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Ming-Qing Guilds

William T.Rowe (Baltimore)

A type of economic organization generically referred to as the "guild" made its appearance in many of the world's major civilizations at one point or another in their histories. Organizations which, at least on. the surface, appear similar to the guilds of medieval and early modem emerged in South Asia, China, and Japan,l each at a which seems to mark a distinctive stage in the intensification of commercial exchange. (Their notable absence in North America is often seen as an anomaly, a key feature in the perceived phenomenon of "American exceptionalism. "2) But to what extent is this surface similarity illusory or coincidental, or to what extent revealing of genuinely universal patterns or processes of cultural evolution? To what extent were Chinese guilds uniquely distinctive? Indeed, is our use of the term "guild" to describe Chinese institutions merely a matter of convenience in labelling, or do we really mean to imply an essential comparability to the European experience, in which the term first arose? What, in other words, were the defining features of guilds in late imperial China? Although they had antecedents as least as early as the Tang dynasty, 3 guilds in China effectively emerged as a prevalent type of social organization during the era of greatly intensified interregional commerce and geographic mobility in the late Ming and early Qing.4 They remained important socioeconomic actors through the first decades of the twentieth century. Nomenclature for these institutions varied, including such terms as bang, hqng, huiguan, and gongsuo. But while the specific term employed in each case sometimes provided a clue to the organization's special character, probably as often it did

1 On South Asia, see for example Christopher Bayly, Rulers, Tosmen, and Bazaars, Cambridge, 1983. On Japan see Willam B. Hauser, Economic Institutional Change in Tokugawa Japan: Osaka and the Kinai Cotton Trade, Cambridge, 1974. 2 For example, Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The in Lynn, Cambridge Mass., 1976. 3 See for example Kato Shigeshi, "On the Hang, or the Associations of in China," Memoirs of the Research Department of the raya Bunko, 8 (1936), pp,65-80; Denis Twitchett, "The T'ang Market System," Asia Major, 12.2 (1966), pp.202-48; Shiba Yoshinobu, Commerce and Society in Sung China, Mark Elvin, ed., Ann Arbor, 1970. 4 The factor of geographic mobility, especially in cOl)nection with the civil service examination system, is stressed in He Bingdi, [Ho Ping-tijZhongguo huiguan shilun (On the history of landsmannschaften in China), Taibei, 1966. See also Peter Golas, "Early Ch'ing Guilds," in G. William Skinner, ed., The in Late Im• perial China, Stanford, 1977, pp.555-80.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:55:00PM via free access William T Rows not, as increasingly the terms came to be used interchangeably. At least by the mid-Qing, listings of such institutions in local gazetteers demonstrate that contemporaries had come to recognize them as belonging to a single broad species of organization. Chinese guilds have been intensively studied by scholars, and it is fair to say that there are as many explanations of their functional rationale as there have been observers. One view, probably in fact the oldest but forcefully restated in a recent article by and Fu• mei Chen and Ramon Myers,5 emphasizes the beneficial effects of association in reducing certain types of overhead (termed by Chen and Myers "transaction costs") to levels which permitted generation of profits, thereby stimulating the entry of capital into the area of commodity circulation and, by extension, production. Perhaps equally venerable, however, is the counterargument that guilds operated in restraint of trade, by restricting entry of potential participants through exclusionary membership policies and by using this leverage for -fixing. This view of what guilds were up to was probably held by many contemporaries, and prompted the imperial administration's repeated prohibitions on "bachi," a term often loosely translated as "" but more accurately meaning any sort of market intervention deemed inimicable to the flow of goods (monopoly itself was not always so conceived). This perspective also largely informed the earliest detailed on guilds by Chinese and Japanese scholars such as Quan Hansheng and Negishi Tadashi.6

Yet a third general view of guild function~ focusing on their role in the marketplace was articulated in a landmark 1956 article by the Chinese economic historian Peng Zeyi.1 Applying a model drawn from Western economic history, Peng saw the essential role of guilds as attempting to forestall the rise of . The targets of such rear-guard action were as often colleagues within the trade as outside competitors. The threat came when one or several of the essentially household-scale enterprises in• volved in the trade rose out of the pack and began to supplant or subordinate the others, by means of enjoying some special competitive. advantage - better access to markets or suppliers, or an ability to produce or operate at lower cost, for example by producing lesser quality goods in bulk. The outcome would be an increased scale of enterprise for the favored party, the replacement of the apprentice system by purer forms of Iabor , and, perhaps eventually, the reduction of previously indipendent and co-equal artisnal proprietors to the status of sub-contractors or employees of the victorious entrepreneur. The role of guilds was to prevent this process by imposing limitations on the scale of members' enterprises, by prohibiting price-cutting , and by upholding quality control and the integrity of the apprentice system. Peng presented evidence in the form of revised guild regulatory codes to argue that this activity was especially characteristic of the second half of the nineteenth century, as the threat to inherited business practices posed by Western capitalist influences became severe. Other observers have been inclined to emphasize the social role of Chinese guilds more centrally than their market functions. The pioneering Japanese scholar Niida Noboru, for example, stressed their activities in the provision of a wide range of functions for their memberships, noting the trend over time for such services

