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

relationship with Shanghai. The city provided him a new social environment that was distinctive from his home village and exposed him to a changing demography and a developing modern urban management.

New Job Identity and Career

For Zheng Guanying, the transformative role of Shanghai seemed to be larger than for those who came at a later age. His career, knowledge of Western learning, and initial public expression of social concern all grew out of Shanghai's social environment. By the time Zheng Guanying arrived in Shanghai, the city had become the center for China's inland river navigation. From 1859, Zheng Guanying worked in the British Dent and Company [Baoshun Yanghang], one of the largest British firms then in China, and he was in charge of the silk and tea business beginning in 1860. It is noticeable that large foreign firms in Shanghai like Dent and Company played a political and diplomatic role in the 1860s in mediating the Chinese and Western disputes.³⁴ From 1867 to 1870, Zheng Guanying engaged in a series of independent investments covering tea, salt, and navigation. After Dent and Company closed its business in 1866, Zheng Guanying worked as a tongshi—linguist, translator, and broker— before starting his own business. In July 1867 the British businessman Francis Arthur Groom organized a joint-stock steamship company called the Union Steam Navigation Company [Gongzheng lunchuan gongsi]. Shanghai's foreign residents and Chinese merchants bought the company's shares. Zheng Guanying and Tang Tingshu both made investments in this company. Zheng's early experience in the navigation business during this period laid a solid foundation for his lifelong career in this field and shaped his standpoint as a merchant reformer.

The occupation of tongshi had existed for a long period before the Opium War. Under the Cohong system, the tongshi worked as semi-official deputies of Chinese customs to oversee the activities of the foreign merchants. With the Cohong system being abolished after the war, these linguists were gradually employed by the foreign merchants as their translators and compradors.³⁵ However, despite the rise of the status of