Zheng Guanying, Merchant Reformer of Late Qing China and his Infl ...

merchants in general, the social status and prestige of foreign-related tongshi in Shanghai as a job identity was actually not favorable, and contemporaries viewed them with a mixed feeling of envy, suspicion, and disdain. Evidence for this can even be found in the narratives of reformers like Wang Tao and Feng Guifen (1809–1874). Wang Tao recorded in his memoir, “The trade between the Chinese and Westerners all relied on the words of tongshi. Half of them were from Canton, and easily made thousands of dollars in a moment.”³⁶ Though himself a reformist writer, Feng Guifen made derogatory comments on the tongshi: “Their character is rude, their learning is shallow, and they are mean, knowing nothing but making profit.”³⁷

To be sure, Zheng Guanying himself was more than the vulgar and shallow tongshi depicted by Feng Guifen. In the 1860s, while running a business, Zheng Guanying started to write Important Suggestions for Social Salvation in his spare time. His decision not to retake the imperial exam did not mean that he had lost interest in learning; on the contrary, it can be seen as an effort to escape the formalism of the exam itself. Since the Ming and Qing dynasties, the imperial exam for recruiting official-scholars had become a test for the test's sake. Students were required to master the rhetoric of the so-called eight-legged essay, which put form over content and did little to encourage students to pursue learning and social concerns. Wang Tao, though he earned a xiucai degree, gave up the exam after failing the advanced test for juren and educated himself with liberal readings.

Educational Opportunities

In the mid-nineteenth century, with the expansion of the Self-strengthening Movement, staged by reformer bureaucrats and the court in 1860, Shanghai became an experimental site of the new type of education. In ancient China, the majority of schools was private and supported by the students’ tuition fees and clan funds. Like other regions of China, Shanghai had its Chinese-style official school and more liberal private Confucian academies, the Shuyuan, located within the city wall and close to