emerged, in some cases building on precedents that had been set long ago. One such form in urban China was the huiguan or tongxianghui, the native place associations, which represented and assisted workers who came to the city from a particular area, province, or region. In places like Shanghai, Tianjin, and Wuhan, they controlled areas of the Chinese city in which their adherents lived, where their dialect was spoken, and where theirsort of food was served. Crucially, they also provided contacts with countrymen abroad. But, while powerful, the native place associations always competed for allegiance with trade and labor organizations and with secret societies of various kinds, from anti-Qing agitators to criminal gangs and those somewhere on the scale in between. The new urban China was unruly territory, with complex links across time and geographical space, hard to control because it was so hard to define. 2
I N 1832, A S COTTISH SHIP DOCTOR , William Jardine, who had an extra income from dealing in opium, and his countryman James Matheson, set up what would become the premier foreign company, or hong , in nineteenth-century China. Jardine, Matheson & co. was primarily based in Hong Kong and Shanghai, with extensions through all the major trading routes within China, between China, Japan, and Southeast Asia, and between East Asia and Europe. It was in many ways China’s first multinational corporation, with a hybrid structure that was replicated in most other foreign-led hongs . Its board and directors were all foreigners, but the company was linked to Chinese compradors who served as conduits to the major Chinese producers and retailers and who in reality provided much of the capital on which the company’s business was based. Jardine’s had agents—mostly Europeans—in all major ports on the coast and along the main rivers, and these agents had their own network of Chinese merchants whom they depended upon to get business done. A company like Jardine’s of course existed mainly to provide the maximum profit for its foreign investors, symbolized by its involvement in the opium trade. But its structure became as much Chinese as European, and its business would have been impossible without the involvement of thousands of Chinese who led the way into markets and trade routes established long before any Scotsman had set foot in China.
One such area in which the European-led trading houses fitted into preexisting Chinese networks was in trade with and within Southeast Asia. In many cases the foreign companies simply slotted into tradingstructures that the Chinese diaspora had been building for many generations. The newcomers provided additional capital and stronger links with Europe. But while the Europeans were busy colonizing Southeast Asia between 1850 and 1914, the Chinese supplied the small traders and low-level administrators that glued the colonial possessions together. Singapore became the hub of the regional trade, and therefore a Chinese city in Southeast Asia, although under British administration. In Batavia (Jakarta) and Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), Chinese traders provided key services for the Dutch and French colonialists, for foreign companies that settled in the area, and for companies operating out of China. Although both Southeast Asian elites and Europeans were fearful of Chinese influence and competition, they came to depend on the expanding markets that the Chinese helped set up. In British Malaya, for instance, Yu Ren Sheng—a company that began trading in Chinese medicine in the 1870s—came to link the peninsula to southern China on most things from banking services to food and contract labor.
The new Western-type banks, based in Shanghai and Hong Kong, also fitted into older Chinese patterns of credit and investment, forming great chains of finance. The links between various kinds of institutions were very close, with loans and securities moving from big banks to small banks to new-type Chinese
I N 1832, A S COTTISH SHIP DOCTOR , William Jardine, who had an extra income from dealing in opium, and his countryman James Matheson, set up what would become the premier foreign company, or hong , in nineteenth-century China. Jardine, Matheson & co. was primarily based in Hong Kong and Shanghai, with extensions through all the major trading routes within China, between China, Japan, and Southeast Asia, and between East Asia and Europe. It was in many ways China’s first multinational corporation, with a hybrid structure that was replicated in most other foreign-led hongs . Its board and directors were all foreigners, but the company was linked to Chinese compradors who served as conduits to the major Chinese producers and retailers and who in reality provided much of the capital on which the company’s business was based. Jardine’s had agents—mostly Europeans—in all major ports on the coast and along the main rivers, and these agents had their own network of Chinese merchants whom they depended upon to get business done. A company like Jardine’s of course existed mainly to provide the maximum profit for its foreign investors, symbolized by its involvement in the opium trade. But its structure became as much Chinese as European, and its business would have been impossible without the involvement of thousands of Chinese who led the way into markets and trade routes established long before any Scotsman had set foot in China.
One such area in which the European-led trading houses fitted into preexisting Chinese networks was in trade with and within Southeast Asia. In many cases the foreign companies simply slotted into tradingstructures that the Chinese diaspora had been building for many generations. The newcomers provided additional capital and stronger links with Europe. But while the Europeans were busy colonizing Southeast Asia between 1850 and 1914, the Chinese supplied the small traders and low-level administrators that glued the colonial possessions together. Singapore became the hub of the regional trade, and therefore a Chinese city in Southeast Asia, although under British administration. In Batavia (Jakarta) and Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), Chinese traders provided key services for the Dutch and French colonialists, for foreign companies that settled in the area, and for companies operating out of China. Although both Southeast Asian elites and Europeans were fearful of Chinese influence and competition, they came to depend on the expanding markets that the Chinese helped set up. In British Malaya, for instance, Yu Ren Sheng—a company that began trading in Chinese medicine in the 1870s—came to link the peninsula to southern China on most things from banking services to food and contract labor.
The new Western-type banks, based in Shanghai and Hong Kong, also fitted into older Chinese patterns of credit and investment, forming great chains of finance. The links between various kinds of institutions were very close, with loans and securities moving from big banks to small banks to new-type Chinese
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