5 Fu-mei Chen and Ramon H. Myers, "Coping with Transaction Cost: The Case of Merchant Associations in the Ch'ing Period," in Yung-san Lee and TS'ui-jung Liu, eds., China's Market Economy in Transition, Taibei, 1990, pp.79-104. 6 Quan Hansheng, Zhongguo hangltui zhidu slti (History of the guild system in China), Shanghai, 1933; Negishi Tadashi, Sltina no girudo no kenkyu (A study of Chinese guild~), Tokyo, 1938. 7 Peng Zeyi, "Shijiu shiji houqi Zhongguo chengshi shougongye shangye hanghui de chongjian he zuoyong" (The reestablishment and functions of Chinese urban handicraft and commercial guilds in the second half of the nineteenth century), Ushi yanjiu, 1.965.1, pp.71-102. 48 Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:55:00PM via free access Ming-Qing Guilds progressively to be extended to wider constituencies, and, through guild cooperation and amalgamation, to the urban community as a whole. 8 Niida' s younger colleague lmahori Seiji stressed instead the more negative side of the same phenomenon, noting the utility of deliberately-promoted communal or collective consciousness in urban guilds (as in rural lineages or village alliances) as a means for socioeconomic elties to institutionalize their control over group resources. 9 In the past two decades a remarkable series of documentary collections has been published in China and elsewhere, which now allow us a reasonably broad perspective on the actual goals and .operations of a large number of late imperial guilds. What I wish to do in the remainder of this article is to survey selected cases of guild activity in five important Chinese for which such documentation is available. The selection of cities is fortuitous, for not only do they provide geographic diversity, but they also include one essentially consumer city (Beijing), one producer city (Foshan), two principally entrepot cities -one coastal (Shanghai) and one inland (Chongqing)- and one city (Suzbou). which combined all three characteristics in roughly equal measure. The selection of individual guilds is based on their unusually high level of documentation. This survey offers us a relatively balanced picture of how Chinese guilds worked, and why they appeared useful to their constituents.

The Silk and Satin Guild of Suzhou

Our first example comes from Suzbou, popularly celebrated as the wealthiest city in late Ming and early Qing China. Suzbou was an administrative and cultural center, a haven for absentee rentier landlords, a major transport node for interregional shipping, and the largest silk producer in the empire. Over the course of the late imperial period, silk had gradually been transformed from a to an essentially private enterprise, and labor relations within the industry had been ridden with conflict and violence, most notably in the late Ming. This phenomenon has been well studied, and need not be reiterated here. 10 Our concern at present is a document from a somewhat later period (1723), which offers the perspective of the Silk and Satin Guild (Shaduan yehang).11 Commercial guilds in the Qing might variously be comprised of brokers (jingji or yahang), of non-broker commodities dealers, or of the two in combination. Tension between these parties often ran high, and both the administration and organizations within the trades themselves regularly sought means to ameliorate such conflicts. The Suzbou Silk and Satin Guild was an association exclusively of brokers. In their view, their had arisen out of the need to effect the link between local workshops

8 Niida Noboru, 'Shindai Konan no girudo-machanto' (A guild- merchant in Qing Hunan), Toyoshi kenkyu, 21.3 (1962), pp.315-36. See also William T. Rowe, Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, Stanford, 1984, chap. 9. 9 Imahori Seiji, Chugoku no shakai kOzo (Chinese social structure), Tokyo, 1953. 10 See variously Fu Yiling, Ming Qing shidai shangren ji shangye ziben (Merchants and commercial capital during the Ming and Qing), Beijing, 1956; Liu Yongcheng, "Shilun Qingdai Suzhou shougongye hanghui" (On handicraft guilds in Suzhou during the Qing period), Lishi yanjiu, 1959, 11, pp.21-46; Yokoyama Suguru, Chugoku kindaika no keizai kOzo (The economic structure of China's modernization), Tokyo, 1972; Paolo Santangelo, 'Urban Society in Late Imperial Suzhou," in Linda Cooke Johnson, ed., Cities of Jiangnan, New York, forthcoming. 11 Ming Qing Suzhou gongshangye beike ji (Collected steles on industry and commerce in Ming and Qing Suzhou), Nanjing, 1981, pp .13-15. 49 Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:55:00PM via free access William T. Rows

