can be found "simultaneously embracing and foiling the state."^[12]

The strength of local elites in Republican Chinese cities depended on their ability to entangle and deflect higher-level power and maintain proprietary control over wealth, status, and position in the community. In the Republican period not only insistent pressures applied by ministers and warlords but also the general politicization of urban residents complicated these tasks. Local elites were forced to fight a two-front political struggle with higher elites and politically conscious subaltern classes at the same time that they competed among themselves for patrons and supporters. If efforts by local power-holders to alternately, or simultaneously, "embrace" and "foil" the direct agents of the state was an old theme in Chinese political life, then the emergence of politically active citizens as the object of elite control was a new theme. Elite politics at both higher and intermediate levels would never be the same once the fate and interests of a powerful minority or elite were coupled to the existence of mass political participation. Lenore Barkan shows similar sets of pressures on county-level elites in Jiangsu, but those elites enjoyed more autonomy, faced less formidable opponents, and had more room to manuever than could be found in the circumscribed but highly politicized public arena of Beijing.

Social Networks Amid Political Turbulence

Local elites occupy an intermediate zone between higher elites above and everyone else below because they are richer, more powerful, or better connected than most people in their communities. All things being relative in these matters, elite credentials are likely to vary from person to person and community to community. In a large city like Beijing undergoing rapid social change, the bases of elite power were inevitably diverse. By the 1920s, modern educators, journalists, financiers, political cadre, and social activists had joined the older pool of "gentry and merchant" elites predominant in the late imperial city. Although diversification meant that no one's wealth-

status-power portfolio was likely to be complete, for some individuals these endowments tended to be cumulative.

For example, Meng Luochuan and Meng Jinhou, owner and manager respectively of Beijing's famous Ruifuxiang silk and foreign goods shops, drew strength from wealth, positions held in local organizations, and connections to individuals richer and more powerful than they. Both what they had and what they lacked suggest changing and prevailing community standards for local elites and provide a baseline against which to compare other individuals of weight and substance in Republican Beijing.

Meng family patriarch Meng Luochuan and his kinsman, Meng Jinhou, established their first shop in Beijing in 1893.^[13] The Meng fortune had its genesis in the family's home area of Zhangqiu county, Shandong, where landholdings and business ventures provided a base for commercial expansion to major cities in North China. Even though the family's wealth was enough by 1800 to permit educating sons for the official examinatons if that had been the family's wish, the Mengs continued to produce merchants and landlords rather than examination candidates. As a result, the clan was known in Zhangqiu for "having wealth without honor" (youfu wugui ).^[14] Meng Luochuan carried on this reputation for single-minded devotion to business matters. Despite the fact that he acquired an official degree (probably, as was common among merchants, through purchase rather than examination), people said that Meng Luochuan's only books were account ledgers. Late Qing reforms brought honor and a more fitting title to the Mengs when Luochuan was appointed the first president of the Shandong chamber of commerce by Governor Yuan Shikai.^[15] As pioneer business professionals in the midst of a Confucian culture that normally persuaded even hard-nosed business types to mimic the life-style of scholar-officials, the Mengs were about to find their metier in a world reshaped to be more congenial to their acquisitive instincts.

In 1900 the Boxer uprising and the foreign invasion that followed devastated much of Beijing, including the business district outside Qian Gate where the first Ruifuxiang store was located. Meng Jinhou, who was responsible for managing the shop, happened to be in Shandong at the time. Despite the danger, he rented a mule cart and rushed back to Beijing to salvage what he could of the family business. Finding the shop in ruins, he recruited employees from clerks and apprentices still left in the city and raised new capital in order to reopen. Meng Jinhou's intrepid behavior in guiding Ruifuxiang to a quick recovery reaped great profits for the Mengs and made expansion into additional stores and trades possible. By the 1920s the Ruifuxiang stores, with hundreds of employees, were reputed to form the largest single business enterprise in the city.^[16] The impressive wrought iron facade and spacious display rooms of the firm's flagship store can still be seen

on Dazhalan Street in downtown Beijing.^[17] Meng Jinhou also rebuilt Ruifuxiang with an eye to withstanding future disorders. The "thick doors and high walls" of the new stores protected the business from looting in the 1912 troop riots that accompanied Yuan Shikai's rise to the presidency of the new Republic.^[18] Later in the 1920s and 1920s, when other merchants hesitated to unshutter their shops because of threatened war, riot, or revolution, Ruifuxiang kept on doing business.^[19] By 1925 Rufuxiang's five Beijing stores were turning over a volume of 600,000 taels a year selling silk, cloth, leather, tea, and foreign imports.

Not only did Meng Luochuan and Jinhou guard their investments with thick doors and high walls, but they also drew a protective thicket of political connections around their business activities. When Yuan Shikai became president, Meng sought to capitalize on his earlier association with the political strongman. Reportedly, Yuan offered Meng an important post as a local official but, leery of the demands of office, he declined. Nonetheless, Meng Luochuan's dealings with Yuan Shikai initiated a period of close association between the Meng family and early Republican VIPs (daguan guiren ).^[20] An editorialist probably had in mind the Ruifuxiang stores when in 1922 he mentioned complaints that "a certain silk shop outside Qian Gate caters to rich and powerful officials and treats them with great respect while treating ordinary people or country people with contempt."^[21] Meng strengthened these political ties with marriage alliances. A daughter married police reformer and future president Xu Shichang, and a grandson wedded future president Cao Kun's granddaughter.

