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.