Chinese Merchants

6 Key excerpts on "Chinese Merchants"

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  Ethnic Chinese Business In Asia: History, Culture And Business Enterprise

  History, Culture and Business Enterprise

  • Ching-hwang Yen(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • WSPC

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3

  Historical Roots of Ethnic Chinese Business

  Role and Status of Businessmen in Traditional Chinese Society

  Traditional role and status

  In this chapter, a modern term ‘businessmen’ would be used instead of ‘merchants’. This is not just because it assumes a modern meaning, but also it is a more appropriate translation of Chinese term, ‘shan-gren’. English word ‘merchant’ is derived from the word ‘merchandise’, and it denotes that the person is involved in goods bought and sold. It is narrow and confined to trading only. It excludes persons involved in mining, service and manufacturing industry. While the word ‘businessmen’ is a broader term which include all people who are involved in making a profit in private business of all kinds. The Chinese term ‘shangren’ is also a general term which denotes people involved in private business activities. In the context of Ethnic Chinese business, the term ‘shangren’ is also inclusive of all people involved in private business activities. For example, in the Chinese communities in Singapore and Malaysia, those involved in mining are called ‘kuangshang’ (mining businessmen), those involved in manufacturing are called ‘changshang’ (industrial businessmen), those who are involved in trading and manufacturing rubber products are called ‘shujiao shang’ (rubber businessmen), those who are involved in middlemen service are called ‘zhongjie shang’ (medium businessmen), the whole-sellers are called ‘pifa shang’, and import-exporters are called ‘churukou shang’.1 However, some old terms used by Western scholars such as ‘Salt Merchants’, ‘Hong Merchants’ or ‘Co-hong Merchants’ will be retained.

  Businessmen had low social status in traditional Chinese society. They were ranked lowest among the commoners who constituted the main bulk of the Chinese population. In traditional Chinese class structure, aristocrats and mandarins occupied the top layer of the social pyramid. Under them were the commoners, and the lowest of the hierarchy was occupied by those so-called degraded people. The commoners were sub-divided into Scholars (Shi), Peasants (Nong), Artisans (Gong) and Businessmen (Shang).2 The reasons for businessmen to be allocated lowest status among the commoners was connected with traditional economic philosophy and the Mandarins’ perception of businessmen’s role in an agrarian economy.3 Traditional Chinese economic philosophy was a reflection of the economic reality on which the traditional Chinese society was based. The society was basically an agrarian one in which agriculture was the main trunk of economy producing food to support the members of all classes. With a subsistent nature of producing goods and services to meet the local needs rather than for distant consumption, commerce was marginalized in the economic pursuits in the society. At the same time, businessmen were considered non-productive and parasitic, and were perceived not to have produced anything except moving goods around for profits. With the lack of understanding of the importance of commerce and with the traditional bias against it, the Chinese mandarins despised businessmen, and condemned them to a lower social status than peasants and artisans. In addition, businessmen’s determined quest for wealth contravened Confucian values and social practices. Their pursuit for profits forced them to leave home for distant places, and neglected their social obligations to family, clan and state.4

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  Chinese History and Culture

  Sixth Century B.C.E. to Seventeenth Century

  • Ying-shih Yü, Josephine Chiu-Duke, Michael Duke(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  11. Business Culture and Chinese Traditions

  Toward a Study of the Evolution of Merchant Culture in Chinese History

  A s indicated by the title, this chapter will relate “business culture” to “Chinese traditions.” To begin with, let me explain briefly what sort of things will be discussed. In the first place, business culture must be distinguished from business itself. The former may be understood as a way of life grown out of the ever-evolving business world that involves ideas, beliefs, values, ethical code, behavior patterns, etc. It is mainly to these cultural aspects, not the business world itself, that I shall address myself. In the second place, from the very beginning, business culture has been an integral part of Chinese culture as a whole and it must not be misconceived as an isolated phenomenon confined only to the business world. As a matter of fact, in the everyday world, business culture constantly interacts as well as intermingles with cultures arising from different realms of life. Special attention, therefore, will be called to the mutual influences between business culture on the one hand and Chinese political, intellectual, and religious traditions on the other. In the third place, I shall also give a brief account of the changing position of the merchant class, particularly vis-à-vis the intellectual elite over the centuries. Business culture is, after all, largely the creation of the merchant community. The relative importance (or unimportance) of business culture in any given period of Chinese history can be more precisely measured by the place of the merchant in the social scale.

