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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Joseph Fewsmith
Affiliation:
Kent State University

Extract

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.”

Type
The Adaptability of Traditional Culture
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1983

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References

This article was written while on a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. I am indebted to the Center for its financial support and intellectual stimulation.

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67 It is often forgotten that the KMT fully accepted the Marxist critique of capitalism. For explications of KMT ideology, see Mengwu, Sa, Sanmin zhuyi zhengzhi xue [The political science of the Three Principles of the People] (Shanghai: Xin shengming yuekan shuju, 1929);Google ScholarYuanchong, Shao, Shao Yuanchong xiansheng yanjiang ji, diyi ji [The collected speeches of Mr. Shao Yuanchong, vol. 1] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1928);Google Scholar and Fuhai, Zhou, Sanmin zhuyi lilun de tixi [The system of the Three Principles of the People] (Shanghai: Xin shengming yuekan she, 1928; second printing, 1929).Google Scholar

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69 It is important to distinguish between the Nationalist regime as a government and the Kuomintang as a party organization. The Kuomintang was only one component, and not necessarily the most important component, of the Nationalist regime. Much confusion results, I think, from collapsing these two entities.

70 This theme is being developed at length in my manuscript, “Party, State, and Local Elites in Republican China,” (forthcoming, University of Hawaii Press).

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72 It should be noted that while the Nationalist regime sharply suppressed the authority of the party organization, it continued, as it does today, to claim legitimacy on the basis of Kuomintang ideology. This raises interesting issues about the relationship between ideology, state, and party in one-party authoritarian regimes.

73 The qualitative difference between a polity with a single party and one with a party system (containing more than one party) is argued emphatically by Sartori, Giovani in his Party and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).Google Scholar