Since the Republican era, Huizhou (southeast Anhui province) has been attracting the attention not only of those in China working in the extensive field of Huixue or Huizhou scholarship, but also of those in the West studying Chinese social and economic history—constituting what Professor Qitao Guo summarizes as the two camps of Sinophone and Anglophone studies on Huizhou in late imperial China (2). Guo’s latest book, Huizhou: Local Identity and Mercantile Lineage Culture in Ming China, is a study of the discursive formation of local Huizhou identity in Ming China. It revisits key questions addressed by social historians, including those about Chinese lineage formation and practice, state-society interactions, the “localist turn,” and the role of lineages in shaping relations between the state and local kinship society. Drawing on new Huizhou sources, the book adds the dimensions of intellectual, religious, and gender histories to these discussions, highlighting the interplay between discourse and social practice and between high and popular cultures.
Chapter 1 focuses on the prominent mid-Ming official Cheng Minzheng’s (1444–1499) commitment to promoting his ancestral place, Huizhou, through a series of localist endeavors, in particular his two major works, The Composite Genealogy of the Xin’an Cheng (Xin’an Chengshi tongzong shipu) and The Anthology of Xin’an Documents (Xin’an wenxian zhi). The Composite Genealogy set new standards for compiling subsequent Huizhou genealogies and, more importantly, allowed Cheng Minzheng to claim Huizhou ties for the two Cheng brothers, Cheng Hao (1032–1085) and Cheng Yi (1033–1107), two founders of Neo-Confucianism. The Anthology, a massive collection of writings by and biographical sketches of local worthies, highlighted eminent local surnames while including the two Cheng brothers and Zhu Xi (1130–1200) as descendants of Huizhou lineages. Thus, aside from enhancing the pedigree of the Cheng descent line in the region, the claimed kinship ties linked the formation of the local Huizhou kinship organization and consciousness with the empire-wide influence of the Cheng-Zhu philosophical tradition. Throughout this chapter, Guo emphasizes Cheng Minzheng’s dual outlook in shaping Huizhou identity: how he merged his localist endeavors with his concern for “all under heaven,” and endowed Huizhou with a larger role in the entire realm. This convergence fits the model of spreading Confucian virtue through the interconnection between personal, familial, regional, and empire-wide practices.
Chapter 2 examines the genealogical gazetteer, Prominent Lineages in Xin’an (Xin’an mingzu zhi, 1551), both in light of Cheng Minzheng’s legacy and as an embodiment of new developments in the projection of Huizhou’s self-identification. Huizhou came to present itself and identify as “a land of prominent lineages.” The inner core of Huizhou society, however, was composed of what Guo calls the “mercantile lineages” and their interconnected gentry–merchant–kinship interests. Thus, mercantile lineages began to celebrate not only those of eminent pedigree but also commoners, particularly righteous merchants and devoted kinswomen, as a means to inscribe new codes of ethics central to their long-term success. Concurrent with the discursive formation of lineage institutions, commercialization accelerated, and businesses expanded. Guo perceives the publication of Prominent Lineages in Xin’an as a significant factor driving the major lineages’ cooperation and victory in empire-wide social and commercial competition. By conveying social values and creating prominent affiliations, the compilation also shielded the Huizhou lineages from hostility against merchants. As a collectively compiled work, it represented a regional entity shared by all participating lineages. As an embodiment of mercantile lineage culture, it illuminates the interplay between kinship institutions and commercialization, and between locally concentrated and empire-wide interests.
