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WELLINGTON K. K. CHAN
Charitable halls in Shanghai did not display the same amount of community leadership even though they should have had a greater community base than the guilds. The reason seems obvious. Charitable halls dominated in communities where the merchants had no problem of collaboration because of differences in dialects or in regional customs. Hence their pre-eminence in places like Canton and Hong Kong. In Shanghai, the cultural gaps between, say, a Cantonese and a Ningpo merchant were often insurmountable. In the final analysis, charitable halls, like the formalised committees of guilds and Landsmannschaften, failed to grow into truly community-wide institutions.
Achievements
Merchant leaders in nineteenth century China were adept at adjusting their organisations to the changing needs of the day. By building up different types of organisations, they hoped to acquire first, broader economic and social interests; second, a large community base; and third, greater political leadership responsibility. As a result, these leaders were singularly successful in the first, especially in providing social welfare and municipal services, but were only partially successful in the second. Thus, in the more homogenous commercial centres such as Canton and Swatow, the charitable halls and the assembly commanded a community base far larger than the traditional guilds, but could not win the allegiance of the entire community. In other places like Shanghai, where the merchant leaders came from several provinces, it was more difficult to set up community-wide organisations. Even the chamber of commerce which followed these organisations and which had explicit aim of involving each entire community was unable to do without sectional interests.
The Shanghai chamber was dominated by the Ningpo merchants from its inception in 1904 to at least the 1920's.35 The Canton chamber had seven vice-presidents (fu-pan) who were elected by the various guilds from among the chamber directors.36 The most extreme assertion of this form of group separatism was written into the bylaws of the overseas Chinese chamber of commerce in Singapore. There, two concurrent presidents were elected by the two most powerful Hokkien and Teochiu (i.e. Ch'ao-chou) merchant groups, while a specific number of vice-presidents and directors were assigned, in diminishing sizes, to these two and three