The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 12: Republican China, 1912-1949, Part 1
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THE TREATY-PORT MIXTURE 23
tans.
44
Presumably there was a comparable drive among Chinese merchants
in their search for success.
Either this drive for success or their speculative impulse, for which
they are famous, made Chinese merchants the chief actors in the treaty-
port trade. The early comprador-managers of the new Western trade came
from the mixed pidgin-English milieu of Canton-Macao. But the growth
of Shanghai was led by Chekiang merchant-bankers from Ningpo, the
southern anchor of the coast trade to Manchuria. Very soon after China's
final opening in 1860 the big firms like Jardine, Matheson and Company
found it needless to staff the smaller ports with the usual young Scotsmen
because their Cantonese or Ningpo compradors could handle the trade
just as well alone.
The growth of treaty-port trade in China brought with it the new
technology of transport and industry, a new knowledge of foreign nations,
and so a growth of nationalism. The pioneer geographies of missionaries
like Gutzlaff and Bridgman stimulated the production of the early geo-
graphies of Wei Yuan and Hsu Chi-yii, which in the 1840s anticipated
the translation programmes of the Kiangnan Arsenal and the Society
for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge (SDK) in later
decades. Christian reformers and journalists like Wang T'ao arose under
foreign influence in Hong Kong and the treaty ports to urge the cause of
Chinese nationalism. Sun Yat-sen came from near the earliest foreign port,
Macao, and was educated abroad in Honolulu and Hong Kong. That
most of his active life was lived outside China, although he was the chief
apostle of its modern nationalism, illustrates how China's Westernizers
generally were men of the coastal frontier.
The new ideas conveyed by such forerunners were neither all-foreign
nor all-Chinese in origin. Wei and Hsu showed proper statecraftsmen's
interest in Western technology. Wang and Sun were concerned about
popular participation in government. The twentieth-century Chinese
reformers' slogan 'Science and Democracy' had its nineteenth-century
antecedents both in China and abroad.
China's maritime connections thus not only served as the channels
of the Western invasion, they also drew a new Chinese leadership into
the new port cities like Shanghai, Tientsin, Kiukiang and Hankow. As
more and more students went to Japan and the West to study how to save
their homeland, they were drawn away from the rural scene with which
44 In finding a Confucian ethic similar to the Protestant ethic, Thomas A. Metzger even sug-
gests 'China's transformative vision of modernization was itself rooted in tradition' - a
lively topic. See 'Review symposium' on Thomas A. Metzger's
Escape
from
predicament:
Neo-Confucianism
and
China's evolving
political
culture,
in JAS, 39.2 (Feb. 1980) 235-90. See
282.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
24 INTRODUCTION: MARITIME AND CONTINENTAL
China's gentry ruling class had ordinarily retained contact. China's new
modernizers generally lost their agricultural roots. In the end many were
deracinated. The young revolutionaries of the Kuomintang generation
from 1895 onwards were typically urban products less acquainted with
the peasant villages. In their effort to save China by Westernization
they mastered many aspects of Western learning and technology but
often found themselves out of touch with the Chinese common people.
But their demands for constitutional government, for railway building
under Chinese control, for the recovery of sovereign rights impaired by
the unequal treaties, all contributed to the extinction both of the Manchu
dynasty and of the monarchy of the Son of Heaven. All these nationalistic
demands showed foreign influence.
The first phase of the Chinese revolution in this way represented both
Chinese and foreign influences conveyed largely through the medium
of Maritime China. The treaty ports reinforced and gave scope to the
Chinese tradition of overseas trade free of bureaucratic control abroad.
This minor tradition of maritime enterprise and economic growth, most
evident to foreigners originally at Singapore and Canton and also in the
opium and coolie trades, contributed to the hybrid society of the treaty
ports and nurtured the Westernization movement as well as the early
Chinese Christian church. It fostered individualism and an interest in
scientific technology at the same time that it aroused patriotism and pride
of culture.
We cannot yet describe in detail the 'maritime' impact on Chinese
business organization and practice. But certain broad effects are already
apparent. Because the Chinese patriots who sprang from this background
were seldom rooted in the villages, their new nationalism concentrated
its hopes upon the Chinese state-and-culture as a whole, 'China' as against
the outside nations. The mechanical devices of industry and the political
institutions of constitutional democracy both seemed at first to be essen-
tial importations for the salvation of 'China'. This first generation after
1900 had little concept of or desire for basic social revolution. Sufficient
unto the day was the problem of creating a unified Chinese nation-state
and its necessary economic base.
