Terminology and research situation

What are referred to as “Chinese guilds” are not quite the equivalent of European guilds. Chinese trade and craft associations possessed similar functions but in institutional and political settings rather different from those of their European counterparts, and were first introduced as “guilds” during the nineteenth century by foreign authors who conducted business with them directly or investigated them in scholarly research.Footnote 2 A second wave of research interest followed in the 1920s,Footnote 3 and since the 1930s Japanese historians of China have used the phonetic rendering girudo.Footnote 4 In Chinese, the generic term hanghui, meaning “trade-line associations”, has been applied as a translation of the term “guild” since then.Footnote 5

But the term hanghui was rarely used contemporaneously, which is one reason why its application to the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing “guilds” has been criticized since the 1980s.Footnote 6 Moreover, to some scholars on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, the term hanghui, as a translation of “guild”, seemed to relegate Chinese trade and craft associations to the level of the supposedly feudalistic, monopolistic, and capitalism-impeding corporations which, in the view of Karl Marx, was what the European guilds were.Footnote 7 They prefer more explicit synthetic terms, such as gongshangye tuanti (meaning “craft and trade associations”), or they make do without a generic term and refer instead to the original designations of huiguan and gongsuo. The term hanghui is still used in some recent publications,Footnote 8 but more Chinese historians tend to outline the differences between their indigenous trade and craft associations and European jierte, which is the phonetic rendering of “guild”. Notwithstanding those reservations, in Western studies of Chinese history the term “Chinese guild” for trade and craft associations is still in general use.

As well as huiguan in its meaning of “assembly houses” and gongsuo meaning “public halls”, Chinese guilds were called bang, or “mutual help associations”, or were named after their places of assembly, such as Confucian academies, shuyan, or after locations of Daoist and popular religious worship. The list in the appendix shows that the most common designations were gongsuo, which indicates mainly associations for those with the same occupation, and huiguan, referring to common-origin associations of people of the same local origin, often also rendered as Landsmannschaften.

Most huiguan outside Peking increasingly acquired economic functions as places where merchant or craft associations convened to coordinate their activities, and they functioned as hostels, restaurants, entertainment centres, and places of reference for those seeking work.Footnote 9 That means they are important indicators for migrational patterns between specific regions. On the Upper Yangzi, especially in Sichuan, huiguan channelled peasant immigration from the other provinces. The huiguan in the capital, by contrast, mainly served as hostels and liaison offices for fellow countrymen who stayed in Peking on official business or for academic formation and examination.Footnote 10 About 400 huiguan are reported for Peking in the late Qing, but only an estimated 10 to 20 per cent were commercial or craft associations.Footnote 11

Between the early seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, within Peking there was a certain amount of segregation between scholar-officials and merchants even from the same locales as both groups were attracted to different areas of the spacious capital, but their different social standings might have played a role. In 1712, for instance, a group of Canton merchants built their own huiguan in Peking in order to keep themselves apart from the scholar-officials in Canton.Footnote 12 The total figure in Belsky’s estimate for late Qing and early Republican huiguan is at least 2,000.Footnote 13

More recently, Western research into huiguan and Landsmannschaften has focused on their political role in nation building. The studies by Rowe,Footnote 14 Goodman,Footnote 15 and Belsky set out from the question as to whether common-origin ties led to particularism and impeded an autonomous citizenship, as Max Weber assumed.Footnote 16 Rowe’s study on Hankou, Goodman’s for Shanghai, and Belsky’s for Peking all came to the conclusion that Weber erred in his view, and have developed instead models of multiple identities to show that native-place ties could enhance identification with the host city and, at a later stage, with the nation-state. In recent Chinese research, the end of the guilds and their transformation into chambers of commerce in the larger framework of a transition to a civil society have attracted the attention of scholars such as Ma Min and Zhu Ying, Chen Zhongping, Peng Nansheng, and Wang Xiang.Footnote 17

Constitutive factors, definitions, and origins

In the opinion of most researchers, the constituent elements of Qing guilds are a common-interest group of merchants or artisans, a commonly owned, or rented, place of assembly, written regulations, and recognition by the local administration. William Rowe points out that the last three characteristics were “signals” for the transition of a guild to formal organizational status.Footnote 18 Qiu Pengsheng outlines the process of “formalization” of the Suzhou guilds as follows: individual artisans or merchants mobilize colleagues on grounds of common home, religious beliefs, and the necessity of mutual help, to form a group. They raise funds for a meeting place and seek the recognition of the local administration. In a second step, the group negotiates and formalizes measures for the protection and use of its common property.Footnote 19

The origins of the Chinese guilds established in the sixteenth century can be found in associations of travelling merchants, aliens who with increased geographic mobility and trade between regions started to settle down nearer their sales markets. Such autonomous initiatives stand in stark contrast to earlier types of business associations (hang “[business] street/line”, zuo “manufacturers”, tuan “associations”) which had been installed by order of the government since the eighth century.Footnote 20