  What follows is essentially a historical overview divided into three sections. The first section covers the ancient period to the unification in 221 B.C.E. , a period that witnessed the origins and development of the market as well as the first remarkable effervescence of Chinese business culture. The second section deals with the long imperial age down to the sixteenth century. It has been generally believed that during this long period, Chinese society was guided by the principle known as “emphasizing the importance of agriculture at the expense of commerce” (zhongnong qingshang 重 農 輕 商

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  Negotiating Friendships

  A Canton Merchant Between East and West in the Early 19th Century

  • Shuo Wang(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Oldenbourg

    (Publisher)

  According to various studies, the social position of Chinese Merchants did advance during the eighteenth century in multiple ways. However, this advancement must be understood in its context and keeping in mind the limitations that it came with. This section details the commercial development and the social position of merchants in late imperial China, primarily during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

  Due to the increasing importance of commerce, the role of merchants became important in economic sectors as well as in ideology and literature. According to the social hierarchy that existed at the time, which was based on the so-called “four categories of people (四民)”, Confucian literati including the bureaucrats (士) represented the highest social class, followed by peasants (农), craftsmen (工), and finally merchants (商) at the bottom. The reason for the low social position of merchants can be traced back to Confucianism, according to which the gentry was oriented towards justice, whereas a nasty person, such as a merchant, seeks profit.73 However, since the sixteenth century, some leading thinkers like Gu Xiancheng (顾宪成 1550–1612) had denied a separation of justice and profit (义利离), and preferred a unification of the two (义利合).74 Therefore, a positive image of merchants can be found in literature. During the Qing Dynasty, popular or vulgar literature (通俗文学), especially novels, reached their peak popularity in imperial China. In such popular literature, instead of having historical figures as protagonists, merchants became the most important characters in the stories.75 This reflected a fusion between high culture (中原文化) and popular culture, which also led to a fusion between the literati class and the merchant class.76

  Beside literature, there were various other factors that helped elevate the literati and merchant classes and contributed to the “social rise” of the merchants. The most crucial one was the “inter-exchange” between Confucian literati and the merchants. On the one hand, there was a popular slogan during the Qing Dynasty: “waiver of Confucianism, begin with commerce (弃儒就贾)”, which speaks of a pattern among many Confucian scholars, especially those who could not obtain a position in government, to become merchants.77

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  A History of Market Performance

  • R.J. Van der Spek, Jan Luiten van Zanden, Bas van Leeuwen, R. J. Van der Spek, Jan Luiten van Zanden, Bas van Leeuwen(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Many merchants purchased low level official titles or became officials of the state, and officials not only accepted but regularly solicited financial contributions from merchants for government projects. The value of rich merchants to the government was enhanced by their large monetary contributions to the central treasury. The Liang-huai salt merchants contributed more than 36 million taels of silver to the government between 1738 and 1804, not counting the 4.6 million taels spent on the Qianlong emperor’s southern tours and the numerous smaller contributions of salt officials (1 tael of silver is about 37 grams). Although the merchant guilds authorized to trade out of Canton contributed only 3.95 million taels between 1773 and 1832, the Wu family alone contributed at least 10 million taels in three generations. For their contributions merchants were awarded with official titles and ranks, some as high as that of financial commissioner (Ho 1964: 82). Information Information about prices, market conditions and travel routes were transmitted in several key ways. First, teahouses and lodges formed meeting points at which merchants, gentry and other members of the marketing community exchanged information, built up relationships, extended credit, coordinated actions and negotiated over deals (Skinner 1964: 37). Second, merchant networks were an important means by which geographically dispersed groups cooperated and shared information about conditions in distant markets. Such groups were well-coordinated internally, and their spread over China amounted to networks of ‘commercial intelligence’ sharing information on possible production and marketing opportunities. Merchant route books were practical manuals that laid out roads between market towns, giving distances that can be covered in a day, suggestions on where to stay overnight, as well as advice pertaining to commercial transactions (Brook 2002: 3)

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  Luxurious Networks

  Salt Merchants, Status, and Statecraft in Eighteenth-Century China

  • Yulian Wu(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Stanford University Press

    (Publisher)

  zitan wood furniture that was made in Yangzhou and was finally used by the Qianlong emperor in his palace records Huizhou salt merchants’ assistance to the salt administrator in satisfying the emperor’s fondness for Jiangnan-made objects. A sturdy stone arch that praised the moral behavior of a chaste widow from a salt merchant family constantly reminded local Huizhou commoners of the Confucian morality of female fidelity that the Qing state promoted highly. A contextualization of these objects allows us to “read” the specific political, cultural, and economic meanings embedded with them, thereby leading us to explore and understand the social environment in which these Huizhou salt merchants lived.

