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

teachings, laying emphasis on values such as benevolence, righteousness, and sincerity.¹⁶ With nearly Benjamin Franklin–style utilitarianism, Chinese merchants also stressed values like honesty, frugality, and industry and attached importance to self-cultivation. Chinese merchants whose values reflected Confucian teaching thus did not consider themselves to be ideological heretics in society, although they were socially unequal to the scholar-officials.

Some merchants who truly pursued virtue did not see money as the ultimate purpose of life and still wanted to fulfill Confucian moral ideals through making donations. Zheng Wenrui consciously limited his appetite for money by quitting his job as a comprador in Shanghai and returning to his hometown, where he got involved in local education. There were multiple channels to obtain gentry status; wealth could be one of them, but one had to engage in undertakings such as local philanthropy or education, as Zheng Wenrui did. In this sense, we might say that gentry was not only a rigid sociological category but also a moral one; that is, an imperial academic degree or official title alone does not determine the status of being gentry; it depends on what one does and contributes to local society. The father and the son embodied the rise of a new social class and its subculture in late Qing society: gentry-merchants who combined mercantilism and Confucian moral pursuit.

From the perspective of China's migration and urbanization, the 16-year-old Zheng Guanying participated in the huge population movement of Shanghai's post–Opium War urbanization, which can be partly attributed to population pressure on land since the eighteenth century. Philip Kuhn suggests that Chinese emigration overseas should be examined as “a special case” of this large migratory process.¹⁷ Urban sociology uses the term “pull” to describe the attractiveness of a migrant destination and “push” for the disadvantages of the place he would leave. In the case of Zheng Guanying, his rural home village had only very limited opportunity for a failed Confucian student, unless he kept working on the exam perhaps until he turned gray. But Shanghai “pulled” as a promising destination for a male teenager, offering possibilities and encouraging dreams about starting anew. Sociological studies of