Ruifuxiang manager Meng Jinhou also cultivated high-level political connections including militarist Zhang Zuolin and his son, Xueliang, as well as numerous other northern warlords. Meng Jinhou had a special reception hall built in one of Ruifuxiang's warehouses where he hosted powerful friends and acquaintances; it was said that one banquet alone could consume the daily receipts of all five Ruifuxiang shops. In return Ruifuxiang was able to cater to the conspicuous consumption of politicians like President Cao Kun who, near the end of his inglorious tenure in office in 1924, held 10,000 gold yuan worth of unpaid-for Ruifuxiang goods in the Zhongnanhai presidential palace. As Cao's position wavered in 1924, and in spite of the close ties between the Mengs and Cao, Meng sent agents to Zhongnanhai to repossess the goods unless payment was forthcoming. The threats paid off, and Ruifuxiang extracted most of Cao's debt before he was driven from office.

The Mengs systematically approached the accumulation of wealth and power. An enterprise that began with one shop and one (albeit exalted) official patron developed into a chain of stores with a convention annex to accommodate an increasingly promiscuous approach to higher-level connections. This was a necessary adjustment if the Mengs, for profit and protection, were to keep track of a political elite splintered by factionalism and'

buffeted by political and military competition. Ruifuxiang's wealth and the assiduous cultivation of connections gave the Mengs great influence in the Beijing chamber of commerce and other elite arenas.^[22] The wealth of the silk and foreign goods trade made Ruifuxiang or silk guild representatives welcome in any enterprise involving local fund raising.^[23] Although Meng Jinhou never ran for office as a chamber director or officer, he was given the honorary status of "special director."

The Mengs realized that vertical ties could radically enhance one's prospects and position. Placing a trade or business under the "protective aura" (menqiang ) of a noble or high official had been a common practice under the Qing. Trades as diverse as the lumber, jade, artificial flower, and book businesses relied on various forms of official patronage.^[24] In the past, few fortunes could be made or protected without ties to official Beijing. Construction firms specializing in erecting and repairing palaces, temples, and other official buildings routinely bribed courtiers and officials to win contracts.^[25] To gain easier access to the court and officialdom and to make coming and going in mansions and offices more natural, builders purchased degrees.

The Mengs simply pursued this strategy with exceptional vigor through a period in which status hierarchies were in flux. Of course, one need not be a capitalist among bureaucrats to realize the advantages of this kind of patronage. Other economic and political entrepreneurs came to the same conclusion in settling on means to promote projects ranging from welfare reform to Communist revolution.

One such example occurred in the early 1920s. A consortium of charities, the Metropolitan Welfare Association, divided over the question of whether to modernize its established practice of dealing with hunger and poverty through directly distributing food and clothing at soup kitchens and temporary aid stations.^[26] A maverick social reformer named Liu Xilian decided that a casework approach would better serve the city's indigent. The established charities opposed Liu's "scientific" methods, insisting that soup kitchens were indispensable. The old distribution system, organized around a seasonal "winter defense" (dongfang ), served those who entered the city in search of food, whether famine victims or war refugees, and gave high visibility to the philanthropists involved. Elites sometimes visited the soup kitchens to pass out copper coins or show their public concern through other personal donations. But the hundreds who starved and froze to death each winter while convocations of elites ponderously arranged for the opening of the kitchens attested to the traditional system's inadequacy.^[27]

Liu temporarily overcame opposition to welfare reform in winter 1922-23 by securing a patron to tip the balance in his favor after failing to persuade his fellow association members to endorse his plan. Warlord Zhang Zuolin, who was looking for ways to build popular support in the city, personally contributed a large shipment of grain to Liu, allowing him to commence his.

social experiment. However, although Liu implemented his pilot program, he never abolished the old welfare system.

Similarly, Communist leader Li Dazhao placed the groups of intellectuals and workers he organized in Beijing in the early and mid-1920s under the protection of two, successive North China warlords in the hope of boosting the power of "mass" politics.^[28] As Communist setbacks in the 1920s suggested, this was a risky strategy; a patron could always disown a client or suffer defeat. The need for higher-level protection against predatory and repressive political forces was acute, but the reliability of such ties was often difficult to gauge given the instability of factional alignments and the power of political ideologies to bind and split people against the grain of personal connections. A staff member of a radical newspaper recalled having dinner with prominent Nationalist Party member Wang Jingwei in 1925, at a time when he feared his paper might be closed down by police. Wang assured him that "things were already arranged" with the police chief. The following day the newspaper was banned, and the unfortunate fellow spent months in jail.^[29]

Would-be patrons could also find that their efforts to mobilize support based on personal ties were problematic. A radical student from Hunan recalled being propositioned in 1925 by a fellow provincial on behalf of the besieged Hunanese education minister Zhang Shizhao. Zhang sought allies in the student movement to defuse protests against his policies. The student, however, repaid the overture by using access to Zhang's household to obtain damaging information from the minister's wife on her husband's personal life.^[30] When the high-level backers of the Beijing Streetcar Company recruited employees in the mid-1920s, they pointedly hired former district police commander Deng Yu'an, thinking that his connections in the police force and his understanding of Beijing society could protect the interest of the enterprise "from below." Instead, the former police officer's attempt to do just that by recruiting fellow policemen for company jobs created bad feelings among police left out of the scheme, and these tensions made the utility more, not less, vulnerable to criticism and opposition.^[31]

A personalistic approach to protecting and expanding one's influence could be expensive (requiring the kind of venture capital invested by the Mengs or the streetcar company) or dangerous (risking sudden exposure when abandoned by one's patron). But the appeals of clientelism for local elites went beyond a simple calculus of these costs measured against the benefits from the quick resolution of a problem through the right connections. Vertical mobilization, as a general principle, operated throughout Beijing society from Republican political elites down to neighborhood charities and militia or labor gangs.

