Ming-Qing Guilds
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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 Europe emerged in South Asia, China, and Japan,l each at a time 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 Industrial Revolution in Lynn, Cambridge Mass., 1976. 3 See for example Kato Shigeshi, "On the Hang, or the Associations of Merchants 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 City 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 merchant 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 price-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 "monopoly" 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 work 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 capitalism. 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 wage 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 competition, 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 welfare 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 cities 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 manufacturing had gradually been transformed from a government 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 profession had arisen out of the need to effect the link between local weaving workshops 8 Niida Noboru, 'Shindai Konan no girudo-machanto' (A guild- merchant in Qing Hunan), Toyoshi kenkyu, 21.3 (1962), pp.315-36.