For this purpose of national salvation China's central tradition of
course had much to offer. The aim of nation-building could be subsumed
under the ancient Legalist slogan 'enrich the state, strengthen the military'
(fu-kuo
ch'iang-ping),
as had been done in Japan. Projects for this purpose
appeared as new applications of the Ming and Ch'ing administrators'
art of statecraft, which extolled learning 'of practical use in the adminis-
tration of society'
(ching-shih
chihyung).
In practice this often involved in
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THE TREATY-PORT MIXTURE 25
time-honoured fashion the management and manipulation of the populace.
Popular training under firm safeguards was foreseen as a necessary
prerequisite for modern self-government. By some this was given the
name 'tutelage'. Thus China's bureaucratic tradition seemed to offer
help in the pursuit of the Western goal of popular participation.
Emerging from this background, the Revolution of 1911 shares the
ambivalence of the treaty-port era as a whole. In form it is more an end
than a beginning. To some degree it is the petering out of a dynasty,
although to some degree it is a triumph of nationalism and other influences
coming by sea to the port cities of China's littoral along the coast and up
the Yangtze. Revolutionary organizing is chiefly by returned students
from Japan. Financing comes from Overseas Chinese communities.
Ideas like constitutionalism and the Three People's Principles of Dr
Sun come from the liberal West. Yet those who attain power in the pro-
vincial assemblies of 1911 are not the revolutionaries but the new mer-
chant gentry, while military men become governors. They all believe in
the economic and military development visible in Japan and the industri-
alizing Western nations, but violent revolution is not what they desire.
The business class that emerges is similarly ambivalent. Modern-
style Chinese banks become active auxiliaries of government finance,
buying bond issues at large discounts and creating a new class of financiers
who hover on the borderline between simple, bureaucratic capitalism and
actual industrial enterprise. For a time in the 1920s, as our chapter 12
below indicates, the ideology of liberalism is as widely embraced among
Shanghai merchants as among Peking intellectuals.
From the 1890s we may discern several features of modern Chinese
life associated with or coloured by the maritime tradition: first, the pro-
priety and prestige of things foreign, including Christianity, then the
spreading sense of nationalism and of the struggle for survival among
nations. With this came ideas of progress and the vital role of science and
technology, concepts of individualism less bound by family ties and,
more vaguely, of political rights and constitutional government. Finally,
underlying all of these was the independent respectability of capitalist
enterprise and its need for legal safeguards.
The mere recital of such themes, which figure, prominently in this
volume, suggests the limitations of Maritime China vis-a-vis the problems
of the great heartland. Deep within China the issue was not simply to
develop and apply more broadly an urban way of life and institutions of
trade that had long been nurtured in China's old society and its foreign
contact. On the contrary, the issue among the peasant villages was one of
continuity versus disruption, how to remake the traditional order to take
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26 INTRODUCTION: MARITIME AND CONTINENTAL
account
of
modern technology, modern egalitarianism
and
political
participation. This
was an
issue,
as we now see, of
social transformation
and regeneration;
in the end, of
revolution.
But social revolution
was not
espoused
in
1911.
One
reason
was
still
the ingrained political passivity
of the
peasant masses
and
their lack
of
leadership. Another reason
was the
patriotic fear that prolonged disorder
would invite foreign intervention. Revolutionaries
of
all camps therefore
'accepted
the
compromise that stopped
the
revolution short
and
brought
Yuan Shih-k'ai
to
power.
The
determining factor
was the
foreign omni-
presence.'
4
'
Yet, being foreign,
the
foreign omnipresence remained superficial
to
the
vast mass
of
agrarian China.
The
traditional rural society kept
on
its
way in its own
style,
not yet
disrupted
by
urban-inspired changes.
The
new
leaders
of
Chinese nationalism
in the
1920s were
not
produced
directly from
it nor
concerned primarily with
its
problems. Peasant China,
in short, proved
to be a
further bourne, beyond
the
purview
and
capacity
of urban-centred
and
foreign-inspired revolutionaries.
We
leave
it
beyond
the scope
of
this introductory essay.
China's social revolution
was a
long time coming.
It
could
not
easily
find a foreign model. Insofar
as
China's peasant mass
was
uniquely large,
dense
and
imperturbable,
the
ingredients
of
social revolution
had to be
mobilized mainly from within
the old
society. This could
not be
done
quickly
but
only
in
proportion
as the
immemorial agrarian society
was
infiltrated
by
urban-maritime ideas (like that
of
material progress),
subjected
to
greater commercialism, upset
by new
values (like women's
equality)
and
shattered
by
warfare, rapine
and
destruction.