(jihu) and extra-local buyers (shangke), especially guaranteeing to the former full and 'proper payment for their merchandise, and to the latter goods of reliably standard quality. Their obligation was to "serve the public interest" (chenggong), thus benefitting equally all parties to the trade. To police the activities of individual brokers their guild had been formed, censing prospective applicants. In recent years, however, decadent trends had set in within the brokers' ranks, a problem signalled by the rising incidence of lawsuits against guild members. What was at issue appears to have been a near classic case of early capitalist enterprise disrupting the fragile balance which had guaranteed the wide and "fair" distribution of profits within the trade. Certain highly capitalized brokers had begun to invest in production, contracting with selected workshops or setting up shops of their own to mass-produce goods - reputedly of sub-standard quality- which they marketed at bargain . The remaining workshops and brokers were clearly suffering from this competition, as well as from the depressive effect on market prices. The Guild stressed in its account the incidence of coercion and fraud on the part of the broker-capitalists, but whil~ an element of this may well have been present, it is clear that certain producers and buyers, at least, were all too happy to reap the fruits of this new form of enterprise. The regulations by which the Guild proposed to remedy the situation offer a fuller picture of the background and activities of these maverick capitalists. Some apparently came form outside the trade; the Guild laments that many prosperous Suzbou brokers have recently been diversifying their lines of business, and seeks to tighten restrictions on brokers handling types of merchandise for which they have not been officially licensed. In other cases, licenses are falling into undesirable hands. The Guild accordingly stipulates that licenses of deceased brokers, while they may be inherited by direct heirs, may not be sold on the market by the deceased's estate. Similarly, licenses of bankrupt brokers will not pass on 10 creditors, but instead be taken in' receivership by the Guild itself, which, subject to administration approval, will sell them to qualified parties. Those who have forfeited their licenses in this way will be forever barred from reentering the trade. A further avenue of unwonted expansion seems to have been pooling of capital among small groups of member brokers; the Guild forbids collusion of any member with another or with his kinsmen, implying in the process that marriage alliances have bveen instrumental in the formation of entrepreneurial . The Guild reiterates its existing prohibitions on sale of goods of sub-standard quality, and on sales below "publically determined" prices. Finally, secret procurement agreements between workshops and brokers or (again) their kinsmen are forbidden'. The entire code is given the force oflaw by the fact of its inscription in stone, under the signature of the county magistrate. The source provides no direct information on the success or failure of this guild initiative, but a safe conclusion is that a full-fledged capitalist mode of production did not eventuate in the Suzbou silk trade at any time to the advent of steam-powered industry in the late nineteenth century. 12

The Paint Supplies Guild of Beijing

Beijing's Paint Supplies Guild (Yanliao huiguan) was an association of wholesale

12 See Lillian Li, China's Silk Trade: TradirionallndusllY in Ihe Modem World, Cambridge Mass. , 1981 . 50 Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:55:00PM via free access Ming-Qing Guilds importers of pigments and oil bases for paints, serving the local industry in a city abounding in highly ornamented wooden palaces, temples, and shops. The several varieties of oils and varnishes it purveyed were all drawn from the Yangzi valley, but until the twentieth century the Guild was exclusively comprised of merchants from neither the production area nor Beijing itself, but rather from northwestern Shanxi province. It was one of the capital's oldest guilds, probably antedating the Manchu conquest. A large-scale reconstruction of its facilities was accomplished in 1668, following the Qing restoration of political stability. 13 Though its complex was imposing, the Guild owned no other collective property in the city, neither for its own use nor for generation of endowment income. It derived its maintenance and operating funds solely from member contributions and an assessed commission on transactions in the trade. Although as its title "huiguan" generally implies it served a specific sojourner community, it provided none of the routine services (such as provision of coffins and operation of a cemetary) usual for such groups. Its functions, rather, were strictly commercial. Beyond propitiation of the trade's patrpn deities, it convened regular plenary meetings on the first of each month to discuss matters of concern to the trade. 14 For more than three centuries the organization succeeded in keeping Beijing's paint base business exclusively in the hands of Shanxi men, but it was apparently less successful in avoiding conflicts among its members themselves. One major source of contention was the growing differential in profits between the trade in tung oil and that in competitor products, as over the course of time the superior drying and waterproofing qualities of tung ever more strongly recommended it to consumers. 15 . Evidence of this schism is provided in a stele of 1753, which announces the formation within the huiguan of a sub-guild comprised exclusively of professional tung oil dealersrI6 The dealers note that over the course of their long history in Beijing there has never been need for any such specialized organ, nor for brokers to manage the local market in tung and regulate prices. Instead, the dealers had been accustomed to sending their own purchasing agents into the production areas, shipping the goods to Beijing, and marketing it directly themselves. Although this was «inconvenient», it brought the happy reward Of higher profits. «Suddenly, however, along came someone brandishing a government license (tie), and demanded a cut from us as as brokerage fee (yayong).,. The tung oil dealers, who fortuitously numbered among themselves a haridful of purchased civil-service degree holders, were equal to the challenge. They prevailed upon an unnamed high metropolitan official to issue an prohibiting such incursions into the trade, and formally organi.zed their to perform any necessary brokerage functions in the name of the collectivity itself. Though the immediate stimulus to group-formation here was the familiar one of broker vs. dealer conflict, it seems likely that an underlying tension was that between specialized tung oil dealers and other huiguan members who sought to move into this increasingly lucrative line of business. (The unnamed interloping broker may well

