by Ying-shih Yü
throughout China precisely because they are easiest to produce.”91 Books printed
246 busine s s c ul t ur e a nd c h ine s e t r adi t ions
in Fujian are generally known as Masha editions in the history of Chinese
printing, notorious for carelessness in proofreading.92 This was obviously due
to the fact that the publishers were private merchants with every intention to
compete for quick profi t in the book market. As a result, book prices began to
decline signifi cantly from the second half of the eleventh century and the same
trend continued into the next two centuries.93 Therefore, from the point of view
of cultural history, the book market in Song China deserves the credit for having
made large numbers of texts, in all va ri e ties, accessible to the reading public.
Moreover, as Susan Cherniack says: “The commercialization of printing, which
transformed books into commodities, gave new ideas tangible worth. It encour-
ages their production.”94 It may be suggested that the revival of learning and the
dissemination of Neo- Confucian ideas in the Song Period were both the unin-
tended consequences of the growth of the book market, to a greater or lesser
degree.
G R O W T H O F B U S I N E S S C U LT U R E F R O M
T H E S I X T E E N T H C E N T U R Y T O 1 8 0 0
A new wave of business culture swept China in the late imperial age beginning
with the sixteenth century, if not earlier. It deserves our special attention on
account of its long- lasting and pervasive infl uences on vari ous aspects of the
Chinese tradition unmatched in the preceding dynasties, including Tang and
Song. Let me begin by quoting an overview off ered by the nineteenth- century
historian Shen Yao
(1798–1840) as a basis for discussion:
Emperor Taizu of the Song (r. 960–976) took back the entitlements [of
offi
cials] to [fringe] benefi ts (i.e., extra incomes from government- owned
lands such as zhifentian
or “lands pertaining to offi
ce” and gongxi-
etian
“lands of the public administration” under the Tang dynasty)
and placed all [of the revenues] in the state trea sury. In consequence of
this, scholar- offi
cials began to fi nd it necessary to engage also in agricul-
tural pursuits in order to support their families; every thing had changed
from the past. Since offi
cials thus vied with the common people for profi t,
and scholars who had not entered government ser vice had to depend on
agricultural pursuits for self- sustenance before they could aff ord to con-
centrate on their studies, management of family fi nance became ever
more pressing, and the tendency towards trade and commerce grew stron-
ger. Indeed, without fathers and elder brothers managing some business
in the fi rst place, sons and younger brothers would have no means to en-
gage in studies through which they might enter offi
cialdom. Thus, while
in the olden days, the four categories of people (i.e., scholar, farmer, arti-
san, and merchant) were diff erentiated from one another, in later times,
busine s s c ul t ur e a nd c h ine s e t r adi t ions 247
they were not diff erentiated. While in olden days, sons of scholars forever
remained as scholars, in later times, only sons of merchants could be-
come scholars. This is the general picture of the change since the Song,
Yuan, and Ming dynasties.
Meanwhile, with most of the scholars coming from merchant fami-
lies, a spirit of parsimony and stinginess steadily intensifi ed. Yet while it
is often diffi
cult these days to witness an amiable and philanthropic spirit
in the scholar- offi
cials, one sees it instead in the merchants. Why is this
so? Because the empire’s center of gravity has tilted toward commerce, and
consequently, heroes and men of intelligence mostly belong to the mer-
chant class; by profession, they are merchants, in character, they are he-
roes. And being the heroes they are, they understand perfectly the aff airs
of the world; and so they can manage what others cannot, but cannot bear
to see what others are indiff erent to. Thus, the situation comes to pass
that the scholars turn ever more stingy, while the merchants come more
and more to cherish the morals of the past. This is again the general picture
of the ways and mores of the world.95
Despite his intended exaggerations and occasional overstatements, the two “gen-
eral pictures” Shen Yao has drawn above are marvelously close to what we call
so cio log i cally oriented generalizations in history. The fi rst one is a summing up
of the changes in social structure resulting from the rise of the merchant class
and the second one describes the emergence of a new culture ultimately rooted
in the changing social structure. In a nutshell, Shen Yao’s view is that the
scholar and the merchant had changed places in society and, consequently, the
social role of leadership that traditionally had been the mono poly of the former
was now largely assumed by the latter. On the basis of my own research, I can
say without hesitation that both pictures are by and large truthful repre sen ta-
tions of the social real ity in China from the sixteenth century on. It is also as-
tonishing that Shen Yao praised the merchants in such laudatory terms. In con-
trast to the past as sketched in the previous two sections, the language seems
wholly new. As I shall try to show below, however, it was actually continuous
from the sixteenth century, if not earlier.
