MERCHANT ORGANISATIONS IN IMPERIAL CHINA
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buildings and roads destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion. Collaboration of this sort gave these merchant leaders a greater voice over taxation and other local public affairs.23 The same guild leaders joined charitable organisations because their larger numbers offered them a wider base of support.
As the merchants assumed a leadership role in providing social services and welfare, they gradually took over responsibilities and privileges which went along with their work. Because permanent charitable organisations could cut across guilds and sometimes Landsmannschaften, they claimed that their leadership was based on community-wide support. And since they were merchants, they should be identified as merchant leaders to whom matters affecting the merchants would be referred. Moreover, these merchants were elites in their own communities, and were regularly referred to as "titled merchants” (shen-shang). Even as individuals, they had some political influence with the local officials. But unless they had begun as gentry or officials, such influence rested on no legitimate basis. When they organised themselves in institutions which had a communal purpose, they quickly used them to claim legitimate leadership.
This was what happened by the late nineteenth century. In Hong Kong, the board of directors of the Tung Wah Hospital quickly gained the right to present petitions to the Hong Kong government on all matters related to the Chinese community. Institutionally, the hospital was put under the jurisdiction of the Registrar General, after 1913 styled the Secretary for Chinese Affairs, who also served as its patron. By the early 1880's, the board opened up another channel when the Governor-general's Office in Canton began to correspond with it. There is some indication that the directors acted as a kind of information centre and advisory board for the Governor-general on matters involving the overseas Chinese.24 To this day, a seat on the board of directors of either the Tung Wah Hospital or the Po Leung Kuk still represents the government's recognition of each occupier's leadership status.
In Canton, charitable organisations, too, quickly became a regular channel of communication between the government and the merchants. In early 1886, when news of the San Francisco race riots against Chinese workers reached Canton and Hong Kong, the Chinese government wrote to the directors of the Ai-yü shan-t’ang