The spatial and social structure of the city supported connections, based on deference, between elites and ordinary residents. The city contained great

extremes of wealth and poverty and yet little by way of class-based residential segregation. Neighborhoods, with a few exceptions, were mixed in character; mansions, hovels, courtyard residences, and courtyard tenements stood in close proximity.^[32] As a matter of status and self-interest, the monied, propertied, and degree-holding classes had reason to lead and support projects to care for and control the poor who lived just beyond their courtyard wall or gathered outside their shop doors. Thanks to the efforts of late Qing reformers concerned about threats from assassins and rebels, Beijing had a large police force. But social control on the streets still depended in part on militia and other communal and private security arrangements that required elites' courage and aura to function.^[33] In addition, the social organization of the workplace favored small shops where owners, managers, masters, workers and apprentices lived and worked side by side. Liberal reformers criticized the amount of personal authority exercised by shop owners who applied patriarchal principles, "Households have a rod for punishing children and servants; Shops have shop rules."^[34] But even during the Republic, personal authority and custom continued to be as important as law and formal organization in regulating relations between social classes.

Classified from a broadly comparative point of view, a "traditional notable" is someone "embedded in a network of personal and family obligation" who parlays those ties into becoming "a kind of paterfamilias of the community."^[35] This role is likely to be more passive than active, insofar as community interests are concerned. One is a notable not so much because of what one does as because others recognize who one is. That solidity on the part of individuals of substance, no matter how old-fashioned in appearance, has practical value in a turbulent, moderizing age when the question of who is responsible for whom is urgent.

In principle, a modern state, the kind the Republic was supposed to be,' was responsible for ensuring the protection and welfare of its citizen.^[36] In reality, and because the state itself was as dangerous as it was helpful to individuals and communities, local elites continued to take responsibility for employees, fellow guildsmen, neighbors, and the larger community. In nineteenth-century Europe, even after feudal privileges had been abolished, a "deference society" persisted based on the community's "habitual respect" for the nobility.^[37] In China, even after the state ended new examination honors in 1905, deference as a basic principle of social organization continued, not merely as a residue of gentry culture but as the active element in a whole range of old and new organizations like guilds, labor unions, and chambers of commerce. Many city residents would probably have agreed with a statement made in 1928 by the directors of the Beijing chamber of commerce. Confronted with the sudden resignation of their president and vice-president, they declared, "As we face the precarious moment, the chamber cannot be one day without someone to take responsibility."^[38] A resident observing the

activities of press gangs in the city during one of Beijing's periodic military crises similary remarked: "Soldiers were seizing everyone who had a strong back and a weak master."^[39]

Association and Mediation

The pursuit of personalistic strategies by local notables does not exclude the presence of civic incentives derived from broader loyalties.^[40] The Mengs' family prejudice against office holding did not prevent them from accepting positions and honors based on their wealth and prestige. But their coolness toward public service stands in striking contrast to the alacrity with which other local elites, including chamber of commerce leaders, built reputations and power through active involvement in public affairs. The Chinese paterfamilias leaned in that direction naturally, through a "self-image of public responsibility—a sense of service or 'cadredom'—which characterizes local leadership in Chinese culture."^[41] Animated by popular and elite expectations concerning community leadership or galvanized by political and social turbulence, a local notable could be pitched toward activism even though "embedded" in a personal network that seemingly valued order and stasis above all else.

This civic activism and a related devotion to formal organization and ideology owed a great deal to a grass-roots tradition of urban management and to late Qing reformist ideals and practice.^[42] In Beijing, merchants and gentry cooperated in neighborhood order-keeping bodies like shuihui ("water" or fire-fighting societies), which had been organized in the mid-nineteenth century to remedy government neglect of local affairs. In sharing responsibility for maintaining social peace at the local or neighborhood levels, degree holders and merchants joined to produce "a blurring of roles and the emergence of a local leadership class" with a dual merchant-gentry identity.^[43] Fire-brigade charters explained that the brigades had assumed quasi-governmental tasks in city neighborhoods because "fire, flood and robbery were rampant."^[44]

Whenever there was a fire, [the government bureau in charge] was unprepared to put it out. As a result, criticism arose during the Xianfeng reign [1851-1862]. In those years fire brigades were established so as to have fire-fighting equipment at the ready. At the same time "calamity relief" neighborhood groups took responsibility for catching thieves.^[45]

