by Ying-shih Yü
busine s s c ul t ur e a nd c h ine s e t r adi t ions 261
ing as the key link. In this way, a universal order is established. . . . There-
fore, what is self- interest to every individual person in the world is com-
mon good to the Son of Heaven.161
What he is really saying is, in a nutshell, that “self- interest” and “common
good” are not opposed to each other and the only function the government
[symbolized by the “Son of Heaven”] is to perform in the name of the “common
good” is to see to it that the “self- interests” of all the people in the world are to
be fulfi lled each in his individual way. This point was further sharpened when
he remarked elsewhere, “with all the self- interests in the world combined, the
common good is thus formed.”162 Clearly, in this new formulation, common
good is conceived as but the sum total of all the individual self- interests and
therefore depends entirely on the latter for its very existence. Now, the point I
wish to emphasize is that this new idea already had its beginning in the fi rst
half of the sixteenth century and the person who expressed it earlier than all
the great names listed above happened to be a scholar- turned- merchant. Yu Xie
(1496–1583) of Jiangxi once said to his nephew in no uncertain terms:
“Common good can be established only if self- interest is realized in the fi rst
place.”163 I take this to be the quintessence of the new conception of self- interest
vis- à- vis common good to be fully developed a century later. By citing this early
example, however, I am not suggesting that the new conception began as a mer-
chant ideology and Confucian scholars who developed it all served the specifi c
interests of the merchant class. All I am saying is that between elite culture and
business culture, there was an overlapping consensus in which each endorsed
this new conception from its own point of view.
Profi tableness. The polarity of “righ teousness versus profi tableness” under-
went a similar change. The early sixteenth- century merchant Wang Xian, whose
remark about “scholar and merchant pursuing diff er ent occupations but shar-
ing the same mind” already noted above, also off ered his view about this polarity
as follows:
A truly good merchant can cultivate lofty conduct while amidst the arena
of money and trade, and consequently remain undefi led in spite of any
profi t they may make. On the other hand, a truly good scholar is guided
by the classics of former sages to keep away from the path of money and
profi t, and consequently is bound to gain [deserved] fame and make ac-
complishments. And so profi t is regulated by righ teousness while fame is
cultivated by purity of mind, as each abides by his chosen vocation.164
Here Wang Xian is making two impor tant points. First, the Confucian moral
princi ple of “righ teousness versus profi tableness” should not be regarded as
something exclusively worthy of the scholars; it is equally applicable to the mer-
chants. Second, one must not assume that the merchant has no moral concern
262 busine s s c ul t ur e a nd c h ine s e t r adi t ions
about what is right and what is wrong simply because he happens to be in a
profi t- making occupation. On the contrary, his profi t- making activity is also
subject to the regulation of the very same moral princi ple that governs the be-
hav ior of the scholar. This is another piece of evidence vividly illustrative of the
merchants’ self- awareness of their growing importance in society.
On the scholars’ part, this view was also sympathetically received. A few de-
cades later, Han Bangqi wrote much in the same vein in an epitaph for his
merchant- student. He said of the merchants, “Amidst the hubbub of business
transactions, righ teousness is to be found.” On the other hand, he also pointed
out that a scholar may be profi t- minded all the way through his Confucian
schooling if it is understood in terms of investment and emolument. The latter
point, of course, was not new, but it gained new signifi cance when the criticism
was made of the scholar vis- à- vis the praise of the merchant.165 Gu Xiancheng
gave this prob lem a neat philosophical formulation. In an epitaph he wrote for
a merchant who died in 1604, he constructed two opposing views. One was that
righ teousness and profi tableness are completely separated and always at war
with each other. The other was that the two are united and mutually comple-
mentary. In the later case, “righ teousness regulates profi tableness while profi t-
ableness assists righ teousness.” He dismissed the fi rst view as erroneous and
praised the deceased merchant for his success in practicing the second one
during his lifetime.166 With his strong merchant background, it was only natu-
ral that he should make such a liberal interpretation of this princi ple when ap-
plied specifi cally to a merchant. By contrast, however, he would not give even
an inch when the same princi ple was applied to scholar- offi
cials who, as trusted
public custodians of the common good, were no longer entitled to “self- interest”
or “profi t.”167 Therefore, he cannot be accused of applying a double standard. In
later centuries, it was the view of mutual complementarity that dominated the
business culture. In 1715, even an imperial censor in the capital did not hesitate
to endorse it publicly when he was requested to contribute an essay to a stone
monument in commemoration of the founding of a merchant association.168
Luxury. In 1957, two leading economic historians, one in China and one in
Amer i ca and in de pen dently of each other, called our attention to a sixteenth-
century essay in favor of spending by Lu Ji
(1515–1552). Fu Yiling in China
compared it to Bernard de Mandev ille’s The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices,
Public Benefi ts (1727), while Lien- sheng Yang of Harvard University considered
it the closest thing to an economic analy sis of “spending for prosperity.”169 The
central thesis of the essay is that luxury, while a private vice, turns out to be a
public virtue, and frugality, while a private virtue, turns out to be a public vice.
