Restless Empire (10 page)

W
HILE FOREIGNERS CARVED OUT
their parts of China’s cities, other newcomers to urban China were busy carving out theirs. From the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, many Chinese cities doubled in size, as Qing restrictions on travel to and residence in the cities faded and more economic opportunities were created. The encounters between Chinese and foreign economies, products, and teachings were among the most important reasons for the urbanization of the late Qing era. But the decrease in official restrictions also played a role, especially for the growth in businesses, organizations, and learning that made the cities attractive. The young people who came to the cities, whether they settled in areas under Chinese or foreign jurisdiction, created new identities for themselves, as workers, traders, shopkeepers, or part of the intelligentsia, in ways that would not have been open to them had Qing power—with its skepticism toward unregulated cities—stayed intact.

The spectacle of change that met newcomers to Shanghai or Wuhan or Tianjin a hundred years ago would almost have been beyond their belief. It was not just the wide streets, trains and tramways, telegraph technology, movie houses, and dance halls that would have excited (and sometimes dismayed) them, it would be the way some people dressed—in skirts, blouses, and suits, rather than gowns—and how they lived—on their own, rather than with their families—that would have seemed odd and new. The presence of foreigners would of course
titillate, as would the sights and smells of a new kind of city, in which production and transport were moving to the forefront of human consciousness. The new products for sale would also startle, from mirrors to soap, from bicycles to cameras, from corsets to flashlights. Sometimes they found their way into ancient cosmologies, as when mirrors were placed in hallways to ward off evil spirits. More often they were admired and, eventually, copied by local producers with twists that fitted local markets and tastes.

The role of the merchant had increased in urban China from the late fifteenth century on, but it took on a new significance in the late nineteenth century, when China was being drawn into an expanding world economy. The compradors (from the Portuguese word for “buyer”)—Chinese who acted as bicultural middlemen in the trade with foreigners—stood at the center of economic change that was taking place, acting as negotiators, business assistants, or upcountry purchasers for Western companies. Ironically, while it was their cultural skills, primarily in language, that gave them their comparative advantage, the compradors became agents of a new kind of economic rationality in the cities, where the accumulation of capital and the possession of material wealth became the main symbol of status. The Confucian context, in which honor, sincerity, and social relationships were as important as economic gain, was gradually outflanked, as was the position of scholars and even imperial officials.
¹

The Chinese cities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were chaotic places, both for old and new inhabitants. As the Qing, who had, with some justification, prided themselves on their city planning, began to lose control, new forms of authority emerged, in some cases building on precedents that had been set long ago. One such form in urban China was the
huiguan
or
tongxianghui,
the native place associations, which represented and assisted workers who came to the city from a particular area, province, or region. In places like Shanghai, Tianjin, and Wuhan, they controlled areas of the Chinese city in which their adherents lived, where their dialect was spoken, and where their
sort of food was served. Crucially, they also provided contacts with countrymen abroad. But, while powerful, the native place associations always competed for allegiance with trade and labor organizations and with secret societies of various kinds, from anti-Qing agitators to criminal gangs and those somewhere on the scale in between. The new urban China was unruly territory, with complex links across time and geographical space, hard to control because it was so hard to define.
²

I
N 1832, A
S
COTTISH SHIP DOCTOR
, William Jardine, who had an extra income from dealing in opium, and his countryman James Matheson, set up what would become the premier foreign company, or
hong
, in nineteenth-century China. Jardine, Matheson & co. was primarily based in Hong Kong and Shanghai, with extensions through all the major trading routes within China, between China, Japan, and Southeast Asia, and between East Asia and Europe. It was in many ways China’s first multinational corporation, with a hybrid structure that was replicated in most other foreign-led
hongs
. Its board and directors were all foreigners, but the company was linked to Chinese compradors who served as conduits to the major Chinese producers and retailers and who in reality provided much of the capital on which the company’s business was based. Jardine’s had agents—mostly Europeans—in all major ports on the coast and along the main rivers, and these agents had their own network of Chinese merchants whom they depended upon to get business done. A company like Jardine’s of course existed mainly to provide the maximum profit for its foreign investors, symbolized by its involvement in the opium trade. But its structure became as much Chinese as European, and its business would have been impossible without the involvement of thousands of Chinese who led the way into markets and trade routes established long before any Scotsman had set foot in China.