After 1900, government reformers at the highest levels took a series of actions that allowed this associative tendency to develop more fully.^[46] Both a kind of officially "licensed participation" by elites in government-sponsored professional associations (fatuan ) like chambers of commerce and a more auton-

omous participation through elected assemblies accompanied the state's drive for greater bureaucratic control.^[47]

David Johnson, in a recent essay, applies Antonio Gramsci's notion of "hegemony" to explain the pervasive influence of the ruling ideas associated with Confucianism in the late imperial period.^[48] He also argues, however, that "Gramsci's distinction between the private institutions of 'civil society' and the public institutions of the State has little relevance for China, where a single elite controlled all national institutions."^[49] During the late Qing and early Republic Gramsci's distinction does become relevant. A "civil society" represented by new and newly independent associations and institutions became visible in China's cities, and the political roles played by local elites were transformed.^[50] Official hostility and elite ambivalence toward developing an autonomous associational life reflected a powerful residue of the hegemonic culture to which Johnson refers.^[51] But other elites defended the integrity of the organizations they directed.^[52]

One of the clearest statements of local elite confidence in the value of public associations was made by Beijing jeweler An Disheng in 1920 as he struggled to regain the post of chamber of commerce president, which he had lost in a scandal earlier that year when he was falsely accused of embezzling chamber funds.^[53] An had been instrumental in pushing the Beijing chamber toward the kind of activism pursued a decade earlier by sister organizations in other cities. Blaming his ouster (with good cause) on the machinations of higher-level elites hostile to his independent leadership of the chamber, An appealed to fellow notables ("junzi [gentlemen] of various circles [jie ]") not because of the personal humiliation he had suffered but because of the "libel directed against the group [tuanti ]" he represented, the merchants of the city.^[54] An Disheng—a former member of the Hanlin Academy, an inventor of a new process for manufacturing cloisonné for export, and a participant in the late Qing and early Republican self-government movement—was an outstanding example of the spirit of cadredom carried by the merchant-gentry class. He took credit for both breaking with the subservient role for professional associations favored by Qing and Republican officials and giving the chamber a sense of "group autonomy" (tuanti zidong ). He blamed his current difficulties on the "Anfu Clique" at the national level for directing a great chain of conspirators in and out of the chamber to unseat him. Faced with a swarm of plots and personal attacks, his only defense was the power of law and public opinion. He addressed his appeal for help to "various provincial assemblies, educational associations, chambers of commerce, agricultural societies, unions, lawyers' associations, student federations, newspapers and professional associations"—that is, to politically active groups in civil society. Despite the sharp distinction An Disheng drew between his own civic activism and his opponents' dependence on connections and private intrigue,

it must be noted that even before he went public with his troubles his friends from the jewelers trade and from his native county in Hebei had tried to mobilize support on his behalf.^[55] It is also true, however, that An Disheng consistently supported the rights of professional associations, self-government, republican virtue, and democracy.

Ideological coherence linked to a clear plan for institutional reform surfaced in other forms in the 1920s and met with some of the same difficulties self-government activists like An faced. When your enemies came for you with trumped-up charges and guns, legal niceties and civic traditions had limited utility. The liberal variant of reform assumed a stable constitutional order that did not exist. The one-party systems advocated by Nationalists and Communists assumed an organizational monolith yet to be built. Under the circumstances, neither the manic networking of the Mengs nor the principled association building of An Disheng was as appealing to some as a balanced approach; this recognized that the intermediate zone one occupied as a local elite was defined by both status hierarchies and what Gramsci describes as the "powerful system of fortresses and earthworks" representing the institutions and institutionalized beliefs of civil society.^[56]

In his study of grass-roots politicians in France and Italy, Sidney Tarrow argues that when a personalistic approach proves outmoded and civic-minded administration is unrealistic, a local elite is likely to assume the role of a "policy broker" who takes "initiatives at the local level to direct policy goods toward particular communities and to capture resources from the state."^[57] The role Tarrow describes emerged in modern Europe as a result of a constant stream of programs and projects emanating from the center. Under conditions prevailing in Republican China, local elites could hardly expect to enjoy that kind of official largess. With the exception of minor anomalies like Liu Xilian's welfare reforms, the heyday of government-sponsored or- directed change in Beijing came during the New Policies reforms in the last decade of the Qing. By the 1920s the problem for local elites was often exactly the reverse of what Tarrow describes: how to prevent representatives of the state from capturing local resources for use at the center or as part of a political struggle to seize the center.

From 1916 to 1930, the total tax burden on Beijing residents, excluding tribute extorted by warlords, increased more than two and one-half times.^[58] With few exceptions, including funds for support of the local police, higher taxes did not reflect or lead to enhanced services. The taut relationship that existed between regimes and organized local society often had less to do with efforts to bend state policy in a particular direction than with a tug of war over taxes. Tax protests were practically continuous in response to the ingenuity of government agencies in seeking new or increased revenues. Taxes on commodities and services, including flour, stock transactions, restaurants, fish, horses, charcoal, coal, butchery, and vegetables, triggered strikes,

marches, and petitions. As Susan Mann has suggested, the practice of tax farming, which began in the late Qing and continued into the Republic in competition with a directly bureaucratic approach, was a "temporary phase in the state-building process" during which time an expansionary state was "met, matched and thwarted by local interests."^[59]

