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

long run.”⁸ It was in this relatively tolerant environment of circulating ideas and new cultures that thinkers such as Zheng developed their ideas that were revolutionary in changing Chinese society.

Zheng Guanying both benefited from and contributed to an urban cultural space that distanced itself from the dominant cultural space of the state as well as the traditional gentry culture.⁹ Zheng Guanying's emergence as both a commercial and intellectual figure in Shanghai was rooted in late-nineteenth-century urbanization. He belonged to a rising urban elite community in nineteenth-century Chinese cities.¹⁰ This community was not merely people living together but was a group of people who shared common interests and concerns and were linked with one another through print media, correspondence, and new social institutions. Zheng Guanying's intellectual articulation and social activities symbolized a process leading to the formation of such a cultural and political space and its attachment to as well as alienation from the state. Many of the activists in this space had failed their imperial exams and were thus denied the avenue to government employment. Moreover, influenced by new ideas and media from the West, they became increasingly critical toward the state.

In Chinese-language scholarship, Zheng Guanying and his reformist thought have received attention since the 1980s.¹¹ In 2002 a government-sponsored meeting was assembled to commemorate the 160th anniversary of Zheng Guanying's birth in today's Zhongshan City of Guangdong Province, and an academic symposium was held in honor of Zheng in the same year. So far, very few English-language books have focused on Zheng Guanying, and main journal articles discussing him appeared in the late 1960s. While the English-language articles seldom mention Zheng's cultural environment, studies of Chinese urban history in recent years have provided us a new perspective to examine him. This trend helped change the stereotypical perception of China as a large agricultural society ruled by its officialdom and lacking urbanization worth studying on its own terms. As early as the 1970s, Rhoads Murphey regarded the May Fourth Movement as an urban affair.¹² Mary Rankin, in Elite Activism and Political Transformation in China: Zhejiang