Hong Merchants of Canton: Chinese Merchants in Sino-Western Trade, 1684-1798 (review)

© 1999 by University ofHawaii Press Reviews 75 came the sole measure ofloyalty, and intellectuals like Deng Tuo were therefore regarded as enemies ofthe regime. This volume contributes ably to the growing scholarship on the dynamics of Mao Zedong and the people and groups he considered to be his opponents. It especially advances our understanding ofthe role ofthe intelligentsia in Mao's new China. Peggy Denning Peggy Denning is aprofessor ofhistory at Slippery Rock University specializing in Chinese history during the Sino-Japanese War. Weng Eang Cheong. HongMerchants ofCanton: Chinese Merchants in Sino-Western Trade, 1684-1798. Nordic Institute ofAsian Studies Monograph Series, No. 70. Richmond, United Kingdom: Curzon Press, 1997. iv, 376 pp. Hardcover, isbn 0-7007-0361-6. Weng Eang Cheong has written an exhaustive study of the Hong merchants of Canton—whom he defines as "a new type ofclient-merchant" (p. 348)—in the century preceding the decades of opium importation and the incessant conflict between China and Great Britain that has dominated modern scholarly thinking about the Canton system. The author argues that modern historians "have given little attention to the [eighteenth-century] merchants," with the result that "[e]xisting works present incomplete and sometimes distorted views" (pp. 14, 16). His intention is to rectify this problem. The study opens with the year 1684, the year that the Qing court allowed the resumption ofmaritime trade after a twenty-seven-year "closed country" interlude during which the Manchus secured control over their southern frontier while banning all maritime commerce, and it concludes with the failure in 1798 of Geowqua, whom the author defines as "a trader oflittle importance, who, however, is significant [in the author's revised interpretation] ofthe Hong merchants ' history because he was the last ofa type and a generation of Hong merchants " (p. 18). In between, Cheong argues, the trade and the Chinese merchants who attended it evolved through three significant stages: (1) 1684-ca. 1740, during which time the merchants were generalist traders with wide personal experience in the "junk trade," the maritime exchange between China and the archipelago lands ofSoutheast Asia that was controlled by Chinese and indigenous Southeast 76 China Review International: Vol. 6, No. ?, Spring 1999 Asian merchants; (2) ca. 1740-ca. 1760, when the traders became more narrowly defined specialists dealing with European chartered companies such as the British East India Company, a new participant that introduced unprecedented levels of demand on the trade as it came to dominate the European side of the exchange; and (3) ca. 1760-1798, when the chartered companies were either entirely displaced , as in the case of the French or the Dutch, or complemented, as in the case of the East India Company, by an expanding "country trade," the private trade running between China and India that once again restructured the fiscal demands on the Chinese merchants, who had to adapt to the pressures of selling imported goods—woolens, raw cotton, and later opium—rather than just receiving specie. Cheong traces the fortunes of the Hong merchants through the eighteenth century, demonstrating that they were increasingly incapable ofaccommodating to the expanding and changing demands of the trade, consequently falling into ever deeper and unresolvable debt. He portrays the Chinese merchants through the first decades of the 1700s as innovative generalists, when the Europeans were only one factor in a thriving regional trade system that stretched from Nagasaki in the northeast to Malacca and Penang in the southwest. Many owned their own vessels—the Chinese junks that had been fixtures in the many ports of the Southeast Asian archipelago for centuries—and had gained their own experience abroad. These merchants, many ofwhom the author identifies as natives of Fujian Province who were "itinerants" in Canton, procured their own trade goods, managed their own transactions, and avoided getting into debt. By the period 1720-1740, however, the character ofthe trade with the Europeans was changing. Faced with growing European competition, the author explains, the traditional junk trade collapsed, robbing the merchants of an important source of income. This in turn led to problems in financing trade with the increasingly demanding charter companies. Gradually the merchants found themselves squeezed between "cash advances from the foreigners and the...