In support of this thesis, he cited many examples to show that “in general, if a
place is accustomed to extravagance, then the people there will fi nd it easy to
make a living, and if a place is accustomed to frugality, then the people there
will fi nd it diffi
cult to make a living.” He further explained what he called the
princi ple of “one person’s loss, another person’s gain” in this way: “But what is
busine s s c ul t ur e a nd c h ine s e t r adi t ions 263
generally referred to as extravagance is merely the fact that rich merchants and
power ful families spend much for their own houses, carts, horses, food, drink
and clothing. When they are extravagant in meat and rice, farmers and cooks
will share the profi t; when they are extravagant in silk textiles, weavers and
dealers will share the profi t.” Here, both in language and in reasoning, the re-
semblance between Lu Ji and Mandev ille is truly amazing. The latter also
argued, “it is the activities o
f the ‘sensual Courtier,’ the ‘fi ckle Strumpet,’ the
‘profuse Rake’ and the ‘haughty Courtesan’—in short, all those who live a life
of ‘Pride and Luxury’— which sets the Poor to Work, adds Spur to Industry and
encourages the skilful Artifi cer to search after further improvements.”170
Needless to say, we must not push historical parallelism beyond its limit. The
diff erences between sixteenth- century China and eighteenth- century Eng land
were too vast to be ignored. Nevertheless, the emergence of a positive view of
luxury vis- à- vis frugality in late Ming China was no less historically signifi cant
than releasing luxury from moral strictures in seventeenth- century Eng land.
I shall make three analytical observations on Lu Ji’s essay in favor of spend-
ing. In the fi rst place, it was not an isolated idea suddenly coming into existence
from nowhere. On the contrary, it was part and parcel of a much larger new
trend in the history of social and economic thought dating from the sixteenth
century and involving many other ideas in the Confucian tradition, such as the
two polarities analyzed above. It is extremely impor tant to note that the subtle
change in the structure of this polarity was exactly the same as the other ones.
Frugality and luxury also turned from mutually exclusive opposites to mutually
complementary ele ments of an inseparable unit. In the second place, an investi-
gation of the family background of our essayist throws considerable light on the
relationship between this new idea and business culture. Lu Ji was the son of Lu
Shen
(1477–1544), a famous scholar and writer who at one time held the
prestigious position of Director of National University. However, for a succession
of four generations from his great grand father to his elder brother, Lu Shen’s
had been very much a merchant family.171 From more than one hundred letters
he wrote to his son over the years, we know that Lu Ji never served in the gov-
ernment due to both his poor health and his repeated failures in metropolitan
examinations. Though a scholar in his own right, Lu Ji, as the only son, was
nevertheless entrusted with the management of family business.172 Thus, we
see that his advocacy of luxury as a way to provide employment for the general
population grew directly out of his personal experiences in the business world.
In the third place, unlike a comet that dis appears quickly without a trace, Lu
Ji’s idea was not only transmitted to later centuries but also translated into local
policies in the commercially prosperous cities in the south, notably Yangzhou
and Suzhou. At the end of the sixteenth century, Li Yuheng
gave a sum-
mary of Lu’s essay in his Tuipeng wuyu, which was, in turn, quoted by Fa- shi- shan
(1753–1813), a scholar of Mongolian ancestry, in his Taolu zalu (1799)
without Lu’s name.173 It is in ter est ing that by the eigh teenth century, the idea of
264 busine s s c ul t ur e a nd c h ine s e t r adi t ions
luxury as a way to provide employment gained great popularity in the Lower
Yangtze region with its authorial origin completely forgotten. Gu Gongxie
,
an eighteenth- century Suzhou scholar, also spoke of the local custom of ex-
travagance with approval from a communitarian point of view. It was unmis-
takably a derivation from Lu Ji’s essay, though he prob ably got it second- or
thirdhand, but he must be given the credit for giving the idea a new formula-
tion when he made this statement: “Extravagance of thousands of people in one
group provides the job opportunities for thousands of people in another. If you
try to change the habit of extravagance of the former and force them to return
to simplicity, then you will inevitably run the risk of eliminating the job oppor-
tunities of the latter.”174 This explains why he was adamantly opposed to prohi-
bition of luxury as a policy.175 Most signifi cant of all, even the emperor also
came to recognize the social importance of luxury in this specifi c sense. During
his imperial tour to Yangzhou in 1765, the Qianlong Emperor remarked in a
note to his poem: “It is a great benefi t [to society] that rich merchants spend
their money in this way with the result that people trained in vari ous skills and
crafts are all able to make their livings. It is indeed easy to impose prohibitions
on their lavish style of life involving all those singing and dancing entertain-
ments. However, since the wealthy are generally parsimonious, what else can we
do to make them help the poor?”176 What a sharp contrast to tradition when we
recall the Ming founding emperor’s law of 1381 denying the use of silk to the
merchant! We cannot but be aware that between the fourteenth century and the
eigh teenth, a sea change had occurred. Here and there, even the state had to
give ground to the impersonal forces of the ever- expanding market.
