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]