Meeting and thwarting the state required brokers, in Tarrow's sense of the term, who were effective because they could mobilize both networks of supporters and the resources of formal organization. One such defensive broker was three-time chamber of commerce president Sun Xueshi. Sun, who defeated An Disheng's bid to recover the presidency in 1922, owned a chain of roast duck restaurants. He led the restaurateurs' guild, had connections based on his Shandong provincial background, maintained close ties to Beijing brothels, and headed a fire brigade located in the midst of the merchant district outside Qian Gate.^[60] Sun was reputedly at his most effective in the "realm of social intercourse," which included rounds of banqueting for which he was obviously well-placed.^[61] However, when necessary, Sun presided at public meetings, attended self-government rallies, and used his formal position as professional association leader to participate in citywide convocations of elites. To the extent that Sun articulated an ideology, it was based on the old notion of "people's livelihood" (minsheng ), which justified protection of markets and jobs. When local elites like Sun pursued these defensive strategies they slipped into the role of paterfamilias, a posture that earned Sun the reputation of being the "taidou (the worthy everyone looks up to) of Beijing's merchant circles." Such a posture at once disguised and legitimized the contrived, political nature of what he was attempting to accomplish: hold together a diverse, quarrelsome constituency of guilds and modern enterprises.^[62]

In the 1920s, liberals like An Disheng, dependent on the success of coherent plans, could be displaced by a traditionalist like Sun, whose strength lay in his command of social networks and his ability to evoke a sense of communal solidarity often against the plans of bureaucrats, warlords, and capitalists. Sun Xueshi played the role of broker in a style that resonated with the traditional mediating function of the gentry.^[63] But he also faced a modernizing state and armed himself with the modern political weapons available to professional association leaders.

Sun Xueshi's skills in this regard were tested during the occupation of the city by warlord Zhang Zuolin. Before he abandoned Beijing in 1928 to oncoming Northern Expedition armies led by Chiang Kai-shek, Zhang instituted a luxury tax on various commodities sold in the city ranging from gold to sugar. The chamber under Sun Xueshi's leadership was made responsible for collecting it.^[64] For months after the initial demand for revenues Sun and his vice-president, Leng Jiayi, played the role of broker between regime and the merchant community. Zhang's agents demanded 100,000 dollars a

month. Sun and Leng offered 50,000 on the condition that the city's livestock tax be suspended.^[65] When the government pushed too hard or chamber members balked at paying, Sun and Leng submitted their resignations and retired to their residences until chamber and government representatives persuaded them to return.

The delicacy of Sun and Leng's maneuvering derived from calculated displays of indispensability. They, in effect, balanced their personal prestige against the institutional weight of the chamber, for which one director claimed a popular mandate as "the only professional association in the capital that genuinely represents city people."^[66] As political theater it was familiar and transparent. But by portraying themselves and their leadership roles as fragile and liable to break, they effectively buffered the potentially dangerous collision between violent men like Zhang Zuolin and their own contentious and cost-conscious followers. Everyone had to tread softly so as not to hurt their feelings, wound their pride, or drive them from their responsibilities. In this context, it made sense for a local strongman like Sun to appear weak and for merchants to organize their collective defense around someone who retreated in the face of superior force. If elite culture as a "process is partly ideological, partly dramaturgical; partly collective, partly individual," the individual and small-group dramas that arose when local elites found themselves caught in the middle protected corporate rights and collective interests.^[67]

In performing these brokerage functions and in self-defense local elites frequently resigned, fell ill, or otherwise absented themselves from their positions—all sensible strategies in an era of scathing public debate, insurgent masses, and sojourning armies. Although this softening of institutions charged with protecting civil society might be construed as a sign of weakness, "underdevelopment," or retrogression to the posture of gentry-broker, the practical value of a politics of accommodation was widely recognized.

Representation and Repression

Dominance by local elites depended not only on wealth, position, and social connections with higher elites but also on maintaining the active support of followers and constituents. Without a sense of reciprocity and a means of representing the views and interests of elites and nonelites, it would have been difficult for organizations like the chamber of commerce to perform certain tasks, for example, extracting small sums from thousands of contributing shops to pay predatory regimes. It was impossible for the Mengs of Ruifuxiang to be inconspicuous, and other elites like An Disheng and Sun Xueshi chose not to be. However, the small-scale nature of Beijing economic activity and residential life made passive withdrawal from citywide responsibility an option for many notables and their dependents. Local elites and

their constituents might agree that strong or shrewd leadership in defense of community interests made sense, but at the same time they might evade the costs and risks involved in producing these "public goods."^[68]

A commitment to mediation and consultation was critical not only because it protected elite and community interest but also because public display of mediation celebrated the notion of reciprocity as a general principle at work in operating social and economic organizations at every level. E. P. Thompson has argued that elite hegemony "can be sustained by the rulers only by the constant exercise of skill, of theatre and of concession."^[69] In Beijing society, mediation was an art widely practiced by street policemen, guildsmen, elder statesmen, and even casual passersby who happened upon fights and quarrels. A Japanese visitor to Beijing drawn into a minor quarrel between a shopkeeper and a tourist over broken merchandise was impressed by the performance of a police officer called upon to adjudicate the matter. With a fine sense of ceremony the policeman declared that "the task of the police is to 'mediate disputes.' In other words, our task is to resolve disputes, not entrap people in crime."^[70] In guild disputes between rival factions, mediators appeared physically to separate the combatants at the risk of injury to themselves.^[71] When quarrels on the street or in shops or residences became violent, press accounts blamed the escalation on bystanders who either "looked on without lifting a finger" to mediate or reported that the wildness of the fray meant that "mediators dared not come in."^[72] Elite activists could draw on broad popular support for the role of mediator to justify their actions as broker or buffer between hostile parties like warlord armies and the merchant community.