So
much
had
to
be
torn down
and
shown
up! Yet
even then
the
agrarian society could
never
be a
clean slate awaiting fresh writing.
The new
message
had to
use
old
terms
in
a fresh way and create its new order
out
of old ingredients.
Insofar
as
Maritime China
was a
channel
for
change,
it
started some-
thing
it
could
not
finish. The rebel tradition in the old agrarian-bureaucratic
China
had
been that
of
millenarian sects like
the
White Lotus Society
in
the north
and of
brotherhoods among places
of
trade like
the
Triad
Society
in the
south. This rebel tradition
had
been secret
and
fanatical,
too often
in the
negative guise
of
Boxerism, profoundly anti-intellectual
and likely
to
degenerate into local feuding.
46
What happens
in the
twen-
tieth century
to
revolutionize
the
major agrarian-bureaucratic tradition
45
Mary Clabaugh Wright, China in
revolution:
the
first phase
1900-191),
55.
46
For a
recent close look
at
Boxer phenomena see Mark Elvin, 'Mandarins and millennarians:
reflections
on the
Boxer uprising
of
1899-1900', journal
of
the
Anthropological
Society
of
Oxford,
10.3
(1979)
115-38.
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THE TREATY-PORT MIXTURE Zf
of the Chinese heartland is thus another universe of discourse and research.
It is even more complex and multi-faceted than China's minor maritime
tradition that we have just been sketching. We are just beginning to un-
derstand its structures of folk religion, familism and local economy.
In the present volume the next two chapters, on the Chinese economy
and the foreign presence, provide a framework for both volume 12 and
volume 13 by covering their subjects down into the late 1940s. The
following three chapters deal with President Yuan Shih-k'ai, the Peking
government and the warlords - mainly North China politics
—
to 1928.
Chapters 7, 8 and 9 then pursue developments in thought and in literature
from the 1890s to 1928, while chapters 10 and 11 concern the early com-
munist movement and the complex course of the Nationalist Revolution
in the tumultuous mid 1920s. The volume concludes with the checkered
career of the business class, mainly in Shanghai, into the 1930s.
Volume 13, in addition to the history of the Nationalist government,
the Japanese invasion, and the rise of the CCP, will consider certain aspects
of the early republic not dealt with here. These include the transformation
of the local order (whatever happened to the gentry class
?),
the nature of
the peasant movement, the growth of the modern scientific-academic
community, the vicissitudes of China's foreign relations centring around
the aggression of Japan, and the great Sino-Japanese and KMT-CCP
conflicts between 1937 and 1949. Even this further range of subject matter
may leave us hard put to trace the revolutionary processes at work in the
remnants of China's ancient rural society. Perhaps we can understand how
even the communist movement in China, though posited on a faith in
social revolution, found the secret of success only after 1928. In the con-
text outlined above, Mao Tse-tung's task thereafter was how to supplant
or 'modernize' China's continental tradition, the agrarian-bureaucratic
and local-commercial order of the heartland. In the effort he confronted
the heritage of Maritime China, the industrial technology and foreign
trade of port cities, though they no longer seemed a minor tradition.
Plainly, abstractions such as Maritime and Continental China have
fuzzy edges - they are suggestive rhetoric rather than analytic cutting
tools.
Yet they cast light on a major puzzle of China's twentieth-century
history - the shifting convergence-cum-conflict between the industrial
and the social revolutions. No doubt two traditions - one, the scientific-
technological development of material things, the other, a moral crusade
to change social class structure - are interwoven in most revolutions.
But the tortuous gyrations of politics in recent decades suggest that
modern China lies peculiarly on a fault line between deep-laid continental
and maritime traditions.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
CHAPTER 2
ECONOMIC TRENDS, 1912-49
INTRODUCTION:
AN
OVERVIEW
To survey the history of the Chinese economy from the end of the Manchu
dynasty
to
the establishment
of
the People's Republic is inevitably
to
tell
a tale
in a
minor key. The years prior
to
1949 saw
no
'take-off'
towards
sustained growth
of
aggregate output
and the
possibility
of
increased
individual welfare that might accompany
it. At
best,
the
great majority
of Chinese merely sustained and reproduced themselves
at
the subsistence
level
to
which,
the
callous might say, they had long since become accus-
tomed.
