THE POLITICIZATION OF CHINESE CRAFT ORGANIZATION IN POST WORLD WAR II HONG KONG
EUGENE COOPER*
In a private communication to John Stewart Burgess, to which Burgess refers in his 1928 work, The Guilds of Peking, the well-known Chinese economist, Ch'en Ta takes note of three characteristics of the modern industries of the time:
1. that modern industries often came into existence by a process of amalgamation of previously distinct, independent crafts.
2. that this synthetic structure often made it difficult to achieve unity between the various constituent craftsmen in a given industry in pressing for their demands as a unified working class (Burgess, 1928:223).
3. that it was often difficult to overcome provincial feeling in organizing workers from different native places into a unified working class (Ibid:227).
The process of amalgamation of independent crafts into a single industry is one which Marx noted as characteristic of the early stages of European capitalist development from the middle of the 16th to the last third of the 18th century. This process resulted in a mode of production that Marx called “manufacture”, the archetypal example of which was carriage-making in which the wheelwright, carpenter, upholsterer, and blacksmith came together in a single enterprise to produce carriages, each coming to specialize in the production of carriage parts (Marx, 1967:1:336 ff.).
Manufacture arose as a mode of production in the Chinese art-carved furniture industry in the 1920's, as the result of just such a process of amalgamation which brought rural temple carvers together under the same roof with carpenters and painters in what became urban Shanghai and Canton-based carved furniture factories.
* Dr. Cooper is Lecturer in Sociology in the University of Hong Kong. This article first appeared as a paper read to the Symposium on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and the Politicization of Asian Folk Culture, held at the Association of Asian Studies Annual Meeting in New York City, March 25, 1977.