Elites like Sun Xueshi had a superior grasp of this kind of moral showmanship; however, this quality was not proof against attacks when norms of deference and reciprocity broke down. One of Beijing's most prominent fixers and mediators was the elder statesman Xiong Xiling. Xiong had retired or "descended" from national politics after a brief tenure as Yuan Shikai's prime minister in 1913-14 following a career that suggested a "progressive yet malleable" nature.^[73] By the 1920s Xiong, using his extensive political and social connections, had built an impressive network of philanthropic and commercial ventures in the city, ranging from an orphanage to a bus company.^[74] Xiong's sociable nature and broad human sympathies, which compromised his effectiveness at the higher levels of Republican politics, made him ideal as a pivot for intermediate-level brokerage activities. But in 1929 when Xiong attempted to rescue a failing factory for poor bannermen by merging it with one of his own philanthropic enterprises, he was bitterly criticized by the city's Manchu Advancement Society even though the mainly Manchu officers and apprentices of the factory supported Xiong.^[75] (It did not help Xiong's case that he had been involved in a scandal involving the theft of Manchu treasures in the 1910s.)^[76] Later that year rickshaw men, who

resented competition from the bus company he had started to connect his orphanage at Xiangshan with Beijing, marched in protest against him.^[77]

Even someone as practiced at the art of local politics as Sun Xueshi faced periodic leadership crises. In 1922 Sun was opposed for reelection as chamber president because of dissatisfaction over his aggressive support for the rickshaw men who feared competition from a new streetcar system. He kept his position by threatening to resign "to protect his reputation" and then hosting a series of banquets to rebuild support.^[78] In 1928, several guilds belonging to the chamber joined a local Nationalist Party "merchants union" and led a campaign against Sun for dunning merchants to pay costs incurred in "protection" payments to Northern Expedition armies.^[79] Local elites were both celebrated as protectors of group and community interests and attacked as dictators, embezzlers, and frauds. The record of local politics in 1920s Beijing shows that respected local elites like chamber of commerce presidents, guild heads, and labor union leaders could suddenly find themselves sued, jailed, slandered, conspired against, and deposed.

For local elites this "small politics" of reputation is just as important in generating and destroying status and prestige as the connections and positions available in the larger world.^[80] In his study of the politics of reputation F. G. Bailey suggests that people invariably ask two questions at the micro-political level: "How can you bring back into line a leader who is showing signs of becoming a despot? How, in [a] particular culture, do you signal to the leader that he is reaching the point of no return?"^[81] Beijing residents continued to ask precisely these questions of chamber leaders, union officials, school administrators, party cadres, factory owners, and labor bosses. Even as civil society developed, tensions created by applying' old expectations to new social and political situations gave rise to intense, sometimes violent disputes; the conflicts were both weighted with personal drama and freighted with larger social and political significance.

Staple items of local news in 1920s Beijing were tales of social disorder centering on a politics of personality or reputation marked by what Georg Simmel described as the "particular bitterness which characterizes conflicts within relationships whose nature would seem to entail harmony."^[82] In one case an apprentice bit off the ear of a flour shop owner (who had destroyed the family business through profligacy) who beat him.^[83] In another, carpet factory workers, led by their labor bosses, denounced their newly appointed manager's corruption and set in motion a series of violent confrontations with the manager and his personal retinue.^[84] Managers, officials, and school administrators suddenly found themselves locked in battle with their workers, employees, students, or followers. Leaders, or "responsible persons," were labeled tyrants, dictators, or thugs after having begun their tenure in office with a fund of deference and respect. Mobilizing resources related to founding guilds and unions and providing new services to constituents created the

impetus for many unpleasant incidents.^[85] The elaboration of a civil society through association building at this time intensified the small politics of reputation beyond the capacity of mediators to maintain social peace. Cobbled together by opportunistic elites and counterelites, the politics of reputation took on an ideological tone with powerful organizational consequences.

Local elites could find themselves in a tight position when confronted by a second "front" of mass politics generated from within their own domains and strengthened by alliances with outside cadres and publics. This potential for internal opposition became difficulty—manifested in 1928 with the arrival of Northern Expedition forces. Having shed much of their commitment to popular mobilization following the bloody break with the Communists, Chiang Kai-shek and his conservative allies in the Nationalist regime emphasized social order to the exclusion of party-led mass participation. However, non-Communist party activists retained their local positions and their enthusiasm for organizing workers, peasants, merchants, students, and women. While Chiang attempted to unify the country by defeating or coopting rival warlord armies, local party activists mobilized city residents to win higher wages, abolish unpopular taxes, promote social and cultural change, combat foreign influences, and establish popular organizations at the expense of professional associations and guilds, which they judged elitist and inimical to the revolution. As a result, in summer 1928, local elites faced the challenge of a divided, even schizophrenic regime, with the higher levels behaving like regional militarists or conservative modernizers and the local or intermediate levels acting like revolutionaries.