Chapters 1 and 2 constitute Part 1 of Huizhou, generating a dynamic picture of localist endeavors that at once shaped a distinct Huizhou identity and deepened the interpenetration of the state and local society. The remaining three chapters, which make up Part 2, examine three manifestations of this Huizhou identity. Chapter 3 focuses on Wang Daokun (1523–1593), a well-known Huizhou scholar-official who, as Guo argues, became the spokesperson for Huizhou mercantile lineage culture. Two categories of Wang Daokun’s writings represent his approach: biographies of merchants and biographies of female moral exemplars. Writing these biographies was itself an act of constructing new mercantile lineage ethics, or of substantiating the ethical codes discussed in Chapter 2 in ways that further embedded the social success of Huizhou lineages in the local kinship tradition. The social strategy of alternating between Confucian learning and trade, for which Huizhou lineages were best known, relied on local mercantile lineage investment practices. Hence, the merchant virtue of jiexia (chivalrous righteousness and generosity) stood out in Wang Daokun’s fashioning of mercantile ethical codes, encouraging devotion to kinship even in situations of business loss or reduced wealth. Parallel to the merchant’s devotion to his kin was the Huizhou women’s devotion to their husbands and marital families: in compiling a new Biographies of Exemplary Women (Lienü zhuan),Wang Daokun celebrated, in particular, local chaste widows and martyred women (jielie). Here Guo begins to engage with gender history in China—a significant aspect of this book—by adding a prominent local dimension to the formation of the cult of female chastity: “it was in this stronghold of kinship settlements, as revealed in Wang Daokun’s writings, that kinswomen’s jielie practice reached a cultic level in the late Ming” (107). What this suggests to Guo is a new interpretation of the chastity cult, namely, “the causal link between lineage institutions and the chastity cult” (107).
Chapter 4 elaborates on this causal link by analyzing the data of demographic change in Huizhou lineages. Retrieved from a particularly well-compiled genealogy, The Branch Genealogy of the Censhandu Cheng in Xin’an, the demographic data show how expanding commercialization and the correspondingly increasing incidence of sojourning among Huizhou merchants changed the basic family structure, to the point that the nuclear family became the norm in late-Ming Huizhou. In these single-couple households, wives were subject to intensified lineage control while husbands pursued trade across the empire; as scholars already recognize, these Huizhou “sojourning merchants” grew into the largest trade diaspora in late imperial China. While intensified lineage control over the women in Huizhou may appear to be a familiar narrative, Guo’s approach of using data analysis as evidence for demographic change is new and worthy of acclaim. We may further wonder—in terms of selecting genealogies for data analysis—whether family arrangements and structures more complicated than those indicated by “sojourning merchants,” or husbands returning home only “once in every three years” (112), are also reflected in the data retrievable from the Huizhou genealogies. Yongtao Du’s recent study of the Huizhou diasporic communities and their “translocal practices” unveils a range of temporary and longer-term family arrangements and strategies in maintaining different homes, as a response to challenges posed by the trade diaspora.Footnote 1 Genealogies provide a trove of demographic data for analyzing the increasingly complex Huizhou family and lineage structures, and women’s place in them.Footnote 2 This chapter opens space for scholarly dialogue in this new direction.
Chapter 5 turns to the religious expression of Huizhou identity, examining the newly discovered late-Ming ritual handbook, Model Prayers to the Deities (Qishen zouge), as the “ritual code” of Huizhou that established the hierarchy of local deities headed by Wang Hua. The leading Huizhou patron deity from the Song onward, Wang Hua emerged during the Ming as the local proxy of the official City God and thus “localized” the Ming state religious system. Aside from providing rich insights into the local power balance and the interplay between the locality and the state, and between popular religion and Confucian ancestral worship, in this chapter Guo again draws attention to the gendered implications of Huizhou self-identification. One of the popular deities incorporated into the Huizhou ritual code was the Wuchang pentad spirit, whose duties included policing/protecting kinswomen and assuring safe childbirth. Guo relates this aspect of local deity worship to the changed family structure discussed in Chapter 4: Wuchang was the “enforcer” (152), on a symbolic level, of control over women as a means of safeguarding the family and lineage interests of the sojourning merchants.