In
the bitter decade
of
war and civil war which began
in
the mid
1930s,
the
standard
of
life
for
many fell short even
of
that customary
level.
1
A cautious weighing
of
what little
is
definitely known suggests that
aggregate output grew only slowly during 1912-49, and that there was no
increase
in per
capita income.
Nor was
there
any
downward trend
in
average income. Although
a
small modern industrial
and
transport
sector, which first appeared
in the
late nineteenth century, continued
to
grow
at a
comparatively rapid rate,
its
impact was minimal before 1949.
The relative factor supplies
of
land, labour and capital remained basically
unaltered.
The
occupational distribution
of the
population
was
hardly
changed;
nor in
spite
of
some expansion
of the
urban population
was
the urban-rural ratio significantly disturbed during these four decades.
While some
new
products were introduced from abroad
and
from
domestic factories, quantitatively they were
a
mere dribble,
and
they
scarcely affected
the
quality
of
life. Institutions
for
the creation
of
credit
remained
few and
feeble;
the
organization
of a
unified national market
was never achieved. Foreign trade
was
relatively unimportant
to the
majority
of the
population. Throughout rural China
a
demographic
1
This chapter excludes
any
consideration
of
communist-controlled China which included
areas
inhabited
by
some
90
million people
in
1945 and operated
in
part with different eco-
nomic
assumptions.
See
Peter Schran, Guerrilla
economy:
the
development
of
the
Shensi-Kansu-
Ninghsia border
region,
19)7-194J.
28
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INTRODUCTION: AN OVERVIEW 29
pattern
of
high birth rates and high death rates persisted. Economic
hardship,
in
rural China in particular, was endemic, and probably grew
more critical after the outbreak
of
war in 1937. Yet in the absence of a
profound transformation
of
values
in a
significant portion
of
the elite
leadership
of
Chinese society, which led ultimately
to
the harnessing of
this distress to political ends not directly determined by the processes of
the economy
itself,
there is no good reason to believe that the economic
system would either have collapsed catastrophically or advanced rapidly
towards modern economic growth. As a system, China's economy which
was 'pre-modern' even in the mid twentieth century ceased to be viable
only after 1949
-
and then as a consequence of explicit political choice by
the victorious Communist Party and not primarily as
a
result
of
lethal
economic contradictions.
While the quantitative indicators do not show large changes during the
republican era, China
in
1949 was nevertheless different from China
in
1912.
The small industrial and transport sector and, perhaps even more,
the reservoir of technical skills and of experience with complex economic
organizations
-
the hundreds
of
thousands
of
workers, technicians and
managers who had themselves 'become modern'
-
provided
a
base upon
which the People's Republic could and did build.
As
a
crude first approximation, the Chinese economy prior
to
1949
may be described as consisting
of a
large agricultural (or rural) sector
encompassing approximately 75 per cent of the population and
a
much
smaller non-agricultural (or urban) sector with its principal base in the
semi-modern treaty-port cities. Rural China grew the agricultural pro-
ducts which constituted 65 per cent
of
national output, and also made
use
of
the handicrafts, petty trade and old-fashioned transport.
To the
urban sector was attached, with ties of varying strength, an agricultural
hinterland. It was located mainly along rivers and railways leading to the
ports,
and may
be
differentiated from the mass
of
rural China
by
the
greater degree
to
which
it
traded with the coastal and riverine cities of
the urban sector.
The agricultural sector was composed mainly of
60
to 70 million family
farms.
Perhaps one-half were owner-operated, one-quarter were farmed
by part-owners who rented varying portions of their land, and the remain-
ing quarter was cultivated by tenant farmers. These families lived in the
several hundred thousand villages that filled most of the landscape of the
arable parts of China. In the course of the first half of the twentieth cen-
tury the average size of these farms decreased as the growth of popula-
tion exceeded the increments
to
arable land. Only
a
few areas
in
rural
China (in the regions
of
dense population) lacked agglomerated settle-
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
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ECONOMIC TRENDS, 1912-49
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Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
INTRODUCTION: AN OVERVIEW 31
ments
-
parts of Szechwan, for example, where scattered farmsteads were
the norm. The typical landscape was dotted with clusters
of
houses
arranged along one or more streets that were surrounded by the village
fields. So closely spaced were the villages in the areas of densest settlement
that one was usually within sight of another. In response to local disorder
in the nineteenth century many villages, first
in
North China and then
also
in
the south, had erected protective walls
so
that the village was
defined
in
terms
of
the inhabitants living within
its
earthen
or
brick
ramparts. This definition proved compatible with
the
lineage system
insofar as many village populations shared the same or
a
small number
of different surnames. The boundaries between the fields of the residents
of one village and those owned
by its
closest neighbours were not,
however, so unambiguously distinguishable. In the course of time farm
land changed hands, and
it
was not unusual for the mortgagee (and pos-
sible eventual owner) of property in village A to be
a
resident of village
B,
or even of village X at some distance removed from A.