13 Niida Noboru, ed., Pekin kOsho girudo shiryo shu (Collected materials on industry and commerce in Beijing), 2. Tokyo, 1976, pp.307-308. My sources for this section are all drawn from Niida, but many of them appear as well in Li Hua, Ming Qing yilai Beijing gongshang huiguan beike xuanbian (Collected steles on handicraft and commercial guilds in Beijing since the Ming and Qing), Beijing, 1980. 14 Niida, Pekin, pp.336-39. 15 See William T. Rowe, "Tung Oil in Central China: The rise and Fall of a Regional Export Staple," in Lee and Liu, China's Market Economy, pp.355-84. 16 Niida, Pekin, pp.3I6-I7. 51 Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:55:00PM via free access William T. Rowe

have been one such person.) The tung oil dealers responded by more fully professionalizing their operations, setting up a formalized institution for regulating participation in the trade in their specialty, and putting this on the official record by inscribing a stele to this effect. The problem, however, did not go away. Early nineteenth-century documents report that the profits of all Paint Supplies Guild members «other than the tung oil dealers» have been declining significantly, and by the 1940s the Guild as a whole dealt in tung oil alone. It is not recorded how this process worked itself out, although it would be fascinating to know. The Paint Supplies Guild aggressively responded to the early nineteenth-century depression in the trade. In 1828 it announced for the first time a policy of collectively setting prices for each line of product sold by guild members. Standard units for sale were proclaimed, along with standard media of payment. The actual price per unit measure of each commodity would vary over time (jiami buqi), but would be set by the guild at each monthly meeting, based on a comprehensive assessment of market conditions. For any given month, however, the price would be constant and uniform within all members' shops.I7 The Guild defended this step by noting that, in an adverse market, «The only way for there to be profits is for all shops in the trade to cooperate and work together, and have no variance in price;»I8 This policy apparently fell within the government's guidelines on restraint of trade (that is, it was not "bachi"), since prices were not fixed without regard for market conditions; the principle of respect for temporal variation - known as shijia, or "timely price"- continued to be observed. It was an ideal means of maximizing the profits of the trade as a 'whole, by eliminating internal competition yet allowing prices to drop when demand fell, and raising them when demand picked up. Thus, according to Qing economic logic, it maximized rather than impeded the flow of goods. But it did not solve the Guild's problems altogether. The two steles of 1828 and 1835 are very dark in their narrative tone. While it was customary throughout Chinese society to introduce any new regulatory measure by contrasting an idealized golden age of antiquity with the decadent conditions of the present, these texts are unusually pessimistic in their acknowledgement of the inevitability of such decay and the certainty that in the future things can only get worse. Demand was clearly contracting over the long term (undoubtedly in part the result of the increasing impoverishmenr of the central government, whose building programs must have constituted a very large share of the Guild's market.) And the reality of individual member firms breaking ranks would not go away. The Beijing Paint Supplies Guild was typical of late imperial practice in being only semi-exclusionist in its membership criteria. In Qing it restricted its membership to Shanxi men, but satisfied the conditions of the government's antitrust policy (its concern for protection of individual livelihoods, minsheng) by allowing any Shanxi native arriving at Beijing to enter the trade -so long as he joined the Guild and abided by its regulations. In 1828 it was just such new arrivals who were accused of endangering the trade by undercutting prices. The Guild responded not only by establishing formal price setting mechanisms, but also by imposing formidable fees for entering the Guild. The fee would be decided by Guild leadership on a case-by-case basis, but would never be lower than 30 taels. As the market continued to worsen in 1835, the Guild noted that the problem of discount pricing was now pervasive among the the membership as a whole (one again wonders to what extent the differential profitability of tung played a role in this), and

17 Ibid., pp.323-24. 18 Ibid., pp .326-27. 52 Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:55:00PM via free access MinfrQing Guilds responded by reiterating its right to set trade-wide prices. Yet at the same time it was forced to concede special circumstances under which discounts might be offered. Yet the Guild and the trade it represented did survive. Even as it was struggling to maintain its hold, in 1838, the Guild undertook a major SUbscription drive and complete renovation of its facilities. 19 Though the immediate stimulus for this action was said to be the theft of ritual paraphenalia from the guildhall premises by an unscrupulous caretaker, clearly a more basic concern was the need for a show of bravado and a renewed physical symbol of in the face of an adverse market and divisive behavior within the membership.

Guilds of Foshan

One of Qing China's most industrialized localities, Foshan (outside· of Guangzbou) was an important cotton-weaving city and the empire's major center of ironware manufacture. It hosted at least a score of guilds, roughly half identified by common trade and half by local origin, some from nearby counties and some of extra-provincial buyers. 20 Many of these were first formally organized in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, an era of rapid growth in the local economy and, apparently, greatly heightened commercial competition.21 The following three cases are representative. The Vase Dealers Guild (Huapen hang) was formed in 1741, to unite two smaller informal guilds operating in different sections of town. The merribers were owners of workshops which produced flower pots and vases for an empire-wide market. The reason for organization at this time was straightforwardly identified as price-setting. The Guild promulgated a detailed standard price schedule for more than 600 distinct lines of merchandise, stipulating payment in high-purity silver, and declaring that «no' discounts will be offered nor substitute forms of payment accepted ... 22 Some nine years later the Iron Smelters Guild (Chaotiehang huiguan) came into being. This was a highly inclusive group of dealers in ironware of all kinds: military weapons, kitchenware, agricultural tools, etc. Like the vase dealers, they were a guild of small-scale manufacturers who produced their wares for sale to outside merchants, who in. turn marketed them empire-wide. Although the precise range of issues which prompted formal organization at this time is not recorded, the guild clearly implied that a major incentive was the effort to confront their extra-provincial buyers, who were already highly organized, on a more equal footing. The iron smelters constructed a magnificent guildhall, «to provide permanent form to our collective activities.. , as well as to signal to trading partners their own substantial wealth and capacity for solidarity, when called

