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

to continue his studies as a teenager. Zheng's writing about reform and self-strengthening also influenced Koreans as early as the 1880s.¹

One of the most important political thinkers of the late Qing period, Zheng Guanying did the most research on the Western parliamentary system and was the first to openly call for it.² It is believed that he was the earliest and most outspoken advocate for women's rights and education,³ and he was one of the first reformers to advance the idea of economic nationalism.⁴ Unlike Zhang Zhidong (1837–1909), who was a high-ranking official,⁵ or Wei Yuan (1794–1856), who influenced policymaking largely because of his prestige as a classical scholar and official policy advisor to prominent officials, Zheng was the only noted merchant-reformer in late Qing China and perhaps the first reformer of modern China who mastered a Western language.⁶ His weak background in classical education and his identity as a merchant defined his success as a reformer and exceptional publicist. Zheng Guanying's systematic reformist agenda and his foresight on multiple issues such as the role of commerce, economic nationalism, law and education, and the establishment of a parliament are still provocative even for today's Chinese. But unlike other reformers such as Guo Songtao (1818–1891), Wang Tao (1828–1897), Zeng Jize (1839–1890), Ma Jianzhong (1845–1900), and Kang Youwei, Zheng had essentially no experience in political and diplomatic interactions with the West.⁷ Rather, Zheng Guanying was a merchant as well as an intellectual who came of age in the cultural and economic environment of the treaty port city of Shanghai. To tackle the issue of his hybrid identity and the contrast between his intellectual breadth and his humble traditional educational achievement, I will examine Zheng Guanying's life and career as a new type of Chinese intellectual arising in the broad context of modern Chinese urbanization and study his relationship with China's coastal cities and treaty ports. Thus, Zheng Guanying's career and thought will be analyzed within the cultural and intellectual milieu in which he lived. As Rhoads Murphey points out when he discusses Shanghai's relationship with China's modernization, “The flow of ideas and of non-economic institutions was perhaps of greater revolutionary importance [than economic development] in the