Rural-Urban Continuities: Leading Families of Two Chekiang Market Towns

-67RURAL -URBAN CONTINUITIES: LEADING FAMILIES OF TWO CHEKIANG MARKET TOWNS Mary Backus Rankin During the last fifty years of the Ch'ing we are faced with somewhat contradictory indications of change and stability in Chinese elite society. Some people in the cities entered new businesses and professions based on Western examples. Focusing on these groups has led some writers variously to stress the seminal role of treaty ports as foci of intercultural contact or to look at evidence for an emerging bourgeoisie in the cities. On the other hand, gentry still dominated agrarian society. This continuity has led to the suggestions that the 1911 Revolution can be interpreted as another dynastic collapse, and that gentry flexibly adjusted to new conditions simply to retain power. Other writers have pointed to limited local political and social changes: expansion of local gentry authority, beginning with militarization during the Taiping Rebellion, that allowed lower gentry to assume administrative powers formerly exercised by bureaucratic underlings, or the growth of a rural landholding and commercial class that might be termed an agrarian bourgeoisie. These interpretations imply or specifically -68postulate growing distinctions between city and countryside . Sometimes these distinctions are expressed in terms of different leadership at district, provincial, and national levels . Sometimes they are defined in terms of an urban-rural gap created both by the removal of gentry to the cities and by differences between traditionalistic rural and Western-influenced urban styles of life. The gap is assumed to have weakened elite concerns for rural welfare and to have increased exploitation of peasants . 4 Detailed research in local gazeteers raises doubts abeult broadly applying the idea of an urban-rural gap to explain social developments in the late nineteenth century and at least the first two decades of the twentieth. Local social patterns varied greatly. Even so, many parts of China had reached levels of urbanization and commercialization in the late imperial period that were far higher than those of Europe at the outset of industrialization . Numerous linkages between different geographic and social environments did not quickly dissolve. Persistent strength of one such tie is illustrated by histories of six wealthy merchant-gentry families of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as they appear in local gazeteers of two flourishing market towns of northwestern Chekiang. 5 These families were strongly affected by the Taiping occupation in the early 1860s and by expansion of the Shanghai foreign trade. They -69exemplify such common social developments as the rise of new urban-related wealth and fusion of merchant and gentry status. Members were rich merchants, low- and middle- ranking officials, provincial reformers, and local leaders . Many came into contact with foreigners after Shanghai became a treaty port, and after 1900 some followed Western-style professional careers. Despite these changes we see much more evidence of continued local involvement by looking at families as a whole than we do by looking at individuals without considering the social context. One of the families I will discuss came from the market towns of Lu-t'ou ?ß |â and Ch'ing-chen ^ 5_Ä in Chia-hsing prefecture of northwestern Chekiang. The other five were from the market town of Nan-hsun, Huchow, almost eleven miles to the north. These towns were all located on water routes in the Kiangnan portion of Chekiang near the Kiangsu border. Ch'ing-chen was probably the largest if combined with the twin town of Wu-chen in a different prefecture across the river. Nan-hsun, on the main water route between the prefectural city of Huchow and the Grand Canal , was a very prosperous , important trading center dating back to the northern Sung. These might rank as local cities, certainly as central market towns, in Skinner's classification. Lu-t'ou, about half way between Ch'ing-chen and the district capital of T'ung-hsiang was much smaller, and could not have ranked above an intermediate market town. -70This was a highly commercialized, wealthy part of China. Silk was overwhelmingly the most important product, but Lu-t'ou was also known for the iron foundaries that had operated there since the Ming. Commercial prosperity had long been associated with strong scholarly traditions . There were nineteen chin...