Now we have come to the end of our story about the evolution of business
culture in China up to 1800. It is neither necessary nor pos si ble to draw specifi c
conclusions from the above account, which is self- explanatory most of the time.
To bring this chapter to a close, however, I wish to make the following three
brief points.
First, the importance of business culture and its infl uences in Chinese his-
tory have been heretofore much underrecognized due to no small extent to the
deep- seated traditional bias on the part of the Chinese ruling elite. With the
notable exceptions of the beginning and the end, during much of the long
middle period, roughly from the end of the Former Han to early Ming, the so-
cial existence of merchants was so blatantly ignored by the intellectual elite that
they were accorded no biographical status. I hope I have somewhat succeeded
in redressing this gross injustice in this chapter. Business culture has always
been an integral part of Chinese culture and it has, to a greater or lesser degree,
helped to shape many a Chinese tradition while at the same time also being
conditioned by the larger culture as a whole.
Second, in this chapter, I have tried to give an account of business culture in
traditional China from the vantage point of the inner world of the merchants so
long as it is pos si ble for a historian on the threshold of the twenty- fi rst century,
busine s s c ul t ur e a nd c h ine s e t r adi t ions 265
but I am fully aware that the picture that emerges from the vast amount of
sources I have selectively canvassed can only be a partial one. It is also in the
very nature of historical analy sis that the subject matter under investigation be
isolated from its total context. The many new and subtle changes I have shown in
the last section did take place during the Ming- Qing Period. However, I must
also point out that they took place in a traditional world in which re sis tance was
very strong and at times even fi erce. People were indeed not lacking who refused
to underwrite the social value of the merchant and who continued to stubbornly
hold to the tradition of moral absolutism.
Third, to the best of my judgment, social and intellectual changes in late im-
perial China had created a frame of mind that made it po
s si ble for some Confu-
cian scholars to be receptive to certain types of Western values and ideas at the
end of the nineteenth century.177 As we have shown above, this new frame of
mind was inseparable from the new business culture that had gradually evolved
since the sixteenth century. Viewed in this light, the role of business culture in
China’s transition from tradition to modernity certainly deserves our most seri-
ous attention. In any case, it seems that the modern transformation of the Chi-
nese business world followed, relatively, a course of gradual and quiet growth in
sharp contrast to the vio lence and disruptiveness of po liti cal and intellectual
revolutions. Given the pres ent state of our historical knowledge, we are not yet in
a position to off er responsible answers to many of the fascinating questions re-
lated specifi cally to the modernization of Chinese business culture. It is therefore
hopeful that the above picture, painted in broad brushes, may serve to stimulate
fellow scholars to make more penetrating inquiries.
not e s
1. F. A.
Hayek,
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, ed. W. W. Bartley III, vol. 1 of The
Collected Works of F. A. Hayek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), esp. pp. 29–45.
For a general comparison with the West, the reader is referred to Thomas L. Hasken
and Richard F. Teichgraeber III, eds., The Culture of the Market: Historical Essays
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
2.
Zhouyi
, SBCK chubian suoben
, juan 8: 48; James Legge, Texts of Confu-
cianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), part 2, 383.
3. Sun
Yirang
, Zhouli zhengyi
(Taipei: Shangwu, 1967), juan 27: 7.77–98;
juan 28: 8.1–5.
4. James
Legge,
The Chinese Classics, vol. 5, The Ch’ un Ts’ ew with the Tso Chuen (Hong
Kong: HKU Press, 1960), 664.
5. Ibid.,
224.
6.
Ibid., 353. On the unique relationship between merchants and the court in the state of
Zheng, see Takezoe Koko
, Saden kaisen
(Taipei: Fenghuang, 1974
[reprint]), chap. 7, p. 59.
266 busine s s c ul t ur e a nd c h ine s e t r adi t ions
