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

500,000 students out of the population of 150 million sat for the county-level licentiate exam in 1700 to get a county-level xiucai degree, but by 1800, there were over 3 million candidates. Among them, only about 14 percent finally got the xiucai degree and were admitted to candidacy for the provincial juren degree, which could lead to official positions.⁹ Admission was limited by quota. For instance, there were 5,580 candidates in the Shuntianfu region near Beijing taking the provincial exam in 1665, while the quota was only 168, constituting about 3 percent. The situation worsened in the same area in 1744, when 10,800 students competed for a quota of 135. That same year, 1,133 Confucian scholars nationwide with a juren degree participated in the metropolitan jinshi exam for the highest degree, and 300 among them, or 26 percent, received the jinshi degree.¹⁰ Like his father, Zheng Guanying was not successful in the imperial exam. He failed his xiucai exam for the elementary degree when he was 16 years old (17 years old by traditional Chinese age reckoning) in 1858. His father then decided to send him to Shanghai to “learn business” with his uncle Zheng Xiushan, a comprador in the British Overweg and Company. Zheng Guanying's quick withdrawal from the academic-official world demonstrated his father's strong identification with commerce as a career, and this can be seen as a result of a more commercially oriented culture in the late imperial Canton and Shanghai regions.

Confucianism is traditionally said to exclude mercantilism as a career for a gentry-scholar. Indeed, in the famous social hierarchy of the “four peoples” [simin], namely, the scholar, the farmer, the artisan, and the merchant, the merchant was placed at the bottom of the social strata. However, though the Confucian-dominated tradition contained an anti-commercial bias that discriminated against mercantile activities, actual social practices did not strictly follow the social theory. Reconciling faith with wealth is always a problem. According to Max Weber's analysis of the Protestant ethic, one characteristic of Calvinism was its secularization and negation of the asceticism of the Middle Ages.¹¹ It took centuries for Calvinism to break from the otherworldliness of Catholicism and have esteem for secular “callings” in Europe, but Confucianism in China was from the very beginning a secular philosophy. Lack of a pursuit