Liturgical Services and Business Fortunes 295
to the scholarship on what they viewed as the development of “incipient
capitalism”.^13 The commercial expansion led to the rise of prominent
regional merchant groups in such places as Anhui, Shansi, Jiangsu,
Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangdong.^14
The rub was that commercialization might also have been seen by
the literati class as a challenge or even a threat to the Confucian social
order and therefore would have strengthened their ideological resistance
to it. As a matter of fact, the merchants were able to justify their need
for proβit-making by using their wealth for public welfare. In so doing,
they played an indispensable role in a society that was still compatible
with the Confucian values. The following discussion will examine this
aspect of the merchants’ role in order to arrive at an understanding of
how the merchants were able to reconcile the conβlict between proβit
maximization and the Confucian concept of benevolent economic
and proper social behavior. The Hong (hang) merchants who involved
themselves in coastal or foreign trade in one way or another in Amoy,
Taiwan and Guangzhou during the eighteenth and the early nineteenth
centuries will be mentioned as examples.
Government and Merchants: Toward a Modus
Operandi
Private maritime trade, both coastal and overseas, burgeoned in
southeastern China during the sixteenth century^15 and, despite the
- See, for example, Zhongguo ziben zahuyi me ngya wenti taolun ji 中国资本主
义萌芽问题讨论集 [A collection of essays on the question of the budding of
capitalism in China], ed. Zhongguo renmin daxue lishi jiaoyan shi 中国人民大
学历史教研室编 (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1957); and Zhongguo ziben zahuyi
mengya wenti taolun ji xubian 中国资本主义萌芽问题讨论集续编 [A collection
of essays on the question of the budding of capitalism in China, supplementary
compilation], ed. Nanjing daxue lishi xi zhongguo gudai shi jiaoyan shi 南京
大学历史系中国古代史教研室编 (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1960). A review
of the discussion in its early stages is given by Albert Feuerwerker in “From
‘Feudalism’ to ‘Capitalism’ in Recent Historical Writing from Mainland China”,
Journal of Asian Studies 18 (Nov. 1958): 107‒16; and “China’s Modern Economic
History in Communist Chinese Historiography”, in Chinese Communist Studies of
Modern Chinese History, ed. Albert Feuerwerker and Harold Kahn (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), pp. 216‒46. - Some of these groups are described in Fu Yiling, Ming Qing shidai shangren; see
also Chang Pin-tsun, “Chinese Maritime Trade: The Case of Sixteenth-Century
Fuchien (Fukien)”, PhD diss., Princeton University, 1983. - This topic is discussed best in Chang Pin-tsun, “Chinese Maritime Trade”.