Indeed, Guo’s conversations with gender historians in this book are especially thought-provoking. His quotation from Siyen Fei places the emphasis on discourse—in this case chastity biographies—as the trigger for social change in generating the chastity cult. Guo aligns Fei’s discursive emphasis with Dorothy Ko’s approach to the fetish of footbinding, finding in both “a new interpretive approach suggesting that representations call into being social practice just as much as, if not more than, they reflect it” (111). While this approach is relevant to empire-wide change, however, Guo believes that it is inadequate for understanding why certain regions, such as Huizhou, boasted stronger cultic practices. As he shows in Chapter 4, the regional prominence of the chastity cult has to be explained by demographic data analysis. The result of family residence patterns combined with chastity discourse was a particularly oppressive kinship system amounting to a new gender regime, with consequences felt by both women and men:
The changing family-lineage structure, spurred on by commercialization, underpinned the promotion of female chastity, and indeed helped it to grow to cultic proportions in late Ming Huizhou. But by tightening the Confucian yoke on their kinswomen, in the end Huizhou merchants constrained themselves as well, for this oppression reproduced not just the patriarchal order but also the entire hierarchical kinship regime (131-132).
Guo’s conclusion about the gender/kinship regime prompts us to think how much Ko’s tripartite model for understanding the production of gender systems—namely, the interplay between three levels of shifting realities that encompassed norms, practices, and self-perceptions—may apply to the Huizhou case as well as to Jiangnan. In particular, Ko was among the first to rethink the “oppression” narrative by foregrounding the processes of contestation and negotiation imbricated in shifting realities, with an emphasis on women as “actors maneuvering to further their perceived interests from within the system.”Footnote 3 For Ko, women’s literary activities and communities spanning the Jiangnan region enabled women to constitute themselves as “actors,” rather than merely the “acted upon” of an omnipotent patriarchal power.Footnote 4 We may further wonder, then, where literary sources about the women of Huizhou may lead in terms of placing these women among the shifting realities of Huizhou. Such sources are now readily available in one of the most exciting contributions to Huizhou scholarship, Fu Ying’s Ming Qing Anhui funü wenxue zhushu jikao, which includes a rich repertoire of literary and biographical sources of women writers from Huizhou.Footnote 5
Guo quotes Janet Theiss’s 2005 monograph on legal cases centering on “women’s ‘disgraceful matters’ (adultery or suicides).” When such situations involved conflicts between patrilineal kin networks and affinal kin networks, they complicated patriarchal hierarchy, Theiss argues. Guo emphasizes Huizhou’s difference in this respect:
this kinship stronghold [in Huizhou] was marked throughout late imperial times by a long-established custom of intermarriage between local elite lineages so that patrilineal and affinal kin networks generally shared the same male “lineage” interests over female “gender” interests (122).
But Theiss goes further than revealing conflicts between patriarchal and affinal interests: echoing Ko, Theiss proposes a shift of perspective in thinking of the Confucian patriarchy, from a focus on the imposition of orthodox gender norms to a focus on everyday encounters between norms and individuals—or, as she puts it, “a complex interplay among imperial agendas, elite priorities, and the views and values of ordinary people, especially women.”Footnote 6 Theiss’s interest lies in how the state’s normative authority and institutions entailed unintended consequences and “messy” realities during continual processes of negotiation with local communities and common people. We may wonder whether also in Huizhou—where the lineage became the primary institution for enforcing gender norms—the actual workings of institutional control might have involved negotiation, between what Guo calls “male ‘lineage’ interests” and “female ‘gender’ interests.” In other words, the scholarly dialogue here stimulates us to think of the new gender regime not only from the perspective of intensified “oppression,” but also from the perspective of Huizhou women and men, as actors negotiating gender norms. Source materials underlying the now emerging vision of the enhanced participation of merchants’ wives and widows in business and in family and lineage affairs, for example, reveal the family and lineage structures in power dynamics shaped by more than a particularly oppressive patriarchal kinship institution.
Rich in insights and stimulating, Huizhou advances our understanding of the prominence of Huizhou as a locus of identity in Chinese history. It appeals to and opens space for dialogue with those interested in the social, intellectual, religious, and gender histories of China.