The earlier associations had served the government in recruiting artisans for public works and to coordinate delivery of taxes in kind by merchants, and contributed to urban security. As cities expanded, it was no longer practicable to maintain the concept of one trade line per street, and that probably led to the formation of voluntary merchant associations beyond government-ordained restrictions.Footnote 21 The numbers of such guilds are often given, approximately, as 36, 72, 120, and 360, implying their great variety.Footnote 22

One diary of the Southern Song (1128–1276) provisory capital, Lin’an, refers to “414” hang, which could refer to individual shops,Footnote 23 while local histories name 6 markets and 11 business quarters of the hang and tuan type as well as one printing and publishing quarter.Footnote 24 Official writings and local histories of the Tang (608–906), Song (960–1276), and Yuan (1276–1368) dynasties record some of the names, locations, products sold or made, and activities of those associations, but no guild epigraphy exists comparable to that from the sixteenth century and later. Scattered evidence suggests that the meeting places of the early “guilds” were temples, such as the silk-loom god temple established between 1078 and 1085 in Suzhou, while one of the earliest references to a guild of the gongsuo type mentions the guild house of the silk weavers of Wu Prefecture, that is, Suzhou, dating from 1295.Footnote 25

The link between the early guilds and those founded after the mid-Ming is tenuous however. In the early phase of twentieth-century guild studies, Japanese and Chinese scholars assumed a continuous development from the Tang and Song to the Ming and Qing guilds, especially because the Ming and Qing guilds in the cities referred to themselves as hang.Footnote 26 The view of those early scholars has since been refuted on the ground that in their own epigraphic writings the Ming and Qing guilds do not claim origins prior to the late Ming.Footnote 27

The rise of the Ming guilds coincides with the decline of the system of obligatory labour that had served local and central governments since the foundation of the Chinese empire in the third century BCE. From the late seventeenth century, work services as a rule were no longer requisitioned without payment, and especially during the time of the Qing dynasty governments were prepared to pay market rates (or near market rates) for labour wages and for finished products.Footnote 28

The new type of guilds from the sixteenth century onward still coordinated the merchants’ and artisans’ obligations to the government, but that was not the main reason for their foundation, which was rather to regulate access and homogenize markets and opportunities for the benefit of their members, since private markets and interregional trade had expanded greatly during the late Ming. Depending on the lens of historical inspection applied, the differences between merchant and craft associations of the Tang to the Yuan dynasties and guilds from the late Ming until the Republic might seem less distinct.

The two subsequent types of association create a contrast, as instruments for government control of the economy in the early phase from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries, as against independent foundations intended for the convenience of merchants and artisans from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. However, to a certain extent the original intention and eventual development seem to have become inverted. Song and Yuan merchant associations might develop into powerful players wielding great influence on not just the urban economy,Footnote 29 while guilds during the late Qing would cooperate closely with municipal authorities, complement them, or sometimes even supersede them.

The early Ming government continued to divide the business quarters into hang, for instance in Peking, and exerted tight control over merchants’ and artisans’ mobility.Footnote 30 The earliest instances of the new guilds can be found in the fifteenth century,Footnote 31 but more solid evidence is available from the Wanli era of the Ming dynasty from 1573–1619 and later. One of the first aims of such associations was to support each other with information and bypass local brokers and middlemen, and guilds most often formed huiguan and were based on the membership criterion of common geographic origin.

In the other dominant form of guilds, based on the principle of common occupation and usually designated as gongsuo, common origin might well play a role but it was not a requirement. A marked difference between Chinese and European guilds is the fact that it was not necessary to be a formally registered citizen of a particular city or placeFootnote 32 in order to become a guild member, but – at least for the huiguan type – it was necessary to belong to a particular place of origin.

Not all guilds or protoguilds provided guild houses, regulations, and official recognition.Footnote 33 Most of the guilds that do feature all three criteria were founded or reorganized in the late nineteenth century and show a certain sophistication in their organization that was due to the growing number of interested persons and enterprises. As we shall see in the present volume, their level of formalization ensures particular comparability with Ottoman and European and guilds, even if the latter were all but defunct by the time the Chinese guilds reached their apex. It does not, however, represent the whole range of “collective action” (De Moor) which was deployed in the crafts and in commerce.

When we widen the perspective to include east and south-east Asia, we find huiguan in Japan and south-east Asia established by Chinese merchants, mainly from the provinces of maritime China, Fujian, and Guangdong, who traded overseas. As within China, their activities were not restricted to economic purposes; they worked as quasi-diplomatic missions too.Footnote 34

A further question is whether the Chinese guild model was adopted in neighbouring countries. As shown in Mary Louise Nagata’s contribution, it was not taken on in Japan, and to only a certain extent in Korea, while in Vietnam the so-called “36 business streets” in the capital Than-long, which still exist today in what is modern Hanoi, were specialized in particular trades and crafts. Than-long had held a population of over 100,000 since the fifteenth century, and was the country’s major manufacturing centre.Footnote 35 The “business streets” are often rendered as the “36 guilds”, but the figure of 36 rings familiar with the earlier Chinese pattern of 36, 72, or 360 guilds: there are certainly more than 36 streets today.Footnote 36 The artisan and trade centre dates back to the thirteenth century, the “streets”, which as with the Chinese are designated as hang, to the fifteenth century.Footnote 37 The importance of the Chinese impact on the Vietnamese structure is disputed, but people from the same native villages settled in urban artisan and trading neighbourhoods, so parallels with the Chinese pattern can at least be assumed.