To begin with, let me point out that by the sixteenth century, big business
networks on a nationwide scale had already come into existence. Rich mer-
chants from Huizhou (in Anhui)— known in history as “Xin-an merchants”—
were particularly famous for building such networks. One example will serve
well as a concrete illustration. According to the biography of a man named Ruan
Bi
(1504–1586?) by Wang Daokun
(1525–1593), Ruan was a success-
ful merchant from She, a county in Xin-an, and established his business head-
quarters in the entrepôt of Wuhu (also in Anhui). He engaged in paper manu-
facturing and selling. At the height of his success, he had branch offi
ces in the
big cities of many provinces including Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Hubei, Henan, Hebei,
248 busine s s c ul t ur e a nd c h ine s e t r adi t ions
and Shandong. He hired many talented assistants to take charge of vari ous
provincial offi
ces while he himself was giving instructions from the headquar-
ters. He is said to have had such an extremely good business sense that he
knew exactly when and how to expand his enterprise. He was also widely re-
spected for the absolute trustworthiness of his promise. Once given, with or
without a written agreement, he never violated it.96 But Ruan Bi was only one
among many such newly emerging entrepreneurs of his time.97 In the seven-
teenth century, a merchant from Dongting (in Jiangsu) named Xi Benzhen
(1601–1653) also developed a similar business network with many ware-
houses
in large cities all over China. He never visited his branch offi
ces and
simply directed his business by sending written instructions to them, some
of which were even one to two thousand (Chinese) miles away. His instruc-
tions were always carried out faithfully by his managerial staff in the vari ous
branches.98
Such networks seem equally qualifi ed to be nicknamed “business empires”
as those in the modern West. It is therefore all the more in ter est ing to see that
sixteenth- century Chinese merchants indeed began to speak of them in exactly
such terms. In the case of the above- mentioned Ruan Bi, for example, Wang
Daokun said that he took his native county of She as a place for “retirement,”
but considered Wuhu to be his “Fengpei”
, the geo graph i cal base from
which the founding emperor of Han started his “empire- building” career.99 If
this was only an isolated description, then we could perhaps dismiss it as an
abuse of analogy on the part of a writer imprisoned in the house of the classical
language. An analogy of this sort occurred frequently in the sixteenth century,
however. Take another Xian-an merchant named Li Dahong, for example. His
biography in the clan genealogy says that he ran pawnshops in the city of Gushu
(Dangtu in southern Anhui), which became his “Guanzhong”
, a reference
to Chang-an, “within the passes.”100 In other words, Gushu was the capital of
his “business empire.” An even more startling case is provided by Cheng Zhou,
a merchant who had many business establishments in Jiangxi ranging from
pawnshops to salt trading. His biography in the Xin-an mingzu zhi
(dated 1551) (Rec ords of Famous Clans in Xin-an) describes him as a person
“starting an enterprise and leaving a tradition to be carried on.” The original
Chinese expression is chuangye chuitong
, which, though originally
used in a general sense by Mencius ( Mencius, 1B.14), had been exclusively re-
served for a dynastic founder after the unifi cation of 211 b.c.e.101 In the latter
two cases, the biographers were family members, and therefore both can be
taken as refl ecting the merchants’ self- image.
From the sixteenth century on, the merchant class grew increasingly self-
confi dent and, indeed, even self- conceited. Biographies of successful merchants
often characterize them as men of “ great aspirations or visions” early in life, a
characterization previously applied only to po liti cal and intellectual leaders.102
In the words of a Xian-an merchant named Xu Zhi
(1494–1554): “Although
busine s s c ul t ur e a nd c h ine s e t r adi t ions 249
I am but a merchant, do I not cherish the aspirations of Duanmu (i.e., Zigong)
who wherever he went, stood up to the king as an equal?”103 It was also around
this time that the merchants became more assertive than ever of their own so-
cial worth. For the fi rst time, they raised the question “Why must the merchant
always be placed below the scholar?”104 For their part, the scholars also began to
recognize the legitimacy of their claim. Thus, Wang Daokun jumped onto their
bandwagon and asked: “Is a fi ne merchant necessarily inferior to a great
scholar?”105 He openly questioned not only the time- honored tradition of chong-
ben yimo
, meaning “upholding essentials (agriculture) and eliminat-
ing nonessentials (commerce and industry),” but also the established fi nancial
policy of “light taxes on the farmer and heavy levies on the merchant.” In his
view, the two occupations ought to be given equal treatment. “Why is the mer-
chant necessarily inferior to the farmer?” he again asked. On this matter, his
view was widely shared by his contemporaries, including Zhang Juzheng
(1525–1582) and Zhang Han
(1511–1593).106
Thus, we see that by the sixteenth century, merchants no longer passively
accepted the low status assigned to them by tradition. On the contrary, they made
every eff ort to prove that they were the social equals of scholars as well as farm-
ers. A comparison with an early case will fully reveal the revolutionary implica-
tions of the rise of this new merchant ideology. A rich man of the eleventh-
century from Hunan named Li Qianzhi
once related to Ouyang Xiu
(1007–1072) what he thought about his social role as a merchant vis- à- vis
people of other occupational categories. He said:
The common people exert their labor for a livelihood. Those who toil hard
will receive a large return, while those who work leisurely will receive a
meager return. The size of their return is always dependent on and pro-
portionate to the amount of labor they put in. And then each lives on his
labor without shame. Scholars are beyond the match of my type. . . . I
consider myself equal to the artisans and farmers . . . but what [the farmers
and artisans] receive does not exceed the value of their labor. Now for me
it is diff er ent . . . I expend labor in a most leisurely and easy manner, and
yet what I receive in return far exceeds my labor. I feel ashamed before
them.107
Here we encounter a merchant who embraced without a demur the traditional
four- tiered social hierarchy in the descending order of scholars, farmers, artisans,
and merchants. There cannot be the slightest doubt that between the eleventh
and the sixteenth centuries, Chinese business culture must have under gone
changes of a fundamental nature.