19 Ibid., pp.327-28. 20 Ming Qing Foshan beike wemian jingji ziliao (Steles and documents on the economy of Ming-Qing Foshan), Guangzhou, 1987, pp.330-31. 21 See David Faure, "What Made Foshan a Town?," Lale Imperial China, 11.2 (1990), pp. I-31; Peng Zeyi, "Yapian zhanzheng qian Guangzhou xinxing de qingfang gongye" (The emerging textile industry of Guangzhou before the Opium War), Lishi yanjiu, 198i3, pp.l09-30. 22 Foshan beike, pp.47-72. S3 Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:55:00PM via free access William T. Rowe for. 23 In 1767 the Foshan Apothecaries Guild (Canyao hang) was founded. The members all hailed from Nanhai county, in the Canton delta, and dealt in various mixtures of medicinal herbs. The founding document notes that while apothecary shops are found all over town, there is a center of the trade in Salted Bean Lane, where some two dozen shops are clustered. The issue behind the guild founding was clearly internal competition, but the text conveys several simultaneous messages about how this competition is seen. The most explicit is that competition is good. Unlike the products of other ' guilds, those of the Foshan apothecaries are not designed to be perfect mutual substitutes. Rather, each is a blend of substances distinctively offered by that shop. It is precisely this competitive striving for better remedies, we are told, which has made their products so efficacious in securing long lives for their customers. But the subtext tells a different story. Collective prosperity hinges on quality control, and yet cheaper products have increasingly come to be offered by some members eager to improve their market share. The guild thus is formally organized, and an imposing guildhall constructed, to ensure conformity to established standards of quality, and pricing policies.24

The Embroiderers Guilds of Chongqing

Like the vasemakers of Foshan, who also produced a luxury item for the national market, the embroiderers of Sichuan's major Yangzi port were originally loosely formed into two groups.2S However, whereas the Foshan vasemakers were driven by struggles vis a vis their customers to create a common formal guild structure, the Chongqing embroiderers found mutual competition a sstronger incentive to organization than solidarity versus those outside the trade. One group, which styled itself the Yongsheng bang, had enjoyed a sufficiently formalized existence to have its own regulatory code since the mid-eighteenth century. In 1842 the Guild revised and republished these rules, principally to defend itself against perceived encroachment by its competitor, the Three Emperors Guild; the first two regulations of the revised code stipulated that no Yongsheng member might simultaneously join, or accept contract work from a member of, the Three Emperors Guild.26 Seven years later the latter group itself, having had no previous formal existence (it was identified by the Yongsheng people as a "society," or hui, rather thana "guild," or bang) responded to the Yongsheng challenge by issuing a regulatory code of its own. 27 Apart from the fact that the more established Yongsheng Guild supported an imposing array of philanthropic activities -a free cemetery, a school, an orphanage, and a medical clinic- and made provisions to underwrite their operation, the two sets of regulations are so similar as to suggest conscious imitation. Both guilds identified

23 Ibid., pp. 75-76. 24 Ibid., pp.78-81 25 The standard aulhority on Chongqing guilds in general is Dou Jiliang, Tongxiang zizhi ;.hi yanjiu (A study oflocal origin organizations), Chongqing, 1943. 26 Qingdai Qian-Jia-Dao Baxian dangan xuanbian (Selected materials fonn Ihe Baxian archives from Ihe Qianlong, Jiaqing, and Daoguang reigns of Ihe Qing) , Chengdu; 1989, pp.234-35. I wish to Ihank Judilh Wfman for providing me wilh a copy of Ihis documentary collection. 2 Baxian dangan, pp.235-36.

