Preferred Citation: Goodman, Bryna. Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853-1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1995 1995. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft0m3nb066/ Native Place, City, and Nation Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853-1937 Bryna Goodman UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford © 1995 The Regents of the University of California for my parents Preferred Citation: Goodman, Bryna. Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853-1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1995 1995. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft0m3nb066/ for my parents Acknowledgments My greatest intellectual debt is to my advisors at Stanford University, Harold Kahn and Lyman Van Slyke, who guided me through a dissertation on this topic and whose careful readings and insightful criticisms challenged and inspired me over the course of many revisions. They created a rare atmosphere of intellectual collaboration at Stanford and set high standards for teaching, scholarship and integrity. I would also like to thank Carol Benedict, Prasenjit Duara, Joseph Esherick, Christian Henriot, Wendy Larson and two anonymous readers for the press, each of whom provided detailed, thoughtful and provocative readings of my full manuscript, substantially enriching its quality. Susan Mann helped guide my initial formulation of my topic and provided insightful suggestions at various points along the way. During a postdoctoral year at the University of California at Berkeley I benefited from the presence of Frederic Wakeman and Yeh Wen-hsin, who took time to read and comment on my work and who challenged me with the breadth of their own work on Shanghai and related topics. Cynthia Brokaw, Andrew Char, Paul Katz, William Rowe and Ernst Schwintzer each read portions of the manuscript and provided insightful comments and suggestions. I am grateful for the generosity of each of these readers, with whose help I have avoided some of the pitfalls of earlier versions. My initial research in China was greatly facilitated by my Fudan advisors, Professors Huang Meizhen and Yang Liqiang. They also opened their homes to me and introduced me to the special foods of their native ― xii ― places, in Fujian and Guangdong provinces. Zhang Jishun and Zhu Hong, of the Center for Research on Shanghai, together with Huang Meizhen, smoothed arrangements during a subsequent research trip in 1991, as did the staff of the Foreign Affairs Office at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. I would also like to thank the staffs of the Shanghai Municipal Archives, the Shanghai Municipal Library and the Shanghai Museum of History. Fan I-chun, Yao Ping and Zhao Xiaojian spent long hours helping me interpret elusive documents. Fu Po-shek, Hamashita Takeshi, Luo Suwen, Ted Huters and Jeff Wasserstrom alerted me to sources of which I had been unaware. Dorothy Ko kindly hosted me and helped to orient me during a research trip to Tokyo. Colleagues in the History Department of the University of Oregon provided encouragement and made me more vigilant in my choice of words. Tom Gold and the staff of the Center for Chinese Studies provided a stimulating environment for writing during my 1990-91 postdoctoral fellowship. I would like to thank the organizers of the 1988 International Symposium on Shanghai History, as well as the Center for Research on Shanghai, for two subsequent conference invitations which provided a forum for discussing my findings with colleagues in the People's Republic of China. The Committee on Scholarly Communication with the PRC (CSCPRC) and the University of Oregon provided funding to attend these conferences. I am also indebted to Christian Henriot and the staff of the Institut d'Asie Orientale in Lyon for their many kindnesses in hosting me during fall 1993 and providing a conducive intellectual climate for my final book revisions. My research in China was made possible through a CSCPRC grant, funded by the U.S. Department of Education. I would like also to acknowledge funding from the Oregon Humanities Council and a Reed College Vollum Award, both of which permitted me to spend time on research and writing. I am grateful to Sheila Levine at the University of California Press for her support and interest in the manuscript, to Laura Driussi for her patient editorial assistance and to Sarah K. Myers for her meticulous copyediting. My friends Jeff and Rosemarie Ostler provided much-needed help with my manuscript preparation at the last minute. Finally, I would like to thank my husband, Peter Edberg, for editorial and computer assistance and many other contributions which cannot all be detailed here. ― 1 ― Chapter One Introduction The Moral Excellence of Loving the Group Shanghai is a hybrid place which mixes together people from all over China. The numbers of outsiders surpass those of natives. Accordingly, people from each locality establish native-place associations [huiguan] to maintain their connections with each other. The Ningbo people are the most numerous, and they have established the Siming Gongsuo. The Guangdong people are second in number, and they have established the Guang-Zhao burial ground and the Chao-Hui Huiguan. In addition to these, the people from Hunan, Hubei, Quanzhou, Zhangzhou, Zhejiang, Shaoxing, Wuxi, Huizhou, Jiangning, Jinhua, Jiangsu, Jiangxi and other places have each established huiguan. As for people from localities which have not established huiguan, they have meetings of fellow-provincials every month. This is for the purpose of uniting native place sentiment.... Among the people of our country, there are none who do not love to combine in groups. Thus fellow- provincials all establish huiguan. And people of the same trade all establish gongsuo .... From this it is possible to know that Chinese people have the moral excellence of loving the group. —Li Weiqing, Shanghai xiangtuzhi (Shanghai local gazetteer), 1907 You remarked to me that the Chinese, being actuated by a common feeling, none of them would be willing to come forward [as witness against a fellow Chinese] .... You entirely ignore the circumstance that the Chinese people have never been influenced by any common feeling. Further, in the [street], people from every part of China are mixed together, owing to which, no one cares for the sorrows and ills of another [emphasis added]. —Daotai Wu Xu to British Consul (Great Britain, Public Record Office, FO 228.274, 1859) ― 2 ― This study explores social practices and rituals related to xxiangyi , also called xiangqing and ziyi , Chinese expressions for the sentiment that binds people from the same native place. This sentiment, and the social institutions which expressed it, profoundly shaped the nature and development of modern Chinese urban society. The two quotations which begin this chapter suggest twin aspects of urban social organization and behavior that correspond to native-place sentiment. The account in the 1907 Shanghai gazetteer describes organization by native place as a necessary, natural, specifically Chinese and indeed "morally excellent" response to the dangers posed by urban admixture and anomie. Daotai Intendment Wu XU's description of the city under his jurisdiction indicates a possible drawback to the "moral excellence" of native-place sentiment, suggesting that, when individuals from different native-place groups mixed together on a city street, they felt no common identity as Chinese.[1] The chapters which follow address these themes—the prominence of native-place sentiment and organization in Chinese cities and the influence of such ideas and social formations on city life, social order and urban and national identity. The study is based on Shanghai and covers nearly a century, from the opening of the city to foreign trade in 1843 to the establishment of Guomindang dominance in the Nanjing decade (1927-37). Throughout this period immigrant groups from other areas of China dominated Shanghai's rapidly expanding urban population, which more than quadrupled in the nineteenth century (see Map 1). Shanghai's population in 1800 was between one-quarter and one-third million. By 1910 it was 1.3 million. It doubled again by 1927, to 2.6 million. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, immigrants comprised at least 75 percent of the total figure. Some of these immigrants came to Shanghai to explore economic opportunities; others came in waves to flee war and famine in their native place. Combining forces to meet the imperatives of their new urban surroundings, these immigrants formed native-place associations, huiguan and tongxianghui . Such associations and the sentiments which engendered them were formative elements of Shanghai's urban environment [1] Daotai Wu's comment here is somewhat disingenuous, for he was attempting to deflect British concerns that the Chinese residents of the settlement could mobilize effectively together in anti-British behavior. In this instance, the Daotai clearly found it useful to suggest that the logic of local native-place identity impeded national identity as Chinese. ― 3 ― Map 1. Major provinces of China supplying immigrants to Shanghai throughout the late Qing and early Republican periods. Social, economic and political organization along lines of regional identity shaped the development of the city. Such prominence and continuity of native-place sentiment and organization was possible because of the flexibility, adaptability and utility