Distribution in time and space

The “Short Table of the Chinese Craft and Commercial Guilds, 1655–1911” contains a list of about 600 dated and 130 undated guild houses and associations, but since few of the stele inscriptions which form an important source for Chinese guild history were considered for its compilation, it is certainly not complete and requires enlargement.Footnote 38 We may assume that it gives an initial impression that is not too far off the mark for features such as distribution over time and space as well as the regions of origin of the guild members. According to the list (see Table 2 in the Appendix), guild concentration was highest in the Lower, Middle, and Upper Yangzi in the provinces of Jiangsu, Hubei, Hunan, and Sichuan, in the cities of Suzhou, Shanghai, Changsha, Hankou, and Chongqing, and along the coast with Guangdong, Guangxi, Fujian, Zhejiang, Zhili, and Fengtian. They were the richest and economically most advanced areas in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the most treaty ports. Further research will have to focus on inland regions which seem quite poorly represented, such as Sichuan, Jiangxi, and Yunnan, not forgetting MongoliaFootnote 39 and Manchuria at the north-western and north-eastern frontiers. Evidence from Foshan stele inscriptions shows that at least ten further guilds that possessed guild houses should be added for the industrial region near Canton.Footnote 40

Typical regions of origin were the coastal provinces of Guangdong, Zhejiang, Fujian, Jiangsu, Shandong, and Zhili, as well as the home provinces of the famous local bankers, the Shanxi merchants, and the most efficient salt traders, the Huizhou merchants from Anhui.

Distribution over time is shown in Figure 3 in the Appendix. The “short table” gives the names of only twelve guild houses founded during the Ming, nine of them in Peking and one each in Hunan, Suzhou, and Foshan near Canton. Nine were expressly huiguan, and with the exception of the potters’ guild in Foshan they were all merchant guilds. Further investigation will undoubtedly bring more foundations to light, especially along those great traffic arteries the Yangzi and the Grand Canal. Closer examination of the Ming huiguan may well show that outside Peking too more were built and used by merchants than is known so far.

However, not much information will be available as to whether they had guild regulations and thus displayed all three qualifications for a “guild” stipulated above. The slight rise in the number of craft guilds in the eighteenth century has been attributed to the need of the government to enlist the help of employers against their unruly workers. The much bigger increase after the mid-nineteenth century was caused by the growing business and work opportunities engendered by the presence of foreign capital, and in the last few years of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the rise of native capitalist-style production and its competition with traditional manufacture and commerce.

Functions and internal organization

Like most guilds worldwide, the Chinese variety combined economic, social, and religious functions. Economically, they regulated wages and prices and tried to secure monopolies in their territories by inclusion of all the actors in the trade. As a rule, guild regulations stipulated that rather than keeping newcomers out, everybody in the trade should be forced into the guilds.Footnote 41 Other important tasks were to secure access to raw materials and the training of the labour force.

Guild regulations most often fixed the duration of apprenticeship, three years as a rule, but did not specify exact requirements for “learning the trade”. Since the number of apprentices a workshop could take on was obviously limited, often to just one person, the three-year duration actually served to regulate wage costs and work quality, rather than the period of actual training,Footnote 42 and Chinese guilds did not formally test the master’s qualifications, for whoever had funds to pay guild entrance fees and open a shop could do so.

The economic role of the Chinese guilds has been interpreted in two divergent ways. One view is that they enabled merchants to make a profit by reducing transaction costs, the costs incurred through brokers for example, and therefore expedited trade and production. The other view is that by restricting the number of players and generally curbing competition, they impeded the free flow of trade and in due course stifled the rise of capitalism.Footnote 43

The social functions of the guilds included the provision to members of welfare facilities such as communal cemeteries, elementary schools, and some relief of poverty, as well as municipal services such as firefighting, policing, and maintenance of general infrastructure including streets and bridges. Last but by no means least, they might provide entertainment in the form of theatrical productions or processions for guild patrons.Footnote 44 Naturally, not all guilds could fulfil all those tasks for everyone, but at least in Hankou, where commerce thrived in the second half of the nineteenth century, charity and community service was not restricted to guild members.Footnote 45

William Rowe has discussed the specific devotional piety which served as a form of self-assertion and created feelings of accountability to the patron saints of guilds. In nineteenth-century Hankou, virtually every guild was a religious fraternity too.Footnote 46 The observers of the Peking guilds were less convinced of the importance of religion in the twentieth-century capital; but Timothy Bradstock, reading the same sources, concludes that if religious service was not practised, that was because of lack of funds rather than disenchantment or scepticism.Footnote 47

