CHAPTER IO Competition and Cooperation in Late Imperial China as Reflected in Native Place and Ethnicity JAMES H. COLE Crassic CONFUCIAN theory represents the linkages between the individual and the well-ordered polity as a seamless and inevitable pro- gression, a virtual Great Chain of Being. In the words of a famous passage from the Daxwe (The great learning), memorized by every schoolchild for centuries until at least 1905, “Thoughts being sincere, hearts are rectified. Hearts being rectified, persons are cultivated. Persons being cultivated, families are regulated. Families being regulated, states are rightly gov- erned, States being rightly governed, the whole kingdom is made tranquil and happy”? Reality, however, betrayed theory. During periods of turmoil, such as the first decades of the twentieth century, the operative metaphor for China’s polity was not so much a Great Chain of Being as, in Sun Yat-sen’s memorable phrase, “a sheet of loose sand.” Yet neither image accurately depicts the polity of the late imperial period (the Ming and Qing dynas- ties), during which the situation was neither as ideal as the Daxue wished nor as desperate as Sun Yat-sen feared. During the late imperial period re- lations between different levels of the sociopolitical hicrarchy exhibited, T have argued, a rather more interesting pattern whereby competition at each level was predicated upon cooperation at the level immediately below, and cooperation at each level was necessitated by competition at the level, immediately above. Thus, cooperation among individual family members was necessitated by competitive rivalries, including of course sibling rival ries, within the family (jia); cooperation within the family was necessi- tated by competitive rivalries among families within the lineage; coopera- 156Competition and Cooperation 187 tion within the lineage was necessitated by competitive rivalries among lineages; and cooperation among lineages was necessitated by competitive rivalries among locales (native places). At each other’s throats intramurally, within their native place, Chinese cooperated “abroad” as fellow natives, seeking their fortunes, careers, or simply survival, in alien locales. Each link in the sociopolitical chain exhibited a capacity for both the yin of co- operation and the yang of competition. The relationship between competition and cooperation was thus not one of antithesis but rather of symbiosis: neither could exist without the other. What more effective way to unify a lineage than against external foes, other lineages? What surer means of forging native place coopera- tion than by competing against other native places? Without competition, there was little motivation for cooperating. Without cooperation, there was little likelihood of competing successfully. This symbiosis of competition and cooperation comprised a survival strategy that was, I would further submit, fully as significant as the “preda- tory” and “protective” survival strategies that Elizabeth Perry has identi- fied among, respectively, the Nian rebels and Red Spear Society in nine- teenth- and early-twentieth-century Anhui. According to Perry, “peasants responded to crises . . . as participants in organized survival strategies that antedated and outlasted any particular crisis." The Nians, for example, survived by functioning as predators outside their home bases, whereas the Red Spears survived by functioning as protectors of their home locales. I would extend Perry’s analysis by identifying the predatory strategy with competition and the protective strategy with cooperation. Thus, what she sees as two completely different survival strategies (predation away from home, protection at home) I would consider to be two sides of the same survival strategy of symbiotic competition-and-cooperation. The strategy of predation away from home was considered normal, and was enacted by virtually all social strata: the merchant who overcharged his nonnative customers rather than those near and dear; the bandit who, by crossing administrative boundaries to victimize alien locales, avoided antagonizing local authorities and “prey[ing] on [his] own nest”;* and the magistrate (always serving—by statutory requirement—outside his native province) who pocketed his share of the “customary fees” squeezed by his underlings from his alien subjects, all exemplify this strategy. Given the desirability of finding a common bond with a stranger with whom one desired to interact on friendly terms, the extreme flexibility with which the content of native place particularism could be interpreted should come as no surprise. Abroad, “fellow natives” were expected to favor each other over aliens. The level of fellowship involved could vary, as the need158 JAMES H. COLE arose, all the way from the village (where, in the case of single-lineage vil- lages, the bond was tantamount to kinship), to the county, the prefecture, the province, and the region (for example, court