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

Shanghai to seek job opportunities and thus formed a powerful Guangdong merchants’ group [Guangdong shangbang] that dominated Shanghai's foreign trade in the mid-nineteenth century. Among the earliest twenty-one Shanghai compradors hired by the four major foreign companies from the 1840 to 1860s, nineteen were from Guangdong.⁴ The demographic data demonstrate that people from Guangdong constituted twenty percent of the total population of the Shanghai International Settlement. In 1935, the year of the latest data available, Guangdong natives constituted five percent of the international settlement, but during the period from 1885 through 1935, Guangdong people remained the third largest native group in the settlement, surpassed only by those from the two provinces nearest Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang.⁵ Among the Cantonese, people from Xiangshan were especially well known for their expertise in foreign trade.⁶ Famous modern entrepreneurs and Zheng Guanying's colleagues at China Merchants’ Steamship Navigation Company, Tang Tingshu [Tong king-sing] (1832–1892) and Xu Run (1838–1911) were both from Xiangshan. According to the economic historian Wang Jingyu, Tang, Xu, and Zheng were part of a second generation of compradors whose fathers and uncles had served the foreign companies as early as the 1850s.⁷

Zheng Guanying's father, Zheng Wenrui (1812–1893), was a Confucian student who earned his living as a merchant after failing the imperial civil service exam. Zheng Wenrui became a comprador merchant in Shanghai in the early 1850s, and he donated money to the government to help suppress the Taiping Rebellion.⁸ After Zheng Wenrui came back to his home village, he assumed the role of a local gentryman by teaching in the village school and compiling Confucian moral booklets, and he became an avid activist in local charities. For Zheng Wenrui and many other contemporary merchants, mercantilism and Confucianism were not radically contradictory. They saw the careers of a Confucian gentry-scholar and a merchant as two reasonable alternatives for an individual. Although becoming a gentry-scholar was preferred, being a merchant could also be a decent occupation for those who had failed in the highly selective civil service process. According to Benjamin Elman, about