As a rule, Qing guilds were organized into management boards, with directors recruited from among members. Cases of rotational leadership are known as well as cases where guild offices were hereditary.Footnote 48 A British observer in the late nineteenth century found that the rotational system showed traits of “almost pure democracy”, as opposed to the English guilds which were subjected to oligarchic rule. In the most recent monograph on Chinese guilds, Peng Nansheng too reflects on an organization which combined “rudimentary democracy, authoritarianism, and customary law”.Footnote 49 He sees the democratic elements in the yearly rotating directorship system of some guilds and the elections in othersFootnote 50 in the fact that a quorum was necessary for important decisions and that in some guilds secret ballots could be used in votes for controversial decisions.Footnote 51

The tasks of boards comprised arbitration among the members and active support in cases of official encroachments or unfounded customer claims. Moreover, in the course of the late nineteenth century, some of the common-origin guilds started to include smaller guilds or networks (bang).Footnote 52 As they gained huge memberships over several thousands of people and considerable corporate property in the form of large guild houses and other buildings, corporate tasks became increasingly complex. In guilds of that size, directors and managers had to deal with financial matters and the allocation of expenses for building and maintenance of guild houses and other things such as cemeteries and schools, or arranging sacrifices, theatrical performances, plenary meetings, or banquets.

John Burgess, who took the opportunity to interview representatives of most Peking guilds in the 1920s, summarized the most salient features of those guilds as follows:Footnote 53 guilds were local in character and field of operation; their general objective was to conserve the welfare of all the members of the respective groups; in the guild, the relationship between employers, employees, and apprentices was close and personal; the intention of the guilds was to limit unrestricted competition between members; they exerted solidarity against opposing bodies, such as other guilds, customers, or employers, and the administration; and they owned corporate property derived from contributions by the members.

In contrast to so essentially positive and nostalgic a view, authors such as Peng Zeyi have pointed out the harsher sides of guild practices in the late nineteenth century, such as demanding heavy accession fees from apprentices who had finished their training periods, or cooperating in many ways with the authorities to the disadvantage of their membership.Footnote 54

In fact, when reading an overview of the functions that European guilds fulfilled,Footnote 55 we find most similarities are on the economic side. Cultural and religious functions varied in expression rather than in substance, but the differences seemed greater in the fields of training, education, and qualification, and the inclusion or exclusion of artisans or merchants because of genderFootnote 56 or geographic origin, and most conspicuously, the political and legal setting of the guilds.

Relationship to the government

As in the case of guild functions, opinions are divided on the relations between government and guilds. Some studies stress the importance of the recognition of guilds by local authorities. Bradstock assumes that all the known craft guilds were sanctioned by the local authorities, and that in fact their main rationale was to assist the government in the administration of commerce and crafts, and especially to control unruly elements.Footnote 57 He argues that the rising numbers of guilds after the mid-eighteenth century coincided with the problem of population growth happening without any concomitant increase in administrative personnel.Footnote 58 “Relieving the government of some of its burden”, in Bradstock’s terms, meant first and foremost ensuring municipal security by controlling the workforce to prevent it from striking and rioting. Local administrations would rather depend on employers’ guilds than allow journeymen or unskilled labourers to form their own associations. There are well-described cases such as those of the Suzhou calenderers, who in 1715 were refused permission to register a journeymen’s guild because the local government and the employers feared them as notorious strikers and troublemakers.Footnote 59

Peng Zeyi discusses the intensified control of guilds by local governments after the Opium Wars in the mid-nineteenth century, when guilds were required to collect a transit tariff called lijin and had to perform municipal work.Footnote 60 Peng Nansheng, citing four examples from Suzhou, insists that “private” – in other words “secret” – guilds not acknowledged by the local government were strictly forbidden.Footnote 61 A secretly founded guild of tobacco processors was banned in 1867 for trying to monopolize the market. In the same year, in reaction to a complaint by eighteen candle-makers’ shops that twelve individuals had tried to organize a guild and “incite the masses [i.e. the workers] against their employers”, their association too was declared illegal. In 1870, Suzhou brocade weavers were not allowed to “try to establish a guildhouse [gongsuo], set up a guild leader and guild regulations, and molest their colleagues by enforcing donations.” The guild was also forbidden from reopening under another name or from defining itself as a religious community. In another case, a magistrate prohibited the establishment of a second guild for printers and dyers on the grounds that the previous guild was functioning well and was active in charitable work, so there was no need for a second guild. But while the local authorities enforced their power of sanction, the guilds themselves could expand their autonomy in the framework of cooperation with officials.Footnote 62

