[
    {
        "id": 207280,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1975",
        "page_number": 48,
        "title": "RAS-1975",
        "content_text": "40\n\nWELLINGTON K. K. CHAN\n\ncommunity in the major commercial centres helped the regional governments to become more independent of, and ultimately even more powerful than, the central government. In this way, merchant organisations helped the growth of political regionalism even as they advanced the cause of social and economic integration.\n\nWe began this study of Chinese merchant organisations on the premise that they reflected not only great resilience as institutions, but also the flexibility of their organisers in adopting changes consistent with changing values and changing times. To synchronise values and the environmental conditions, however, proved to be highly intractable. In late imperial China, as society made fast and momentous changes towards regionalism, warlordism and political illegitimacy, merchant organisations adjusted admirably, but somehow failed to keep pace with the rapidly changing environment. Our conclusion then is to suggest that indeed both men and institutions showed great resilience, but that in times of great social and political stress, there were limits as to what they could accomplish.\n\nNOTES\n\n1 See, e.g. Thomas A. Metzger's \"The Organizational Capabilities of the Ch'ing State in the Field of Commerce: The Liang-huai Salt Monopoly, 1740-1840,\" in W. E. Willmott, ed., Economic Organization in Chinese Society (Stanford, 1972), pp. 9-45, showing how the organizational flexibility of the Liang-huai salt administration was matched by the manipulative skills and non-conformist behavior of its administrators; and John E. Schrecker, Imperialism and Chinese Nationalism: Germany in Shantung (Cambridge, Mass., 1971) for emphasizing comparable success by late Ch'ing foreign policy institutions and officials.\n\n2 Ch'üan Han-sheng, Chung-kuo hang-hui chih-tu shih (An institutional history of the Chinese guilds) (Shanghai, 1934), pp. 29-36.\n\n3 H. B. Morse, The Gilds of China (London, 1909), pp. 35-48; Ho Ping-ti, Chung-kuo hui-kuan shih-lun (A historical survey of Landsmannschaften in China) (Taipei, 1966). The German term \"Landsmannschaft\" used by Professor Ho for \"hui-kuan\" was first suggested by D. J. MacGowan in his \"Chinese Guilds or Chambers of Commerce and Trade Unions,\" Journal of North-China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 21 (1888-89).\n\n4 Chung-hsü Hsi-hsien hui-kuan lu (A repeat edition of the continuation to the records of the Hsi-hsien Landsmannschaft) (n.p., 1834), “hsü-lu hou-chi,” pp. 13a, 16b, 19a, 22b; \"hsin-chi,\" pp. 3b-5b, 12a.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 212011,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1989",
        "page_number": 426,
        "title": "RAS-1989",
        "content_text": "401\n\nconnections between the local guilds, membership on the committee and the emergence of a Chinese business elite, the importance of a Chinese alternative to the colonial government which the Tung Wah essentially represented, and the links between traditional Chinese political culture and the symbols and trappings of authority with which committee members sought to enhance their status. It would be interesting to see how these patterns of social control changed after the colonial government introduced more controls over the hospital in 1896. But that is another story. Dr. Sinn's book will stand as the definitive study of the early history of the hospital and it is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand Hong Kong society and politics in the nineteenth century.\n\nIAN SCOTT, University of Hong Kong\n\nPaul A. Cohen and Merle Goldman, eds., Ideas Across Cultures: Essays On Chinese Thought In Honor of Benjamin I. Schwartz. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1990. xi + 400 pp. Index.\n\nThis Festschrift for the recently retired Harvard professor of Chinese history and political science, after nearly four decades of teaching and writing, is a genuine tribute to the iconoclastic Schwartzian tradition. All ten articles, written by former students of the last three decades, address questions in Chinese studies which engage broad ranges of comparison with other Asian and Western expressions, in search of Schwartz's 'possibility of a universal human discourse', (p. 314). In every case, the thematic questions take Schwartz's previous work as a starting point from which to embellish, extrapolate or challenge academic evaluations of China. Raising issues from such diverse fields as Shang oracular bones, Mo-ist and Confucian utilitarianism, medieval metaphysics, folk-opera in the 1920s, non-Eurocentric Marxist theory and recent democratic overtures in the People's Republic, the authors create a literary monument to the probing and sensitive studies of their teacher. Precisely because of these varying degrees of reference to the Schwartzian corpus and the unusual breadth of themes, the lack of an exhaustive bibliography related to the honored scholar and the absence of a Chinese glossary are regrettable.\n\nThe first and ninth articles, by Hao Chang and Thomas Metzger, pinpoint their correctives to Schwartz's claims. Chang repeats a claim already made in 1985 that the ‘axial age' (qua Karl Jaspers) of Chinese",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h",
        "rank": 0
    }
]