cliques of “southern” ver- sus “northern” officials), Nor was it only at the level of “court politics” that factions and cliques are to be sought. Indeed, it would be a mistake to assume that local officials were merely representatives of the central government’s interests. Local officials of course maintained their native place ties even as they served in alien locales,’ and to the extent that they profiteered in office by exploiting their posts, they served the interests of their native places by exporting re- sources back home. Upon retirement, officials became gentry and switched, as it were, from offense to defense, attempting now to protect their native places from alien officials. The strategy of protective behavior at home was necessary to counter the predatory behavior of outsiders—two sides of the same coin. Thus, the keen competition for official position was not merely a com- petition among individuals, families, or even lineages: it was a competition among locales, in which underproduction of officials laid a region (typi- cally poor and peripheral) open to exploitation by the native sons of the more prosperous and productive core areas. During the late imperial period the institutional expression of the native place (tongxiang) tie was the huiguan, i.e. landsmannschaft or native place association.” Even the term gongsuo, which usually meant “merchant guild? could on occasion refer to a native place association; witness the famous Siming gongsuo of Ningbo natives living in Shanghai.* The phrase tongxianghui began to replace huiguan and its variants during the Repub- lican period.? Negishi Tadashi argues that this terminological evolution was accompanied by a substantive transformation from the “aristocratic” Auiguan, dominated by rich merchants and exclusivist vis-a-vis outsiders, to the more “democratic” tongxianghui, open to all fellow natives irre- spective of occupation and more open to cooperation with other associa- tions. Bryna Goodman’s research on Republican-period Shanghai supports Negishi’s thesis, with one qualification: “While tongxianghui were signifi- cantly more open and democratic than the more traditional buiguan, they still generally excluded poor members of the native-place community by requiring both letters of introduction from current members and yearly membership fees.”?° The first documented hujguan was established in Beijing as early as the Yongle period (1403-24) of the Ming as a club open only to central gov- ernment officials who were natives of Wuhu county, Anhui." The first sii- Juan open to merchants as well as officials was founded in Beijing in 1560Competition and Cooperation 159 (during the Jiajing period) by natives of Shexian in Huizhou prefecture, Anhui. Hujguan flourished in many parts of the country, first during the commercial boom of the late Ming and then even more during the Qing’s prosperous Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong periods (1662-1795). Their growth continued during the nineteenth century. Indeed, it has even been claimed that “more huiguan were founded from the Qianlong through the Guangxu reigns than at any other time in Chinese history outside the early 1920s and 1930s.”"¥ Beijing’s role as the imperial capital and site of the triennial jinshi civil service examinations, combined with its commercial significance, made it the premier locale for native place associations. By the late nineteenth cen- tury there were close to 400 huiguan in Beijing alone. The total for the entire country by the end of the Qing was 800.5 Huiguan activities fell into six broad categories: (1) economic, to advance and protect members’ commercial and financial interests; (2) political, administrative, and judi- cial, to lobby local officials, handle the self-policing bagjia organization of its members, and—often with the blessing of the local authorities— settle disputes among members without outside interference; (3) educa- tional and cultural, to provide residence facilities, and even financial aid, for fellow natives who were in town to take the civil service examinations, and a school for members’ children; (4) social and entertainment, includ- ing performances of hometown operas and banquets, presumably featur- ing hometown delicacies; (5) religious, to celebrate native-place deities and thus promote group solidarity; and (6) philanthropic, including buri- als both permanent and temporary—depending on the family’s financial ability to repatriate the remains; emergency relief aid for the native place; and, as William Rowe argues, such aid to the host community as fire fight- ing and municipal defense.1° In any given bujguan the mix of activities surely varied through time and space. One expects, for instance, that Beijing’s huiguan played a more prominent role as residences for examination candidates than did their opposite numbers in more purely commercial locales. Dou Jiliang hypothesizes that sujguan in a given locale developed through time from the spatially more to less inclusive as the outsider population of the locale grew: provincial-level buiguan were established first, then prefectural-level, then county-level, as a critical mass of potential members at each level of inclusivity was reached.!” Yet, on the other hand, Masui notes that the province-wide Anhui /uiguan in Beijing was estab- lished after prefectural- and county-level Auiguan.