王赓武：“无帝国依托的商人：旅居海外的福建社群”

WANG GUNGWU，Merchants without empire: the Hokkien sojourning communities

     CHINESE merchants have long struggled against the orthodox Confucian view that they should be at the bottom of the sociopolitical scale. The agrarian empire was established by force of arms and run by a centralized bureaucracy. This empire soon developed strict controls over the sources of mercantile wealth and thereafter kept merchant families on the defensive. The underlying principle was that such families should not be allowed to use commercial wealth to acquire political power either directly through official appointments or indirectly through high social status. And as the mandarin state evolved through the centuries, military families also were ultimately excluded from political power, except during times of dynastic crises. The mandarins, selected largely from literati with or without landed wealth,became the embodiment of imperial authority and legitimacy. Merchants could not hope to challenge such a state structure. All they could hope for was to get some of the mandarins to collaborate in the acquisition of commercial wealth and to educate some members of their families to reach literati status and help to protect their enterprises.

    Behind this overall framework, however, there were countervailing trends. For the first thousand years, from the Han to the Tang dynas ties (from roughly the second century B.C. to the ninth century A.D.), the major pressures against mandarin power came from military fam ilies seeking to erect feudal structures. Merchants had no place in this struggle: their lowly status placed them with the artisans, even though their skills with money in an increasingly cash-based economy made them useful agents to powerful families from time to time. After the tenth century, when no military aristocracy was possible any more within China, the literati route to power was supreme and firmly es tablished. But this opened up a different trend: it created a merito cracy in which wealth could and did play an important role, giving new encouragement to entrepreneurship and the emerging mercan tile class. Thus the Sung dynasty (980-1276), and especially the Southern Sung during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, offered opportunities to merchants to create wealth to increase the imperial revenues and, at the same time, strive for upward social mobility.1 But the wealth was never allowed to be independent of the mandari nate. It was always contingent on its value to the court and its links with officialdom, preferably through family members who had made the transition to literati status.    

   It was in this context of a new role for merchants that maritime trade became important in the southeastern coastal provinces of China after the tenth century. This essay explores the nature of Chinese merchant communities through their activities overseas. Given the background of discrimination, what can we learn from those who were more daring and enterprising and who sought their wealth in areas outside mandarin control? Among the most active of them were the merchants of south Fujian, better known as the Hokkiens.2 The first part of the essay will describe the background of their maritime activities, especially the trading conditions before the end of the sixteenth century. The second will concentrate on two of their communities: one in Manila from the 1570s and the other in Nagasaki after 1600. From their experience, it may become clear why the Chinese did not develop strong networks and organizations of the kind that emerged in Europe by the seventeenth century. The Hokkiens also provide a contrast with the merchant communities in Europe, which fared better in a variety of small contending states that needed and supported them in their overseas trade. There is also the difference between merchants barely tolerated by a centralized empire and those whose

rulers and governments used them for their imperial cause. When merchants could extract favorable conditions from kings and aristocrats, they could hope eventually to gain control of the governments themselves. A mandarinate that believed that the successful state was dependent on a peaceful and prolific peasantry would question the function of profit and mercantile wealth. And despised merchant communities excluded from political power could hardly expect to build merchant empires of their own.