54 Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:55:00PM via free access Ming-Qing Guilds themselves as organizations of both shopowners (laoban) and master and artisans (shiyu), and it seems probable that a major purpose of organization itself was to ameliorate tension between these two sets of parties. There is no indication that they were unsuccessful in doing so. Indeed, the major thrust of both sets of regulations is not in the direction of harmonizing labor relations within the trade, but rather in combatting a more serious threat: the rise of large-scale capitalist enterprises within the trade -a phenomenon that both workshop owners and master artisans had reason to fear. To this end the scale of individual enterprises is held down by the imposi.ion of a substantial fee on new shop openings, and by the prohibition against one shopowner taking over a failed colleague's shop. The size of each shop's workforce is limited by a variety of labor laws. Non-guild masters and journeymen may be hired on upon payment of a fee to the Guild, but for specified terms and in limited numbers only. These "guest" employees are forbidden from secretly investing in members' shops. A minimum wage is established for hiring of unskilled day laborers. Strict provisions are set up to prevent the debasement of the system into a disguised form of servile hired labor. A limit of two per year is put on the number of apprentices a shop can contract; non-guild masters in guild shops' employ cannot take on apprentices of their own. Apprentices are to be enrolled as Guild members (at their master's expense). They are to serve for a fixed term, after completion of which they are entitled to be certified as masters, upon payment of a fee. Apprentices of Guild members may not be lent out to work for non-Guild members. Shops of the Guild are furthermore forbidden to engage in competitive price cutting. All of these restrictions are familiar from guilds of different trades and in different cities, but there is one further feature of the Three Emperors Guild code which I have never before encountered. That is, the Guild was exclusively an organization of male embroiderers, and energetically sought to distance itself from female workers in the trade. The Guild strove to establish its own lines of production (embroidered curtains and screens) as a. professional specialty which lay in the domain of men's work, as distinguished from the more usual sorts of embroidery such as that on female apparel, which it conceded to be "women's work" (nugong). The prohibition on guild members crossing this line and producing such work on the side was so strong that violation would be punished by expulsion. This was felt to be necessary clearly because of the greater fear that female workers might encroach on the lines of production which the Guild had staked out for itself. The code stipulated that:

Male artisans produce men's work. Female artIsans produce women's work. It is prohibited for a female to do half the work on a job, then turn it over to a male to complete and sell as his own product.

What is underway appears to be some process whereby shopowners utilizing cheaper female labor to substitute for males in the preliminary work of embroidery, thereby producing in greater quantity and at greater cost-efficiency, had come to pose a serious threat to their fellow male artisans. However, despite some obvious similarities, we cannot too readily make the association between this and the well-known experience of early modern Europe, in which emergent capitalists used semi-skilled female labor as a wedge to debase the artisanate and establish the wage-Iabor factory system. As Susan Mann has shown in her studies of the Yangzi delta, while embroidery was "women's work" par excellence in Qing China, it was woman's work of a particular kind, highly skilled, associated with upper class women of leisure (quite different from the more

55 Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:55:00PM via free access William T. ROW8

mundane spinning and weaving), and seldom commercialized.28 Who then were these women who posed such a threat to Chongqing's male embroiderers in the 1840s? Recalling the anxious 1842 prohibition of the Yongsheng Guild on its members secretly doing piecework for shops of the rival Three Emperors Guild, the suggestion arises that perhaps it was the male embroiderers who were guilty of encroachment. Could it be true that the Yongsheng Guild was itself highly female (unlike its competitor it did not stipulate the gender of its constituents), and that it was its members who were working on the side to subcontract on jobs of their latecomer male rivals? If so, this would force us to rethink much of our picture of guilds and of gender roles in the early nineteenth century.

The Ningho Guild at Shanghai

Shanghai was likely the most ethnically cosmopolitan city in late Qing China. Following its official opening to Western trade in 1842 its population (already quite large) grew exponentially, as the city attracted compatriot groups of merchants and laoorers from all parts of the empire. One of the most numerous of these was a group from nearby Ningbo, which included among its diverse array of occupations the city's most powerful native commercial force, the Ningbo bankers. The Ningbo Guild at Shanghai is one of the best documented, and accordingly most studied commercial groups in Qing China. 29 Here I want to concentrate merely on one rather late, and less commonly noted, aspect of its organizational history. Largely due to the size and rapid-expansion of its membership, the Ningbo Guild gradually came to evolve one of the most complex internal structures of any guild in Chinese history, growing both by processes of segmentation and amalgamation. Its existance was first formally documented in 1797, when a group of Ningbo businessmen apparently broke off from the older Zheshao Guild and took up a subscription to purchase a common cemetery plot north of the city. Six years later they took up another collection to erect a temple to their local patron deity, Guandi, at that time assuming the formal organizational name Siming gongsuo (Ningbo Guild).30 They continued steadily to acquire new members and new corporate assets throughout the remainder of the dynasty. Beginning in the 1860s, in the era of reconstruction of the region from the devastations of the Taiping campaigns and the simultaneous emergence of Shanghai as the center of China's foreign trade, the Guild began to spawn a large number of component groups known as hui (associations) or, less frequently, tang (lodges). The principle of cohesiveness for these smaller groups was usually functional: collective celebration of a specific item on the festival calendar (such as the Spring Festival), propitiation of a spe• cific deity (such as Tianhou), or performance of a particular philanthropic activity like provision of coffins or collection and ritual burning of printed paper. In the later-founded hui (though apparently not in the earliest) this functional criterion was combined with one of common occupation, so that we see, for example, an association of Ningbo woodcarvers to provide free burial for its members, and one of Ningbo butchers to propi• tiate hungry ghosts.31 The defming feature of all hui, however, was that they were