Mass mobilization by Nationalist cadres was an immediate success. By the end of 1928, the Beiping Federation of Trade Unions (FTU) numbered twenty-six unions with more than fifteen thousand members.^[86] Nationalist union organizers in Beijing began as local representatives of the Grand Alliance (Da tongmeng) faction recruited by leftist party figure Ding Weifen on the basis of school and Shandong native place connections.^[87] Factional ties gave a handful of cadres in the Grand Alliance the ability to emerge as leaders from the thousand or so Nationalist Party members in Beiping. In the process of building the FTU, the Grand Alliance then established an organizational base. By late 1928 the faction's leaders, especially a former university student and brilliant orator named Zhang Yinqing, began to act like brokers as they mediated between the unions and higher-level authorities, represented the interests of their constituents, and repressed any challenge to FTU and Grand Alliance power. Predictably, given the political trajectories of other elites who made a similar progression, during 1929 insurgent unions and party allies of Chiang Kai-shek attacked the "old faction" of the FTU. The incumbents, criticized for "clutching the unions in a monopolistic grip," were finally toppled.^[88]

More fundamental limitations to the labor movement in Beiping were

revealed by the FTU's inability to penetrate most wholesale, retail, and craft shops where the bulk of the city's laborers held jobs. Attempts to unionize shop employees brought into the open the conflicting interests of the city's laborers and business elite. Elite paternalism and brokerage no longer sufficed to maintain social dominance when labor organizers as representatives of the workers pressed demands. Employer-employee relationships were politicized, and the contentiousness of civil society was revealed as its new associations clashed rather than coexisted. Challenged by unions from below, the local-elite leaders united within their most powerful organization, the chamber of commerce, to seek to repress their employees with help from governmental elites who shared the goal of social order but who proved uncertain allies of local-elite organization.

These sociopolitical fissures were dramatized by the shop clerks' movement of 1929. Most of the thirty thousand shops in the city had fewer than five employees, and the lion's share of clerks and craftsmen were attached to these small-scale enterprises.^[89] Many shops doubled as residences, with much of the firm's business conducted on the street.^[90] Larger shops boasted ornate facades and a number of rooms for business transactions, manufacturing, storage, and living quarters. The wealthiest establishments outside Qian Gate, like the Meng family's Ruifuxiang silk and foreign good shops, employed as many as several hundred persons in elaborate hierarchies of salesmen and apprentices.^[91] The familylike character of the traditional shop did not exempt it from conflict between owners and workers. But the small scale and the appeals and threats embodied in shop-based paternalism, combined with the double-cloaking effect of guild and chamber of commerce organization, offered formidable barriers to labor organizers.

In 1928 the merchants' union, sister organization to the FTU, had failed in its attempt to create a mass base among shopkeepers to rival the chamber of commerce. In 1929, the merchants union shifted tactics from winning over guild leaders to undercutting merchant authority by mobilizing shop employees; the merchants launched a campaign to organize a shop employees' or clerks' union. By mid-February, the local press reported that "in the last few days, young shop clerks in the big shops, with the encouragement of the Nationalist Party branch and the merchants' union, have organized branches of the Beiping Clerks Association (Dianyuan gonghui)."^[92] Eight or nine of the more famous shops in the city were immediately affected, and the clerks themselves were said to be in "high spirits."

At the main Ruifuxiang store, manager Meng responded to unrest among his clerks by arranging a theatrical party for the workers. At the gathering Meng explained his views on unionism and tried to convince the workers that the firm could not afford the extra $240,000 in wages they were demanding. Most clerks present were reportedly swayed by Meng's arguments and his

display of paternal concern for their interests; but a minority, citing Sun Yat-sen's Three People's Principles, declared that they must be allowed to organize. Meanwhile, against the chance that the workers might not be persuaded, Meng had given orders that all stock be cleared from his stores and the buildings locked. When the clerks found out what had happened, they angrily accused the Ruifuxiang management of antinationalism. Outside the locked and shuttered shops, merchant union leaders led the clerks in chanting "Down with Meng!" As the clerks movement spread throughout the crowded merchant quarter, many owners followed the lead of Ruifuxiang and closed their businesses. In other shops, clerks either convinced employers to allow them to organize or took over the stores themselves. Posters appeared in store windows declaring the right of workers to organize. In all, as many as one thousand workers joined the movement in the first days of agitation.^[93]

Long-standing grievances soon surfaced in the movement, giving the lie to the ideal of elite paternalism. The clerks movement showed class and ethnic solidarities normally suppressed by the regime of social hierarchy. In the tea trade, the managers of shops were mostly from the same county in Anhui. Many tea-store clerks who joined the movement claimed that workers who were not natives of that area had long suffered discrimination. They were paid less than one-quarter of what the others earned and were "treated like animals." But the pressures exerted by the clerks' association also stimulated internal reform in some shops where managers raised wages and lightened work loads to prevent organizers from gaining a foothold. Signs announcing that "this shop's clerks have organized their own association and will not join any other group" were tacked to the front of some stores. While guilds and guildlike bodies limited the nature and comprehensiveness of worker demands and grievances, the nested hierarchy of shops, work groups and gangs, and citywide umbrella-organizations like the chamber of commerce offered a framework for expressing and resolving grievances through mediation and reciprocity.