A contrary position was expressed in one of the earliest studies on the Chinese guilds, by Hosea Morse, Statistical Secretary of the Inspectorate General of Customs in China, an institution founded by foreign traders and which collected maritime trade taxes between 1854 and the late 1940s on behalf of the Chinese state. Morse regarded the Chinese government as being a caretaker state that simply collected taxes and provided security services by installing police forces, and he stressed the independence of the guilds from the government: “The trade gilds […] have moulded their own organization, sought their own objects, devised their own regulations, and enforced them in their own way and by their own methods.”Footnote 63 To Morse we owe the frequently cited dictum “The guilds were never within the law: they grew up outside the law; and as associations they neither recognized the law nor claimed its protection.”Footnote 64

Actually, Qing legislation issued by the central government does not include any provisions on guilds. Legal texts may call for vigilance against “monopolistic formation of cartels”,Footnote 65 but the manner of converting that warning into action was entrusted more or less to the judgement of local authorities. The local authorities, not the central government, interacted with the guilds, which explains why the handicraft regulations (jiangzuo zeli) issued by the central government for the officials who managed state building and production contain no references to guilds, although the artisans recruited from the open market were certainly organized into guilds. In the guild stele writings, only a few small clues suggest that the central government was even aware of the existence of the guilds.Footnote 66

In Hankou, the advantages of registering a guild rather than suffering administrative coercion prompted guilds to seek official recognition.Footnote 67 A registered guild could appeal to the local authorities if they saw their rights being infringed or their collective property violated. Some of the smaller guilds preferred to stay anonymous, but the much bigger Huizhou huiguan in Hankou applied for official recognition only twenty-seven years after its foundation.Footnote 68 All the same, informal existence was possible if a guild could make do without administrative protection.

How can these contradictory views of severe control versus casual laissez-faire of local governments be reconciled? To a certain extent, they reflect regional variance. From early on, Suzhou was one of the most important centres of manufacture, especially for silk and cotton textiles. Conflicts between employers and workers are recorded in the Suzhou guild epigraphy from the early eighteenth century, and it is conceivable that Suzhou authorities more than the local governments in other regions would try to gain close control of workers’ guilds. For Hankou, on the other hand, at least one case has been quoted were a guild – that of the itinerant fish peddlers – was not prohibited, but its exclusive sales rights were not acknowledged by the local authorities.Footnote 69

However, on the whole William Rowe found more instances of government support for guilds and shows attempts by them to court Hankou and provincial officials actively, for instance by conferring honorary titles on them.Footnote 70 Moreover, the Hankou guilds since pre-Taiping days had started to form alliances that eventually culminated in the “All-Hankou Guild Confederation” in which over a hundred separate guilds participated. They took over most of the city administration after the military mutiny in 1911 that led to the collapse of the Qing dynasty,Footnote 71 so from the picture emerging from Hankou it might well be said that officials there were more accommodating towards the guilds than those of Suzhou.

Guild confederations as powerful as those in Hankou were not common in other Chinese cities with high concentrations of guilds,Footnote 72 where the balance of power tended to depend more on the distribution of commercial and craft guilds in the respective localities. We may safely assume that merchant guilds possessed better resources and more possibilities to make the authorities act on their behalf.

In sum, cooperation and interconnection of local officials and guilds were certainly much more complex than Morse and later Max Weber believed, but the actual situations undoubtedly varied from place to place.

Towards the twentieth century

In recent years, the transition of the guilds from “traditional” to “modern” has been researched extensively by Chinese scholars. The establishment of chambers of commerce in the late Qing is a focal point for investigating the transition and further fate of the guilds. In an important case study, Chen Zhongping has described the beginnings of the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce. Unlike what occurred in Hankou, guild alliances did not exist in the cities and market towns of the Yangzi Delta. In a complex process of cooperation and competition between elite merchants and local, provincial, and central governments, in 1904 the Qing state finally included on the agenda of reforms for its “New Policies” the need to foster commerce through the chambers of commerce. The government allowed the chambers to be organized and to have their leadership recruited from and elected by elite merchants, and the role of guilds was not specified in the 1904 decree. In practice, not all members but only the leaders of the most influential guilds were able to join the chambers of commerce too.Footnote 73

After the fall of the Qing the subsequent Republican governments in Peking and Nanking tried to strengthen state control of commerce and industries and by their legislation gradually eliminated the traditional forms of association.

The 1918 “regulations on industrial and commercial associations”

The first legal provisions that concern Chinese trade associations in particular trades, the “Regulations on Industrial and Commercial Associations”Footnote 74 were promulgated in 1918 by the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce of the Peking government. While enterprises in handicraft production were expressly excluded,Footnote 75 the main intention was to establish special new associations for industries and commercial branches which until then had had no associations. Pre-existing trade associations, such as huiguan and gongsuo, were allowed to continue operating but were expected to submit their charters to local authorities for official inspection.Footnote 76 The new associations had to have their charters endorsed as well.

