Chinese Merchants and Confucianism
:Lufrano, Richard John, Honorable Merchants: Commerce And Self-Cultivation In Late Imperial China, University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu 1997, 241 pp.ISBN: 0-8248-1640-0By Harriet T. Zurndorfer
As interest in the Confucian origins of Pacific Rim business practices continues to grow, historical explications behind the East Asian success story assume greater importance. Lufrano's book probes among the deepest roots of this phenomenon with a precise examination of some of the merchant manuals used by the Qing dynasty precursors of today's commercial champions. These publications include the 1692 'Guide for Traders and Shopkeepers' (Shanggu bianlan) and the 1854 'Essential Knowledge for Trade' (Maoyi xuzhi), although Honorable Merchants alludes to many more works of this genre.The merchant manual, a distinctly eighteenth-century literary product, which developed out of earlier family instruction compendia and merchant route books, advised readers how to become both prosperous businessmen and respectable gentlemen (women not having any role to serve either in the publications or in the merchant profession). These commercial handbooks, written by and for merchants, Lufrano claims, purported to teach 'Confucian' morality. Although some merchant-authors composed these works to boast of their literacy to others, and not least, to make monetary profit for their endeavours, their major preoccupation was to demonstrate the commercial class's appropriation of (elitist) Confucian values. These qualities include, according to the 'Guide for Traders and Shopkeepers', benevolence, righteousness, propriety, moral knowledge, sincerity, and of course, filial piety; and according to 'Essential Knowledge for Trade', caution, moderation, diligence, loyalty, courage, conscientiousness, cultivating one's nature (xing), and nourishing one's vital spirit (qi).
For anyone familiar with Max Weber's The Religion of China, this list of Confucian attributes is a far-cry from the ideological factors Weber considered inimical to China developing capitalism. Thus, for someone, and in particular, someone with a particular urgency to learn how the Confucian-capitalist synthesis came about, Lufrano's book offers few clues. In fact, for those of us like myself who attended graduate school in the late 1960s and remember how Mao Zedong was revered for helping to modernize China, the Confucian recipe here is a strange concoction indeed.
The problem with Lufrano's thesis is its monolithic presentation of the merchant-Confucian connection. That Qing merchants engaged in a 'Confucian discourse' on social hierarchy, status definition, and even respectability, as these manuals testify, may be true. But it is probably just as true that these same persons gambled, cheated, depended on fortune-tellers, treated their less-fortunate inferiors with contempt, and prayed to a variety of local gods, in order to carry out their business activities. As individuals, they might have also been unreliable, slothful, timid, selfish, and ostentatious.
Like other scholars such as the America-based Yu Yingshi whose work he admires, Lufrano maintains there is a connection to be found between merchant manuals and the broader philosophical developments of the late imperial era (roughly 1550-1900). He also subscribes to the doctrine endorsed by another America-based China scholar, Tu Weiming, who in a series of publications has avowed the importance of 'self-cultivation' to Confucian moral development. Lufrano in his book utilizes Tu's idea of self-cultivation, the practice of one informing on every act and decision to assure appropriate behaviour in every situation, and sees this concept as the basis of merchants 'internalizing' Confucian values. He proposes on page 61 that there was [only] a "short leap" for merchants to link 'self-cultivation' with their own business routines. But this jump, minor as it may have been, is non-sequitur: there is not sufficient evidence to link prescriptive morality texts with economic dynamism, or the lack thereof.
In sum, while Honorable Merchants may fail to convince the reader of the connection between religious/intellectual belief and 'progressive' economic development, this book is full of interesting details about merchant manuals and the cosmopolitan world of late imperial markets and cities in which they were utilized.
Dr Harriet T. Zurndorfer (Zurndorf@let.leidenuniv.nl) is attached to the Sinological Institute, Leiden University.