* Rowe attempts to rec- oncile such contradictory evidence by arguing that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, increased differentiation among /uiguan160 JAMES H. COLE was the norm, but that after the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century the trend was reversed, as lower-level /ujguan federated to form “large, multiplex buiguan” —part of what Rowe considers a general post- ‘Taiping tendency towards deparochialization.* Nor can we assume a uniformly simple correspondence of huiguan to administrative unit: Masui cites cases of one native place being represented by several (apparently competing) suiguan in a given locale—testimony, ‘one assumes, to factionalism within the emigré community—and con- versely, cases of several native places sharing a common huiguan in a given locale. Zhuang and Chen note individual /ujguan that represented all or part of several prefectures and even of several provinces.” This relatively common phenomenon of noncorrespondence between administrative unit and bujguan catchment area may be explained if such hujguan represented de facto marketing areas rather than de jure administrative units. It has also been noted that buiguan tended to represent natives of core, rather than peripheral, locales: the higher population density of cores led to a higher rate of emigration, and since cores tended to be wealthier than peripheries, their natives had greater resources to invest “abroad” in hui- guan? But perhaps the greatest unresolved point of dispute among schol- ars is whether before the twentieth century buiguan were, in the words of William Rowe, “a progressive force,” cooperating extensively with other associations within the host community and in effect promoting national cohesion2? or whether, on the contrary, their activities encouraged com- petitive native place particularism and parochialism.* Did, as Rowe argues for nineteenth-century Hankou, the multiplicity of ujguan in the locale result in a sense of “urban community” there, with “sojourning merchants identifying with local interests” and even developing a “sub-rosa municipal government apparatus”? On the macro level, did “the institution of hui- Juan . . . facilitate interregional economic and social integration”? ?° Or, on the contrary, was the bujquan, in Pierre Maybon’s words, “a camp in enemy territory. . . . The Chinese who lives outside his home district has the im- pression of being in a foreign country. The milieu is hostile to him, for he simultaneously disdains and fears what he doesn’t understand”??6 For the Ming-Qing period as a whole, this rather significant disagreement must be considered as yet unresolved, although at least for the pre-Taiping period the case for competitive particularism is still the conventional wisdom. What, we might well ask, prevented such native place rivalries from destroying the viability of an overarching polity? If mutual exploitation among locales was the order of the day, what held China together? At one level, the answer was ideology: the very concept of “China” itself. UnlikeCompetition and Cooperation 161 another subcontinent-sized country, India, which was merely a geographi- cal expression until its inhabitants became united by, and then against, British imperialism, Chinese have always considered a unified China to be the norm. Regionalism and Kieinstaaterei have always been viewed as aber- rations, even when the decentralization that they entailed proved highly conducive to economic development.’ A recent advertisement in the New York Times by the “Autonomous Government of Catalonia” reads in part: “Joan Miré was born 100 years ago in Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia, a country within Spain. With its own culture, language and identity.”?* If some future “Autonomous Government of Guangdong” were ever to run a similar advertisement, we would be put on notice that China’s classic view of itself had not merely been transformed but destroyed. When forced to choose between political unity and economic devel- opment, China’s rulers have usually opted for the former. The Chinese, for normative reasons, have preferred to emphasize the cooperative side of the symbiotic equation. Given a Confucian ideology which apotheosized a comprehensive unity (datong)—the ultimate in cooperation—as the socio- political ideal, it is hardly surprising that intermediate steps toward that goal such as tongzu (intralineage solidarity) and tongxiang (intra-native- place solidarity) were highly esteemed, while what remained unstated, let alone