At this juncture, let me turn to the realm of social thought, where a new
theory about the social division of labor was being developed in response, es-
sentially, to the growing importance of the merchant class in Chinese society.
250 busine s s c ul t ur e a nd c h ine s e t r adi t ions
In this regard, the most signifi cant documentary evidence is provided, quite
unexpectedly, by the leading Neo- Confucian phi los o pher Wang Yangming
. In a tomb inscription for a merchant called Fang Lin
, written in
1525, the phi los o pher off ered the following view:
There was a gentleman from the Kunshan County of Suzhou Prefecture
called Fang Lin, whose courtesy name was Jie-an. He started off as a
scholar, studying for the civil ser vice examinations. But he left off after
a short while and went to live with his wife’s family, the Zhus, who had
been merchants for a long time. One of Fang’s friends said to him: “So
now you have left the world of scholarship for commerce?” Fang smiled
and replied: “How do you know that a scholar does not engage in com-
merce, and that a merchant cannot be a scholar?”
The Hanlin scholar Gu Jiuhe said to me: “I once read Fang’s letter to
his two sons. His words of advice were all earnest exhortations to loyalty,
fi lial piety, integrity, and righ teousness; they were above popu lar vulgar
talk and rather like those of a man of ancient times who knew the Way
( Dao).”
I replied: “In olden times, the four categories of people were engaged
in diff er ent occupations but followed the same Way; they were at one in
giving full realization to their mind
s. Scholars maintained government
ser vices, farmers provided for subsistence needs, artisans prepared tools
and implements, and merchants facilitated the fl ow of commodities. Each
person chose his vocation according to the inclination of his talent and
the level of his capacity, seeking to give full realization to his mind.
“Hence, in terms of the fi nal objective of advancing the way of human
life, their vocations were the same. . . . But with the Kingly Way extin-
guished and learning gone astray, people lost their [original] minds and
craved for gains, vying to surpass one another. It was then that people
began to think highly of scholars, look down on farmers, to honor offi
cial-
dom and despise being artisans and merchants. If one investigates the
facts objectively, however, one will realize that the scholars were even
more opportunistic and blinded by considerations of profi t, only under a
diff er ent name. . . . Looking into Mr. Fang’s statement on the occupa-
tions of the scholar and the merchant, I see it as reminiscent of the truth
pertaining to the ancient four categories of people; it was as if he were
aroused in some way to say what he did. Alas, it is a long time since such
truth was lost; did Mr. Fang perhaps hear about it somewhere? Or is it
that the superiority of his innate qualities enabled him to assimilate it si-
lently within his heart? Thus, I came to ponder deeply on the subject.”108
I quote this inscription at some length because it reveals changes in sixteenth-
century Chinese society in several impor tant ways. Moreover, it may also be
busine s s c ul t ur e a nd c h ine s e t r adi t ions 251
regarded as an epoch- making document in the history of Neo- Confucian social
thinking to which, unfortunately, due attention has not been given thus far. In
what immediately follows, I shall try to bring out some of its most impor tant
implications by way of a running commentary.
First, Fang Lin’s was an early case typical of numerous scholars- turned-
merchants in Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) times. In the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, a quiet but active social movement known as “aban-
doning Confucian studies for commercial pursuits” ( qiru jiugu
) swept
China. The basic pattern may be simply characterized. Having repeatedly failed