One such area in which the European-led trading houses fitted into preexisting Chinese networks was in trade with and within Southeast Asia. In many cases the foreign companies simply slotted into trading
structures that the Chinese diaspora had been building for many generations. The newcomers provided additional capital and stronger links with Europe. But while the Europeans were busy colonizing Southeast Asia between 1850 and 1914, the Chinese supplied the small traders and low-level administrators that glued the colonial possessions together. Singapore became the hub of the regional trade, and therefore a Chinese city in Southeast Asia, although under British administration. In Batavia (Jakarta) and Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), Chinese traders provided key services for the Dutch and French colonialists, for foreign companies that settled in the area, and for companies operating out of China. Although both Southeast Asian elites and Europeans were fearful of Chinese influence and competition, they came to depend on the expanding markets that the Chinese helped set up. In British Malaya, for instance, Yu Ren Sheng—a company that began trading in Chinese medicine in the 1870s—came to link the peninsula to southern China on most things from banking services to food and contract labor.

The new Western-type banks, based in Shanghai and Hong Kong, also fitted into older Chinese patterns of credit and investment, forming great chains of finance. The links between various kinds of institutions were very close, with loans and securities moving from big banks to small banks to new-type Chinese banks to old-type Chinese banks. The number of Chinese who were—in one form or another—affected by the activities of banks grew rapidly in the nineteenth century, even outside the cities. The banks were also, of course, linked to the trading houses, big and small. Jardine’s Fuzhou comprador sold, for instance, shares on behalf of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, the biggest of all the foreign-type institutions. HSBC had started operations from rented premises in Hong Kong in 1865, with a capital of five million Hong Kong dollars. By the 1880s, it was the biggest bank in China, with offices and agents all over the country. It was banker to the Hong Kong government for British government accounts in China, Japan, Malaya, and Singapore. It issued banknotes in Hong Kong and
in Thailand. And most notably it was the banker to the Chinese government, managing most of its public loans between 1874 and the 1920s, making a substantial profit for its shareholders in the process.

Throughout the long period of wars and revolutions in China in the twentieth century, big foreign-run banks such as HSBC remained the preferred bankers for Chinese who gained from the capitalist expansion. While all foreign banks in China became more susceptible to risk after the collapse of the Qing empire in 1911, the romance between Western banking methods and Chinese capital continued to be strong. Ewen Cameron, the manager of HSBC’s Shanghai headquarters, in 1890 boasted that “for the last 25 years the Bank has been doing a very large business with the Chinese in Shanghai amounting, I should say, to hundreds of millions of
taels
[Chinese dollars], and we have never met with a defaulting Chinaman.”
³

It was only in the early twentieth century that foreign involvement in Chinese industry started to catch up with foreign involvement in trade. One reason was that until the 1890s foreigners were not allowed to invest in production on Chinese soil. Another was Chinese resistance to the introduction of Western commercial law; it took up to 1904 before the concept of limited liability for corporations was accepted.
⁴
The first Chinese industrial enterprises had developed out of existing companies, mostly in handicrafts. During the 1870s the Qing state and its provincial governments had begun forging links with private companies under the slogan
guandu shangban
(official supervision, merchant management) as part of the Self-strengthening Movement. Many of the enterprises that were created as part of such schemes—such as the China Merchant Steamship Navigation Company (founded in 1872), the Jiangnan Arsenal (1865), the Shanghai Cotton Cloth Mill (1878), and the Kaiping Mines (1877)—were based on Western technologies. But even though some of these new companies carried out quite amazing feats of reverse engineering to understand and produce foreign machinery, they found it hard to compete against Western-owned shipping
and imports. From the turn of the century, foreign investment expanded rapidly, beginning in the mining industry, then in foodstuffs, energy, and textiles, with Shanghai the biggest center of production. Many of these businesses grew quickly and were highly profitable.