28 Susan Mann, "Women's Work in the Ningbo Area," in Thomas Rawski 29 See for example Susan Mann lones, "The Ningpo Pang and Financial Power at Shanghai," in Mark Elvin and G. WiIliam Skinner, cds., The Chinese City Between Two Worlds, Stanford, 1974, pp.73-96; also work in progress by Linda Cooke Johnson. 30 Shanghai beilce ;ziliao xuanji (Selected steles and materials on Shanghai), Shanghai, 1980, pp.259-60. 31 1bid_, pp.384-86,403-404. 56 Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:55:00PM via free access Ming-Qihg Guilds property-holding collective trusts, whose membership was more restricted than that of the Guild as whole. Frequently they owned a separate chapel within the sprawling Ningbo guildhall compound, and ineviatbly they controlled an independent endowment, funded by member SUbscription and used to underwrite group activities. Holders of shares in this endowment (sometimes several hundred of them) were clearly recorded, along with the amount subscribed. Elected managers of each hui invested this for the group in various ways, but as Shanghai continued to boom in the 1870s and 80s, such investment was increasingly channeled into urban real estate. Individual hui holdings could be quite large -the Changsheng hui by 1896 owned sixteen large shophouse complexes, drawing a combined annual rent of 620,000 cash32_ and taken together the membership of the Ningbo Guild was very likely the largest corporate landholder in the city. As ostensibly charitable trusts, such holdings were registered with, and protected by, the relevant municipal authorities, be they Chinese, British, or French. 33 The organizational histories of the hui themselves were lively. There are several recorded instances of segmentation of individual hui into branches (zhu), each with its own headman, with the headmen as a group acting as trustees for hui accounts. There were also cases of merger of hui, as with the absorbtion of the Nenghui and the Dinghui by the Changsheng hui in 1869.34 On occasion, the membership of a hui might rise and turn out its managers for reasons of corruption or incompetence. as did the Changxing hui in 1894.35 The culmination of such patterns of flux was a remarkable wave of commendation of hui assets to the management of the parent Ningbo Guild. occuring in the final decade or so of Qing rule. A precedent for this later process was provided in 1886, when the Guild's most venerable hui, the Changsheng hui, turned over control of its endowment to the overall Guild managers. The deal involved a turnover of rental properties from hui to Guild, with the latter thereafter entitled to all rental income and resopnsible for all maintenance and repairs, in return for which a set fee would be paid annually from Guild to hui. The hui leadership would continue as before to manage expenditures of this income for its routine philanthropic and ceremonial activities, with the annual payment from the Guild supplemented by continuing subscriptions from hui members. The hui management was simply relieving itself of one set of responsibilities, while maintaining operational control over the group. 36 It was probably not all that earthshaking for the Changsheng hui to merge lllanagement of its investmentswith those of the Ningbo Guild, since in a sense the hui itself was effectively a surrogate for the Guild membership as a whole. The hui was defmed solely in functional terms (the provision of charitable services), its membership probably represented simply the most affluent constituents of the overall Guild, and its leadership must have coincided rather closely with that of the Guild itself. This was not the case, however, with the hui which commended their endowments to the Guild in the early twentieth century. In each case these represented special, occupationally-defined sub-groups within the larger Guild structure. The following table records those late-Qing bequests on which we have documentation (there were almost certainly others as well):

32 Ibid., pp.265-66. 33 For example, Ibid., pp.426-29. 34 Ibid .• p.262. 35 Ibid., p.385. 36 Ibid .• pp.263-66. 51 Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:55:00PM via free access William T. Rows

Table: Commendation of Assets by Hui to Ningbo. Guild, 1900-1911

Constituency Date of Hui Date of Value of Assets ofHui Founding Commendation Commended

Woodcarvers 1879 1900 Over 5000 yuan Butchers 1890 1900 British £.1000 Bamboo dealers 1892 1908 Steamship o.perato.rs c1895 1909 Carriage painters 1905 1909 Appliance dealers 1907 1910 British £. 3000

Source: Shanghai beike, pp.384-86,403-406,412,418-24.

In my reading o.f these documents o.f bequest, there seems to. have been deliberate ambiguity as to. whether fo.rmal titles o.f o.wnership as well as rights and duties o.f management were being co.mmended to. the Guild. There was clearly a stro.ng presumptio.n o.f Guild proprieto.rship, ho.wever. The woodcarvers' hui, fo.r example, stipulated that after payment o.f certain annual fees to themselves, any surplus inco.me derived from their endowment «will permanently revert to the Guild.,. And an addendum to this, dated 1914, seems to remove all do.ubt. Sho.rtly after assuming contro.l over the woodcarvers' hui endo.wment pro.perties in 1900, Guild managers had o.pted to. raze and rebuild these facilities, in the process mo.re than do.ubling their annual yield in rents; by mutual agreement of Guild and hui, the added inco.me was retained by the Guild to repay its Co.sts in rebuilding. Then, in 1913, the Public Wo.rks Bureau of the French Concession condemned a portio.n o.f this property in o.rder to widen the street on which it fronted, offering compensation of 4300 Chinese dollars. The leadership of the woodcarvers' hui formally reno.unced any claim on this payment, allo.wing it to revert fully to the Guild on condition that the same fixed annual fee be paid to the hui. The Guild was thus confirmed as having an entrepreneurial interest in all property it "managed," with the commending hui defined simply as passive recipients o.f a fixed annuity. 37 Why would hui members condone such a process of commendation, and why at this particular time? A wide range of facto.rs probably came into play. Inflatio.nary pressures in the local eco.nomy were sometimes cited in the documents themselves, pressures which threatened the predictability of members' private incomes, and hence their ability to. further contribute to hui programs. The quest for routinizatio.n of revenues thus recommended -the shift to. more passive patterns o.f investment. In a volatile

