MERCHANT ORGANISATIONS IN IMPERIAL CHINA
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other geographical groups. However, the Chinese chambers of commerce, with their foreign influence and official sponsorship, were a “modern” kind of merchant organisation, and their story properly belongs elsewhere.38
In the area of increased political leadership—the third area of merchant aspirations—the merchants' success was mixed and in one sense limited. As a social class, the merchants did not have an overall strategy to enhance their status and influence. Rationalisation of their political roles varied from place to place. In Canton, the merchant leadership remained with the directors and officers of the charitable halls, and they remained conservative. In Shanghai, merchants participated not only in charitable halls but also in municipal organisations with clear political aims. By the first decade of the twentieth century, merchant study groups, in imitation of others formed by students and scholar-gentry, were established to examine the questions of local government and constitutionalism. Eventually these activities led merchants to agitate for political representations in the Municipal Council of the International Settlement, and to set up a city council for the Chinese-controlled section of Shanghai.39 Others participated in direct action, as in the case of the 1905-06 boycott against American goods over that country's discriminatory immigration policy.40
Few merchant organisations, however, became schools for political confrontations or other forms of patriotic outbursts. Most of them were run by establishment-oriented merchants who sought to use their institutions as a means to promote symbiotic arrangements with officialdom. Although these efforts varied by time and place, one common element stood out—the Chinese merchants in late imperial China were by and large interested in making their political links only at the local and provincial levels. Their interaction with the political order took place at these levels, for governmental sanctions and supports came from the provincial Governors-general and their lieutenants. The merchants realised that the central authority at the time was weak and far away. As practical men, they therefore limited their ties of mutual benefit to where they were counted most. Yet this went against their long-term interests. For to achieve economic development, China needed efforts at the national level. Then as collaborations between local officials and merchants increased, the considerable strength of the merchant