  RETHINKING THE PARADIGM OF STATUS NEGOTIATION

  Careful scrutiny of the interactions between merchants and objects enables us to uncover the motivations and agenda of eighteenth-century Huizhou salt merchants. A discovery of these dimensions forces a rethinking of the conventional understanding of merchants’ activities in late imperial China.

  The rise of merchants and their upward social mobility in the Ming and Qing dynasties have received extensive scholarly attention. Confucian ideology ranked merchants lowest in the “four strata of occupations” (scholar-officials, farmers, artisans, and merchants), because, according to that orthodoxy, merchants did not do honest labor but rather profit from the labor of others. Moreover, unlike the gentry, who received state-conferred degrees, merchants were not able to achieve a higher social status through academic achievement. Accordingly, merchants strove to negotiate their social status and move up the social ladder by using the examination system, clan organization, and print culture to their advantage. The social categories of merchant and scholar-official, in this context, began to blur.25

  Prevailing scholarship depicts merchants as a group eager to enter the scholar-official elite or literati (shi ). This portrayal explains one aspect of the crucial and sometimes fraught relationship between literati (shi ) and merchants (shang ). It is, however, mostly based on the written texts about merchants that literati produced. One of the most representative examples is the writing from the famous manual of connoisseurship titled Treatise on Superfluous Things (Zhangwu zhi ). This manual was edited by Wen Zhenheng (1585–1645), a famed late-Ming literatus who came from a well-known scholarly family in Suzhou. As Craig Clunas elegantly demonstrates, the Treatise on Superfluous Things is a book about the “assertion of the difference between people as consumers of things.” The editor of this book aimed to use consumptions of specific things to classify people in a “hierarchically structured” society.26 Wen Zhenheng’s close associate Shen Chunze confirmed this goal in his preface for the Treatise

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  Routledge Handbook of Southeast Asian History

  • Norman Owen, Norman G. Owen(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  ce . From the Ming dynasty onward, Chinese people from Fujian and Guangdong came and settled in various parts of Southeast Asia, including north Java, the Gulf of Siam, the Philippines, and the Malay Peninsula. While some arrived as political refugees or as pirates escaping from the Chinese authorities, most came to trade.

  During the early modern period, these traders mainly exchanged Chinese goods like ceramics, ironmongery, and silks for Southeast Asian commodities like spices, bird’s nests, and sandalwood. Although they initially traded at coastal ports, Chinese traders gradually went into the interior, doing peddling trade, as seen in their pepper and rice purchases in seventeenth-century Sumatra and Java. Those with more capital also introduced new milling technologies for the sugar, timber, and rice industries. Most Chinese were trading on their own account, but a handful of the biggest merchants also traded on behalf of the rulers as royal merchants, occasionally serving as envoys on tributary trade missions to China.

  From the seventeenth century onward, the Chinese also ventured into the production sector, including tin- and gold-mining in Bangka and west Borneo, and pepper and gambier cultivation in parts of the Indonesian archipelago and Indochinese peninsula. They also worked as artisans and craftsmen to service urban populations in port towns like Ayutthaya, Batavia, and Manila by the 1600s. These crafts included ship-making, coin minting, and distillery. In places with substantial Chinese populations, they also engaged in fishing, pigbreeding, and vegetable-farming.

  One characteristic of Chinese economic activities in the early modern period was that they traded mainly in goods for the China market. For instance, bird’s nests and sea cucumber were valued for their medicinal elements, whereas sandalwood and tin were used for Chinese religious rituals. As rice and sugar production in south China became insufficient for local consumption by the 1700s, traders also began to import them from Southeast Asia. The Chinese dealt in goods like salt and tobacco chiefly because they were useful in regional trade to exchange for commodities desired in China. They were also retailers of Indian cloth and European manufactured goods for the European importers. Chinese artisans and market gardeners mainly operated in port towns where there were substantial populations of Chinese.

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