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

Western urbanization in the nineteenth century also show the pattern of younger age groups predominating in rural-to-urban migration.¹⁸ Specific to China, William Rowe classified the nineteenth-century urban relocation into three categories: migration of poor people; urbanization-based job seeking; and sojourning merchants.¹⁹ With respect to Rowe's categories, Zheng Guanying initially belonged to the second group and then became a sedentary merchant in the third group, the men who began as sojourning businessmen but had potential to settle down in their destination. Zheng exemplified the apt description of Frederic Wakeman Jr. and Wen-hsin Yeh that “Shanghai sojourners were more than persons passing by; they were denizens.”²⁰

Before Zheng Guanying arrived in Shanghai, the city had long been a booming trading hub in the lower Yangtze region. In 751, during the Tang dynasty, an administrative office was set up in Qinglong Town,25 miles away from Shanghai. During the period from 1070 to 1080 in the Song dynasty, Qinglong had become a prosperous commercial town and was nicknamed “little Hangzhou.”²¹ In 1684 the Qing government lifted the ban on overseas trade, and a customhouse was established in today's Shanghai area. Many merchant ships from home and abroad gathered at the Shanghai port until 1757, when the Qianlong Emperor, successor of the Yongzheng Emperor, announced a foreign trade monopoly by Canton, but the domestic trade in the Shanghai area was still active. With the loosening of the prohibition by his son the Jiaqing Emperor, Shanghai again saw a rapid development of foreign trade, mostly with Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asian countries. Until the reign of Daoguang and before the Opium War, thousands of merchant ships regularly visited the Shanghai port. The area around Shanghai boasted a commercialized rural society connected with the cotton trade, and the urbanization rate of the Lower Yangtze macro-region, where Shanghai is located, had the highest percentage of urban population in the entire country—7.9 percent—by 1843.²²

During the seventeen years between Zheng Guanying's birth and his arrival in Shanghai, Chinese society witnessed a fundamental transformation that was caused by the intrusion of and the challenges posed by