There was always a surplus of peasants wanting to work in the cities, but conditions for those who labored in the nascent industries were often poor, whether they were employed by foreigners or Chinese. Hours were long, living conditions filthy, and wages low compared to the cost of living in the cities. Sick or pregnant workers were fired, and children were hired to do the most dirty or dangerous jobs. Women workers, who came to the cities in increasing numbers from the turn of the century on, especially to work in the textile industry, were vulnerable to sexual exploitation by their bosses and often felt that they had to send the greater amount of their wages back to their parents in their home village. Although many Chinese became workers not of their own free will, but because their families or clans decided that they had to, others were drawn to the cities by the freedom from family control that they offered. As in other countries at the dawn of industrialization, factory life in China was hard and hazardous, but the foreignness of the cities broke the monotony of farming and held out the hope of rich rewards to those who most eagerly broke the set moral guidelines of the past.

M
ANY
C
HINESE FIRST ENCOUNTERED
foreigners as missionaries. As the empire was forced to open its doors in the mid-1800s, Christian missions sprung up in the treaty ports and itinerant missionaries began traveling to most parts of the country. In spite of both official and popular Chinese resentment, much cultural and educational interaction took place through Christian missions. Education and science, not religion, became the most significant fields of missionary enterprise. Still, the Christian faith came to have a deep impact on some parts of Chinese society, as did the many religious amalgams and cultural translations that came out of these contacts.

While the social and economic dislocation in China in the nineteenth century provided fertile ground for the entry of a new transcendental faith, the association of Christianity with foreign aggression diminished the effectiveness of the missionaries’ message. Although many were impressed with the personal courage and sacrifice shown by foreign and Chinese Christians, many more were disgusted with the demands foreign governments made to pave the way for Christian proselytizing. When France declared itself a protector of all Catholic missionaries in China, or when the British or Germans exacted revenge for attacks against Christians, much of the goodwill on which Christianity could expand was destroyed. The sense that Christians were one of many Western groups out to smash the existing order in China also damaged their cause. In village after village, disputes, often violent, broke out when Christians refused to contribute to popular festivals or the upkeep of the village temple. In some areas reports of churches being vandalized were followed by news of temples or sacred images being destroyed. The attitude of Confucian officialdom toward Christians remained profoundly negative. A Christian man brought before a Shanxi magistrate after a brawl over the man’s refusal to help pay for the annual Chinese opera performance was asked which country he was from. When he answered that he was a man of the Qing, the magistrate exploded:

If you are a person of the Qing dynasty then why are you following the foreign devils and their seditious religion? You didn’t pay your opera money when requested by the village and you were beaten. But how can you dare to bring a suit? You certainly ought to pay the opera subscription. If you don’t you won’t be allowed to live in the land of the Qing. You will have to leave for a foreign country.
⁵

Two constituencies among which Christian missionaries made some early inroads—as would the Communists later—were women and ethnic minorities. Even though their position could be strong in some regions and clans, especially in the south, women were the largest
oppressed group in nineteenth-century China. They lacked the rights of men and were under the command of their fathers, brothers, husbands, and even sons. For some of the most exploited women, Christianity, with its emphasis on choice and personal salvation, proved a way out, but often at the cost of breaking with their families or even their community. Some ethnic minorities, such as the Miao people in southern China or the Taiwan aboriginals, also had relatively high numbers of converts. After the end of the Taiping movement, groups among the Hakka joined with local missions—such as the Swiss-German Basel Mission—in order to defend against revenge from non-Hakka neighbors. The Deng clan—from among whom one of the key leaders of Communist China, Deng Xiaoping, would later emerge—was one such group of Hakka.