Since the 1918 regulations allowed the coexistence of old and new associations and excluded handicraft trades, they contained no incentives for existing craft guilds to reorganize themselves. Interviews carried out in 1926 and 1927Footnote 77 reflect a situation where the legal existence of traditional handicraft guilds was still acknowledged, but guild people already felt a crisis approaching – not only in the form of mechanization, but also the threat to their self-determination posed by the authorities. As the bonds of traditional guild regulations grew weaker, members lost interest in guild meetings and common religious worship,Footnote 78 until the previous rules could hardly be enforced and guildsmen became increasingly reluctant to punish offenders or report non-members.Footnote 79

A detailed analysis shows that two types of guild were disappearing: those of artisans and traders whose goods were no longer in demand, such as makers of accessories for the male hairstyle of the queue – obligatory under the Manchu Qing dynasty, but abandoned thereafter – sword makers, and the like, and those which offered business prospects too huge to allow themselves to be restricted by guild rules. In Peking a case in point was the production of rugs, for which an export market had opened.Footnote 80 Generally, however, industrial production and the changed labour relations played a less important role there than in big treaty port cities along the coast. In Shanghai, for instance, small workshops were driven from the market much sooner, and “the guilds went with them” – like the former Shanghai cotton guild. At the same time, new guilds opened for electricians, and car and bicycle dealers who were “organized along the same lines as the ordinary Peking commercial guild”.Footnote 81

While that might apply to small-scale merchant and common-occupation craft guilds, the huiguan and more notorious associations of the bang, or network type, especially the Green network (qingbang), for many decades fulfilled a particular function as job agencies for contract labourers in mechanized production such as shipbuilding, the armaments industry, and cotton mills.Footnote 82 For skilled labourers, membership of the occupational guild was obligatory. The guilds collected fees, set levels of wages, and did not allow for individual wage agreements, while with the common-origin guilds, membership was not obligatory nor were members closely controlled.

Figure 1

Theatre stage of the Zhengyi ci gold and silver smelters’ guild house in Peking. The guild was founded by silver smelters from Zhejiang province in 1667. The theatre is now renovated and used for Peking opera performances. Source: Shen Nianle, Liulichang shihua (Historical narrative of the Liulichang [quarter in Peking]) (Beijing, 2001), p. 106.

Figure 2

The renovated Zhengyi ci stage in 2000. Source: Webpage by Masahiro Nishimura, Pekin no dentōteki ‘xilou’ (Peking traditional opera houses), http://www003.upp.so-net.ne.jp/jyoururi/beijing/zheng_yi1.jpeg, installed September 2000, accessed November 2007.

Common-origin guilds were open to all social groups, not just workers, but their presidents were always officials from the respective home region and control over members was not severely enforced there. Common-occupation guilds and common-origin huiguan were often interlinked.Footnote 83 Associations such as the Green network usually organized temporary unskilled labour.

The transitional period lasted from the 1860s at least until the 1930s, and it took the trade unions, mostly organized by the Communist Party or the Guomindang (National People’s Party), considerable trouble to supersede completely the traditional ways of labour organization.Footnote 84

In the power struggles between the Guomindang and the Communist Party, Chiang Kaishek had used the Green network to suppress the communist trade unions in Shanghai during the Northern Expedition in April 1927, an action that set a violent end to the first United Front between the Guomindang and the communists. In the eighteenth century the Green network had emerged as an occupational association of boatmen with a rigid organizational structure.Footnote 85

In the non-mechanized handicraft sector too employers’ and employees’ or workers’ associations were now distinctly parting company. Journeymen’s guilds had fought for their right to exist since the early eighteenth century, but their numbers now were few. The “Short Table” contains six references to existing journeymen’s guilds,Footnote 86 and two more are mentioned by Niida and Bradstock,Footnote 87 all founded in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Similarly to the case of the trade associations, in the transitional phase in the second and third decades of the twentieth century the “traditional” journeymen’s associations increased, and at the same time “modern” labour unions were established under the growing influence of the Comintern, the Guomindang, and the Communist Party. The differences between the two lay in their scope – labour unions united several trade branches, while the journeymen’s guilds represented and negotiated only for the members of a particular branch.

Power and decision-making structures in unions were more democratic, while in the pre-existing guilds masters frequently were the ones who decided among themselves questions of price fixing, wages, or hours of work.Footnote 88 Moreover, membership of trade unions had to remain voluntary, another factor different from the traditional system in which informal persuasion and pressure could be applied to force everybody in the trade or from a particular home region to join the guild.

Instances of the fusion of guilds with labour unions were reported, for in fact building up the labour unions, the legalization of strikes, arbitration by government commissions, and the principle of voluntary membership were some of the basic policies of the Guomindang which it enforced from its power base in Canton.Footnote 89 A 1927 survey carried out by the Canton city government shows that of 180 labour unions, 74 were reorganized guilds.Footnote 90

Apprenticeship, another vital sector of the earlier guilds, was evolving into a system whereby the rights and duties of apprentices were regulated more clearly, and which entailed more theoretical training in schools that were often operated or supervised by the government. Finally, the newly established chambers of commerce – by 1915 869 foundations in cities and towns were reportedFootnote 91 – became control organs that supervised the activities of the old guilds as well as the new trade associations. In Peking, the chambers became increasingly powerful. They collected taxes, and, in the court of the Chamber of Commerce, arbitrated disputes among guild members, matters which had formerly been settled by neutral members from within the guild. The chambers, in contrast to the guilds and guild federations in the cities, were interlinked at the provincial and national levels.