unglorified, was the disunifying competition that was always logi- cally implicit within such terms. One cultural attribute that contributed to the Chinese predilection to idealize cooperation was the assumption that ethnicity, as distinguished from tongxiang subethnicity, was not to be a differentiating factor in Chi- nese society. Indeed, even as they celebrated subethnic loyalty to their native places within China, Chinese have willfully ignored true ethnic variety within the “Han” population. Confucianism did not look kindly upon diversity and pluralism, which were seen not as sources of strength but as intimations of /uan, disorder, chaos. To residents of ethnic conglom- erates like the contemporary United States, what is striking about China is not rivalries among native places but rather the virtually universal belief among Chinese that they are all Chinese, without qualification. Americans typically express their ethnic identity on one level, via acknowledgment of foreign roots (Italian American, Mexican American, etc.). But Chinese typically express their ethnic identity on two levels: ethnically as “Han Chi- nese” (rather than one of the shaoshu minzu, minority-nationality citizens of China) and subethnically as Cantonese, Ningboese, etc. Only during periods of alien invasion (for example, by Mongols, Man- chus, or, in the nineteenth century, the West) did ethnicity per se figure large in the Chinese consciousness. To rehearse the obvious, until well into162 JAMES H. COLE the nineteenth century the Chinese typically did not consider themselves “Chinese” so much as “civilized,” equating Chinese culture with civiliza- tion. Here was a breathtaking apotheosis of achieved, unifying ideology over ascribed, disaggregating ethnicity. The competition expressed in con- temporary American society, for example, as rivalries among ethnic groups was expressed in late imperial China as rivalries among subethnic native places (for example, Cantonese vs. Ningboese in Shanghai) 2? So strong has been the myth of Han cultural uniformity that eth- nicity has been only rarely used as a marker of identity. Han Chinese have simply assumed, as a matter of principle, that—except perhaps for the Hakka (typically considered by other Chinese to be non-Han)—they are all members of one ethnic group formed acons ago, in the mists of pre- history. This assumption is not so much one of ethnic purity 4 la japonaise as of ethnic unity. For example, the entry on “Han Chinese” (Hanzu) in the PRC’s Encyclopedia of Ethnic Groups, published in 1984, informs us that the Hanzu, “comprising some 94 percent of our nation’s population, . . . was formed by the gradual, long-term amalgamation of the ancient Huaxia ethnic group (Huaxia zu) with other fraternal ethnic groups (qita xiongdi minzu)”*° This assumption of unity will doubtless continue unti] DNA testing of representative samples of the “Han Chinese” population either proves or disproves it. Obvious differences in such ethnic markers as “culture, language and identity” (to return to the Catalonian example) have not been allowed to overshadow achieved characteristics of unity, for instance, a common writ- ten language intelligible to all educated persons. Indeed, spoken languages which are mutually incomprehensible within China are euphemistically re- ferred to as “dialects” (fangyan). However, to the historical linguist, Chinese is rather more like a language family than a single language made up of a number of regional forms. The Chi- nese dialectal complex is in many ways analogous to the Romance language family in Europe. . . . To take an extreme example, there is probably as much difference between the dialects of Peking and Chaozhou as there is between Italian and French; the Hainan Min dialects are as different from the Xan dialect as Spanish is from Rumanian. There are literally scores of mutually non-intelligible varieties of Chinese" In the face of such extreme linguistic fractiousness, and its potentially disastrous political consequences from the perspective of any central gov- ernment, the achievement of a unified imperial polity is all the more re- markable—and that polity’s apotheosis of the datong ideal of cooperation all the more understandable. By standardizing both the linguistic formCompetition and Cooperation 163 (wenyan rather than fangyan) and the substantive content of the governing ideology, it was the unifying power of education—specifically, education in the Confucian classics channeling talent into an examination system that was meant to control access to the most prestigious prizes offered by the culture—that, in an important sense, made China one. In conclusion, ethnicity is indeed a human construct. But so too is the willful, even ideological, disregard of ethnicity. It is this simultaneous combination of intense inter-native-place competition with an equally pas- sionate commitment to cooperation — that is, to China’s unity —that makes the Chinese case so fascinating.