37 Ibid., p.386.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:55:00PM via free access Ming-Qing GUIlds marketplace, lingering doubts about their own leadership's financial acumen must also have made management by the professional bankers who headed the Ningbo Guild seem especially attractive. And there was the climate of political as well as economic uncertainty. Especially after 1905 (when the pace of commendation accelerated noticeably) the late Qing "New Policies· (xinzheng) -an eleventh-hour burst of governmental initiative on the part of the Manchu court- frequently entailed seizure of guild treasuries to finance expanded bureaucratic operations in areas such as education, public security, and urban services_ Placing their endowments in the hands of the powerful parent guild, and in the process having their ownership certified by _local officials who signed the documents of commendation, may well have seemed the most prudent response. But there was almost certainly an active as well as defensive set of reasons as well. Throughout urban 'China this was an era of rapid expansion, not only of the , but of extra-bureaucratic "public" activism in service activities, a movement in which Ningbo merchants at Shanghai participated. The venerable Changsheng hui, for example, in 1908 renamed itself the United Benevolent Association (Tongren hui) and officially redefined its functions to stress dispsnsation of relief food and medical care to indigent elements in the urban population as a whole, regardless of local origin.38 This drive was associated with the local autonomy (zizhi) movement, which in cities tended dramatically to promote the unit of the municipality as the locus and beneficiary of activist efforts. In Shanghai, 1905 marked the emergence of what Mark Elvin has termed the "gentry democracy," a pioneering effort at municipal self-governance formed out of the combined learderships of the city's major guilds and charitable societies.39 Throughout China this was an era of organizational synthesis at the municipality level, when virtues of capital accumulation, efficient management, structural bureaucratization, and most simply institutional size itself had a tremendous appeal to urban elites. 4O The expansive centralizing of the Ningbo Guild in the early twentieth century was fully in line with the mood of the times.

Conclusion

What emerges from this survey is, above all, a sense of the great diversity in functional rationales underlying late imperial Chinese guilds. Although recognized by contemporaries as belonging to a common, identifiable type of social organization, guilds in fact arose in a wide variety of historical circumstances and in cities of varying types, and served varying constituencies with vastly different needs. To all, guild formation seemed useful.

By comparison with guilds in Europe and elsewhere, those in China see~ to have been less exclusionist in orientation. None of the regulatory codes examined here (nor

38 Ibid., pp.268-73. 39 Mark Elvin, "The Gentry Democracy in Chinese Shanghai," in Jack Gray, ed., Modem China's Search for a Political Form, London, 1969, pp.41-65. 40 For examples from another city, see Rowe, Hankow: Commerce and Society, chap. 10, and Rowe, Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, Stanford, 1989, chaps. 3 and 9. 59 Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:55:00PM via free access William T. Rowe

any others I have seen) explicitly limit membership to a fixed group of persons. While criteria for membership were regularly drawn along dimensions of common local origin or common trade, the thrust of the rules is always to force all members of the target constituency into the guild, rather than to keep others (such as new .arrivals) out. Far more often than outsiders, it is guild members themselves who are seen as the threat, and the regulations are designed to ensure conformity and solidarity. The regulatory codes thus functioned essentially as covenants, or multi-party contracts, and were accepted by the administration as enforceable as such. We have seen several cases here to argue that the view of guilds as largely designed to forestall the rise of capitalist- enterprise and labor relations has considerable merit, although Peng Zeyi's ascription of this phenomenon to the era of Western imperialism seems unnecessarily limiting, and, in any case, this was but one of many rationales for guild formation. Enhancement of the market position of one group of participants, provision of ritual and welfare services to members, and, eventually, service to the wider urban community also figured in the logic of guild organization. Not only were the functions of Chinese guilds various and situational, they were also highly flexible. Perhaps the most striking observation to be gleaned from the cases presented here, one amply reinforced by countless other known examples, is the ease with which organizational structures erected to serve one set of circumstances and meet one set of needs could without much difficulty be adapted to meet entirely different sets of needs, as situations changed. Strictly functionalist explanations can thus take us only so far. Organization was largely a goal in and of itself.. One senses that this was almost consciously recognized by the actors themselves, as seen in such bland but morally-laden defenses of their behavior as that by the Foshan smelters that, .. We believe organization generally to be a contributor to the common weal (yi he wei gong).,.41 Organizational permanence, as expressed for example in the competitively ostentatious they erected, was likewise an end in itself; functional rigidity was not. Organization for its own sake, as prophylactic against the ever-present threat of disorder, was part of the cultural genius of Confucian society, and Ming-Qing guilds were one of its most effective manifestations.

41.Foshan beike, p.75.

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