This indeterminacy
of
village boundaries began
to
change only
in
the latter part of the nineteenth century when increased tax demands by
hsien (county) governments made
it
essential that the villages be con-
cerned about the precise areas in which the new levies would be collected.
Even in the twentieth century, while more formal village organizations
were elaborated, the rural village was usually not
an
effective political
unit, certainly not for the purpose of organizing its human and material
resources
for
economic development. Indeed, the frequent inability
of
higher levels
of
government before 1949
to
penetrate into
the
basic
'natural' units
of
Chinese society except
to
collect taxes was one factor
perpetuating China's traditional economy into the middle
of
the twen-
tieth century.
Household and village were natural social units, not imposed by the
state as the revived
pao-chia
(registration and police) system (see volume
10,
page 29) was from the 1920s onwards; but the peasant's horizon was
not bounded by them. The normal limits of
social
interaction were not the
village boundaries, but rather the borders of a higher order community
composed
of
several
(a
dozen
or
more) villages and the market town
which served them.
A
high proportion
of
China's farm households
produced all
or
much
of
their own food, but grains, cash crops, local
agricultural specialties, as well as the products of household handicraft
-
perhaps 30 per cent by value of farm output
-
were regularly marketed.
The peasant sector in fact consisted
of
a large number of local market
areas,
each one roughly defined by
a
radius equal to the distance which
a peasant buyer or seller and his products might cover on foot in one day.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
32 ECONOMIC TRENDS, I912-49
The markets were normally periodic rather than continuous, occurring
every few days according to one
of
several scheduling systems that were
characteristic
of
different regions
in
China. Skinner, who refers
to
these
basic units as 'standard marketing areas' (SMA), has suggested that 'the
rural countryside
of
late traditional China can
be
viewed
as a
grid
of
approximately 70,000 hexagonal cells, each an economic system focused
on
a
standard market.'
2
The bulk of the trading in standard markets con-
sisted of a horizontal exchange of goods among peasants. To some extent
there was an upward flow out
of
the SMA
of
handicraft items and local
agricultural specialties; the principal outflow
of
staples, however, con-
sisted of tax grains to the government level of the economy. Increasingly
in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries the SMA was the ultimate
destination
of
new commodities either manufactured
in
the treaty ports
or imported from abroad.
To
the
limited extent that rural China began
to
produce staples
for
export, including technical crops for the treaty-port factories, these tended
to move in new commercial channels alternative to the traditional periodic
markets.
In
the agricultural hinterland
of
the east coast treaty ports,
in
particular,
a
modern town economy developed alongside the periodic-
marketing economy. But
in
the vast area
of
rural China the traditional
market structure was flourishing with few signs
of
decay right down
to
1949,
a
strong indication that
the
rural economy
had not
been
sub-
stantially transformed. The peasant household in the mid twentieth century
probably depended more
on
commodities not produced
by
itself or
by
its neighbours than was the case 50 years earlier. But, because there was
little real improvement
in
transportation
at
the local level, the primary
marketing area was not enlarged
so as to
bring about
a
radical replace-
ment
of
standard markets
by
modern commercial channels organized
around larger regional marketing complexes.
Non-agricultural,
or
'urban', does
not
necessarily imply 'modern'.
At the beginning
of
the nineteenth century perhaps
as
many
as
12 mil-
lion people,
3 to 4
per cent
of
the then 350 million Chinese, lived
in
cities with populations
of
30,000
or
more. With few exceptions, these
cities were primarily administrative centres
-
the national capital, Peking,
with nearly one million inhabitants, major provincial capitals, and
the
largest prefectural (Ju) cities. Some were simultaneously important centres
of inter-provincial and inter-regional commerce like Nanking, Soochow,
Hankow, Canton, Foochow, Hangchow, Chungking, Chengtu and Sian.
These cities were the loci of the highest officials of the empire, the major
2
G.
William Skinner, 'Marketing and social structure
in
rural China',
pt
I,
JAS,
26.1 (Nov.
1964) 3-44.
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