From Guild to Interest Group: The Transformation of Public and Private in Late Qing China

Abstract

Voluntary associations of one sort or another were clearly an important component of traditional Chinese society. Their importance for the economy has long been recognized, and their potential political efficacy was acknowledged—albeit negatively—by the government, which prohibited gentry from forming study associations (xuehui). An earlier generation of Western observers was quick to note this facet of Chinese life. The French social scientist, Maurice Courant, declared that “the fact that dominates the Chinese life is the existence of associations,” and E. T. C. Werner, in a less scholarly vein, commented on “the tendency of the Chinese to act not singly but in groups.” As early as 1803, the American missionary S. Wells Williams had observed in a manner reminiscent of Tocqueville that the natural tendency of the Chinese people to “crystallize into associations” provided a “stimulus to activity,” which he credited with “quickening the vitality of the mass.”