The 1927 “regulations on craft associations”

After the National People’s Party had consolidated its government in Nanking in 1927, economic development ranked high on its agenda. The “Regulations on Craft Associations”Footnote 92 were promulgated late in 1927, and while the legislation of the previous government focused more on reform of the merchant associations, the new regulations formally put an end to the traditional craft guilds too. They stipulated that all existing guilds should be reorganized and should then report to the authorities.Footnote 93 That ruling was to be applied to all production enterprises, regardless of whether they were mechanized or handicraft manufacturers. In any administrative region the associations were the sole representatives of their respective trade branch,Footnote 94 and, as in the 1918 regulations, the associations were obliged to set up regulations according to a set pattern. Moreover, they were expected to cooperate with government authorities by answering questionnaires on the situation of their trade.Footnote 95

Together with the 1929 “Law on Industrial and Commercial Associations” (Gong shang tongye gonghui fa) and the 1930 “Detailed Regulations for the Execution of the Law on Industrial and Commercial Associations” (Gong shang tongye gonghui fa shixing xice), the new body of commercial legislation now emphasized compulsory membership and cooperation with the government and secured the inclusion of all firms in a certain branch.Footnote 96 The old-style guilds were to be reorganized within one year and had to report to a supervisory committee (Shangren tuanti zhengli weiyuanhui). Almost all the associations were renamed with a unified style.

In the Republic of China the actions of commercial associations were closely monitored and shown in public municipal statistics. By 1934 Wuhan, the amalgamation of the previous Hankou and its adjacent districts Hanyang and Wuchang, had 159 new associations, Shanghai 236, of which 40 were industrial (figures for 1936), and Chengdu in Sichuan had 111 by 1939. By 1933, a total of 4,185 new associations was recorded in 21 provinces,Footnote 97 certainly more than even the closest reading of Qing texts and steles could ever reveal. The process of transformation seems to have been concluded by the 1930s.

Guilds in transition

During the 1940s, another large-scale investigation of traditional guilds and their successors, the trade and craft associations, was conducted in Peking by the Japanese law historian, Niida Noboru and his colleagues and students. They visited about fifty sites of former guilds, recorded the stele texts they found there and interviewed guild representatives. Their interviews show that little enthusiasm was felt for the new trade associations, while nostalgia for the guilds remained strong.

Why was that so? More than anything it was because the new associations had less autonomy than the guilds. One informant from the barbers’ association said that the statutes of their association had been forced on them in 1942, but that they were not considered the “real” rules of the trade.Footnote 98 To a representative of the hatters’ guild, inheritance of leadership positions seemed preferable to rotational directorship.Footnote 99 Several interviewees confirmed that belonging to an association brought little or no benefit,Footnote 100 and that led to a situation in which the old huiguan and the “modern” associations coexisted – sometimes in competition, but sometimes complementing each other too.

The rule of sole representation of one trade branch was sometimes avoided by declaring the reason for association as being common geographic descent rather than common occupation. A Shanghai guidebook published in 1930 lists nine guilds in the tobacco trade, nine dyers’ guilds, and three lacquerware guilds, many of which in their names suggest common-origin associations.Footnote 101 In general, guild members were friendlier disposed towards the huiguan, which retained some of their social, religious, and cultural functions. They rejected the new associations because they considered them to be instruments of the authorities, which in Japanese-occupied Peking restricted access to raw materials and fixed prices.

The transition from guilds to trade associations might not have roused as much antipathy in other cities with bigger industrial sectors where the guilds, especially the huiguan, were not as omnipresent as they were in Peking. Clearly, representatives of small-scale handicraft business who had known the traditional system, with values such as solidarity, relative economic autonomy, and guild morals, would resent top-down reforms which restricted their range of self-determination and swept away the pre-existing hierarchy and didactic methods – to little avail, however. After the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the last remaining traditional guilds were phased out.

Short case study: Jingdezhen

What can we know about the guilds beyond the great and well-documented centres of Peking, Suzhou, Shanghai, and Hankou? Despite the lack of documentation, a look at industrial Jingdezhen can illustrate the obvious existence of guilds, the qualities of protoguilds, and their survival well into the twentieth century.

As can be seen from the “Short Table”, Jiangxi province in general does not rank highly among host regions for guilds. For the market town of Jingdezhen, the biggest porcelain production centre during the Qing and, until the late eighteenth century, the largest in the world, only the two associations “Perfect Porcelain” and “Celebrated Porcelain” are recorded. In the town’s heyday in the eighteenth century, about a million workers are said to have been engaged in the porcelain trade there, so we might ask why so little Jingdezhen guild activity is recorded in Peng Zeyi’s collection. Artisan and commercial activities of trade lines (hang) and networks (bang) are mentioned here and there in Qing contemporary writings on Jingdezhen, as well as in surveys and retrospectives of the Republican era, but stele inscriptions or other contemporary guild documents have not been preserved.

