300 Boundaries and Beyond
their organizations” and “[b]ureaucrats were to act only to regulate and
restrict the proβitability of trade to a reasonable or just level”.^30
Confucianization of Merchant Culture and
the Responsive Mercantile Community
In response to their new roles in society, Chinese merchants adjusted
their cultural characteristics to conform to the mainstream Confucian
value system. Generally, merchant culture embraced the merchants’
shared beliefs about how they should conduct themselves in relation
to the society at large and how they should run their businesses. These
beliefs had a major impact on their thoughts and actions.^31 As Wang
Gungwu observes, such a culture in traditional China, although “elusive
and hard to deβine”, is still identiβiable. Referring to merchants, he says
that, “attitudes towards proβit-seeking and risk-taking, towards business
organizations like occupational guilds, native-place associations and
trade coalitions ... marked them off most notably from the literati and the
peasantry”.^32 Since late Ming times, merchants had increasingly identiβied
themselves with the traditional Confucian culture and value system.^33 In
other words, Confucian ethics and teachings were inβluencing the social
and economic behavioral norms of merchants.^34
Merchants made efforts to reconcile proβit-seeking (li) with selβless
righteousness (yi), or the common good. Merchant associations and guilds
served not only mercantile interests, but also those of the community,
and merchants shed their proβiteering image through philanthropy and
community service, efforts that “were grounded in the Confucian moral
imperative of paternalist social responsibility”.^35 These activities allied
them with the scholar-gentry and the ofβicials in a common effort to care
for the general populace. On account of their wealth, merchants were
- Sus an Mann, Local Merchants and the Chinese Bureaucracy, 1750‒ 1950
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), pp. 12, 20. - This idea is drawn from R. Eric Reidenbach, Ethics and Proϔits: A Convergence
of Corporate America’s Economic and Social Responsibilities (Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989), p. 91. - Wang Gungwu, China and the Chinese Overseas (Singapore: Times Academic
Press, 1991), pp. 182, 186. - See L iu Kuang-ching’s preface to Yü Ying-shih, Chung-kuo ching-shih tsung-jiao
lun-li, p. 30; see also p. 131. - Yü Yin g-shih, Chung-kuo ching-shih tsung-jiao lun-li, p. 59.
- William T. Rowe, Hankow: Conϔlict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796‒ 1895
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), p. 91.
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