The chamber of commerce called a special meeting in late February 1929 to consider what to do about a movement that, as an outgrowth of the merchants' union, directly threatened its control over the commercial sector. The chamber created a ten-man committee to try to mediate between the clerks' association and affected shops. It also authorized formation of a merchants' militia in the event mediation failed. Militia were typically deployed only in time of war or serious social turmoil, and the chamber's action suggests that the body viewed the new movement as a greater threat to its interests than the rise of either the FTU or the merchants' union in 1928. Many trades represented in the chamber were accustomed to yearly rounds of labor negotiations. But these disputes typically pitted merchants against craftsmen

organized either in their own guilds or informally in bodies led by labor bosses. Until 1929, retail and wholesale shops themselves had been immune from union organizing.

In the smallest shops, where home and workplace were practically identical, there would have been room for a small politics of rebellion and feud but not for the ideologically militant worker or labor organizer. Conflict remained personal and factionalized within the narrow compass of the owner and a few employees. In larger shops, where the division of labor was better defined and where the binding strength of native place ties was missing or fractured, there was room for organized dissent. In the Ruifuxiang stores managers and apprentices were linked through Shandong native-place bonds. On the one hand, because managers themselves rose from apprentice status, a strong sense of master-apprentice relations pervaded the firm's social organization.^[94] On the other hand, shop clerks were divided into "inner" and "outer" employees with the latter serving as temporary or contract workers. The outer clerks had higher wages and lower status and might not even be invited to the customary end-of-year banquet to celebrate shop solidarity.

Faced with the growing power of the clerks' association, the chamber appealed to both regional power holders and Nanjing for help in suppressing the movement. Representatives of Chiang Kai-shek and North China militarist Yan Xishan obliged by denouncing the organization as illegal.^[95] The merchants' union defended its creation by arguing that it was an "association" rather than a "union." However, the Beiping Branch Political Council, which represented the alliance of Nanjing and the northern warlords, rejected the argument out of hand and ominously referred to the bloody repression of the "poor clerks" in southern cities. The mayor and the police chief informed the chamber of commerce that shop owners whose employees had been organized by the clerks' association should call on the police for help in disbanding it. Policemen went to stores occupied by militant clerks and ordered that political placards be torn down. With the backing of the chamber, the police, higher-level Nationalist officials, and regional militarists, shop owners were emboldened to fire workers who had joined. The Ruifuxiang stores alone dismissed over one hundred clerks. Finally, under pressure from police and military authorities, the merchants' union itself disowned the organization. Clerks who had joined the movement were ostracized by the merchant community. Months later they were still out of work and living off alms from sympathetic party officials.

The dismal performance of the clerks' association stood in sharp contrast to the success of the labor movement and the temporary inroads made by the merchants' union. The FTU had withstood Yan Xishan's attempt to break the union movement the previous August. Workers had held firm, and union leaders had exploited divisions between Yan and Chiang Kai-shek, benefit-

ing from local-elite apathy. The initial success of the merchants' union in 1928 stemmed from its ability to divide chamber members and win several guilds to its side by exploiting resentment over chamber collection of extra taxes to feed Northern Expedition armies encamped around the city. In the case of the clerks' rebellion, however, the chamber remained unified and found common cause with regional and national military and bureaucratic elites. Conflict between guild leaders over the issue of protection money or disagreements between local elites and Nanjing over taxes did not prevent elites from protecting a principle central to the functioning of Beijing's social order—the exclusive power of the shopkeeper over workers and apprentices.

Conclusion

Local elites in Beijing practiced a politics of accommodation throughout the warlord period. They were neither so weak that they needed to bow habitually to the demands of higher elites nor so strong that they could elevate acts of defiance into an independent municipal politics. The frustrations of war-lord Zhang Zuolin when denied the revenues he craved by the tightrope artistry of Sun Xueshi and the bitter defeat of insurgent shop clerks at the hands of the Mengs suggest the outer limits of local-elite power. They ruled a realm bordered by clashing militarists and restive mass constituencies. A few individuals, like An Disheng, believed that the autonomy bequeathed local organizations by Qing reformers and reluctantly confirmed by Republican politicians could be the stuff of a liberal politics. New legal statuses of professional association and citizen grafted onto traditional prerogatives exercised by gentry and merchant elites would make the state dependent on civil society for legitimacy, rather than the other way round. The utopian nature of An's idealism allowed him to see that a window of opportunity had opened for this kind of project, if local elites had the courage to challenge a weakened, though still dangerous, state. An Disheng's more pragmatic confederates and adversaries refused to be drawn into risky enterprises of the sort An favored. They either broadened their involvement in local affairs to fill the paterfamilias-cum-broker role of a Sun Xueshi or narrowed their approach to the specific defense of individual or group interests like the Mengs.

The real threat to the baroque structure of the local elite, with its old dome of gentry and merchant activism embellished by the 1920s and the addition of new professionals and cadres of various hues, was central state power combined with mass mobilization. This kind of radical circumvention and subversion of local-elite power, alien to the thinking of Qing reformers and early Republican power holders, was considered and finally rejected by the Nationalists. It turned out to be the key to future Communist success.^[96]