However, the customary rules of the trades were recorded in local gazetteers and monographs on porcelain production in Jingdezhen, and they report that division of labour was highly developed, with at least eight major production lines: kiln firing; forming of the blanks on the wheel or in moulds; painting of ornaments; production of saggars, the protective clay containers used for firing porcelain objects; packing and transporting; forming and attaching the standing rim of the vessels; production of tools for porcelain making, especially clay-working knives; service trades such as cart building, and the horse guild. Those were further split into thirty-six subdivisions, which explains the saying that any finished porcelain vessel had passed through seventy-two hands – also an echo of the preferred figures for Song dynasty hang within one city.

There are no easily identifiable formal guilds, but rather protoguilds that roughly tally with the subdivisions, so that basically as many trade networks (hangbang) existed as trades (hang). The difficulty is to assign those networks to localities and to guild houses, which in Jingdezhen were of the huiguan (common-origin) and shuyuan (Confucian-academy) type rather than gongsuo (common occupation).

About half the remaining huiguan had alternative names of Confucian academies. The geographic distribution of the original regions of members of those houses is as follows: Jiangxi (same province, different prefectures) 10; Guangdong (neighbouring provinces) 2; Anhui 2; Zhejiang 1; Hubei 1; Hunan 1; Fujian 1; Jiangsu (Lower Yangzi) 3; Shanxi (remote North-western) 1. The date of origin of the houses is not recorded, but the names of a few of them occur in eighteenth-century texts.

Also known are the home regions of ceramic workers within Jiangxi province. DuchangFootnote 102 people were engaged in almost all trades of high, medium, and low skill, as kiln workers, formers of round forms, kiln fillers, kiln builders, painters, and saggar makers. Potters who produced open forms came from Fuzhou about 200 kilometres away by water; only the top quality kiln builders of the Wei family came from Jingdezhen itself, but they were later superseded by the Yus from Duchang. Those who performed the highly skilled trade of forming and carving vases came from Fengcheng, about 250 kilometres away. Workers in low-skilled trades, such as saggar makers, came at first from Leping and Poyang, relatively nearby at 25–40 kilometres away, but later from Duchang, Fuzhou, and Raozhou too. Packers of small items came from all five northern and central prefectures of Jiangxi province.Footnote 103

Information is relatively scarce for the networks of artisans.Footnote 104 “Old” and “new” networks were comprised of people from Duchang and Poyang; the “Perfect Porcelain” and “Celebrated Porcelain” network convened at the Jingyang Academy. “Perfect Porcelain” kiln workers specialized in pine-faggot kilns, while “Celebrated Porcelain” workers used brushwood kilns. The Jiangzhen guildhouseFootnote 105 was built with donations from the Duchang potters, but was not reserved for potters and was frequented by Duchang people who came to Jingdezhen for academic formation, so it came to be called “Old Southern Academy”.

Although guild regulations either did not exist or are not preserved, customary rules offer some insights into the activities of the networks. Most of them concern the riskier part of the production and distribution processes, namely firing, unloading of the kilns, and packing. Rules are recorded for the critical periods in the twelfth lunar month, when work was stopped, the beginning of work in the third lunar month, and the renewal of contracts or the dismissal of labourers and foremen in the seventh lunar month. When work was interrupted during the winter period, workers could return to their home regions, but some of them stayed behind.Footnote 106

Merchant networks, also called bang, are well documented for the twentieth century, twenty-six being reported for 1936,Footnote 107 and as business was thriving after the war years the networks increased to as many as seventy-six. According to one twentieth-century observer, owners of ceramic businesses had to be members of one or other of the guilds, or form a partnership in which one of the members belonged to a guild. The sanction of the guilds was required before a newcomer could begin manufacture, and the guild had to approve beforehand what type of ware could be made.Footnote 108

From the 1930s we have a relatively clear overview of trade associations classified by common occupation, but not formally registered as new-style craft associations. Twenty-one branches are listed under their traditional names, among them the venerable “Perfect Porcelain” and “Celebrated Porcelain”. They were all designated as she, which implies a sacrificial community.

The author of the Jingdezhen industrial history was obviously not favourably inclined to the associations. He informs us that they existed of old, but now did not have much to do. They merely congregated several times a year and offered sacrifices.Footnote 109 After the foundation of the People’s Republic, such associations were deemed even more dubious in retrospect. They seemed to be breeding grounds for the underground activities of secret societies, but such insinuations are formulated in the most generalized wayFootnote 110 so that the illegal potential of the old Jingdezhen guilds can hardly be accurately assessed. Nevertheless, the range of guild and protoguild activities, especially of the informal bang networks that were not officially registered, could include clandestine action and thus constitute the reverse side of their relationship with the government.

Guilds worldwide and research perspectives

Many of the features outlined above will seem familiar to guild historians worldwide, and in fact when studying overviews of European guild history the similarities seem to outweigh the differences.