Lukang used to be Taiwan's second city, subordinate only to Tainan. Now it is mostly famous for its temples, but one anthropologist found there the inspiration for a fascinating study of Chinese society in miniature.
To the tourist stepping off the bus on a cool, wet, October day, Lukang presents itself as a modest little town with plenty to be modest about. Situated on the west coast of Taiwan, about halfway between Taipei in the north and Kaohsiung in the south, most people visit Lukang because they have heard it has a couple of wonderful temples and a thriving market. It is very small; an hour's walk will take the traveler from one end of the town to the other. A few convenience stores, a druggist or two, enough banks to serve the population of 30,000 or so people, and that's it.
But it was not always that way. At one time, Lukang was a major metropolis, second only in importance to Tainan: a bustling center of commerce and cross-strait trade with Fujian province. And it is this Lukang, the old business hub, that Donald R. DeGlopper entertainingly addresses in Lukang: Commerce and Community in a Chinese City, part of the SUNY series in Chinese Local Studies.
DeGlopper's intention was to write a monograph on Chinese urban society, making Lukang a case study that could be used to argue generalities. In particular, he was concerned to discover how personal and business relations were formed between persons who initially were strangers. What he has actually done is write two books. One is a learned, anthropological study of Chinese urban society in flux. The other is an entertaining, well-researched, and delightfully written history of a rather eccentric town. That both books can be found between the same covers is a bonus for the reader.
To anyone like the present reviewer, who is Chinese but who was raised and has spent most of his life in the West, the question of how strangers get together to do business is a very interesting question. In London it happens all the time, and nobody thinks it odd. An introduction from a friend, a bank manager, or an accountant may provide the catalyst, but an ad in the paper often does the job just as well, a nd English anecdotal lore is littered with successful partnerships formed at the racecourse or in the pub. For Chinese people, the issue is more complicated. Why?
Much of the difference stems from the fact that Chinese society is vertical, while Western societies increasingly tend to be horizontal. In other words, in Chinese cultures orders are passed down by father to son, teacher to student, and boss to worker. Chinese bosses, in particular, have had a bad press from this. The typical owner of one of Taiwan's famous small- and medium-sized enterprises watches his own work force, let alone outsiders, with jealous distrust. Successful Western businesses, on the other hand, tend to be owned and managed by people who understand the value of partnerships between equals. It is hard to escape the conclusion that there is little concept of alliance in Chinese society, and even less faith in contracts, in words. Why? Blame the Chinese language.
If English is a language primarily for communicati on, then Chinese is more useful as a tool of obfuscation. It is easy to understand why--for five thousand years and more, it was dangerous to utter anything other than the vaguest of generalities. A famous saying, "the tall bamboo is the one that gets chopped down," expresses the notion perfectly. DeGlopper is wise to this. "I found the way the people of Lukang presented themselves and described their city both incomplete and paradoxical," he writes at one point. Indeed, communication problems (he did his research in Chinese) almost sabotaged his examination, central to the entire project, of how comparative strangers enter into business relations--
Shopkeepers and businessmen kept responding to my questions about the significance of common schooling or common surname by insisting that such categories were totally irrelevant, and that within Lukang anyone could do business with anyone else.
This is a refreshing summation of the problems faced by any Westerner engage d in research into Chinese society. To anticipate DeGlopper's conclusions: what he found at the end of the day was an extraordinarily wide gap between the facts his research revealed and the way in which the inhabitants described those facts to him.
Despite its professional overtones, this book has huge appeal to the general reader. DeGlopper has a lively style and is no stranger to irony. His text is also rich in historical detail, myth, and gossip, some of it downright hilarious. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the author's account of the annual rock fight.
There were, and are, three principal surnames to be found in Lukang: Shih, Huang, and Hsu. Once a year, these extended families would come together to throw rocks at one anotherbut in "a very well-defined and bounded situation," to quote the author. Why? The explanations offered are vague, and perhaps the most plausible is also the simplest: the big surname groups did not like each other so they fought, and the more th ey fought the less they liked each other. DeGlopper sees the event as a ritual, as action for its own sake, with no overt purpose. He even has the nerve to say that they might as well have been playing cricket. According to one informant, "People were tougher then than they are now. If someone got hurt or lost some teeth, he would drop out and wash his injury off, apply a plaster made of tobacco leaves and cow dung, and then go back and fight some more." Cricket, indeed!
Nobody won and there were no losers. Hawkers sold snacks and toys, and a good time seems to have been had by all. During the Japanese occupation (1895-1945), the police tried to stop these annual battles, but the site was simply moved further out into the countryside. It was still happening in the 1930s, but has not been indulged in since World War II--unless, of course, the periodic bouts of fisticuffs in the Legislative Yuan count as a continuation. Boys will always be boys.
Early Chinese settlers were mostly Hokkien, from the coastal regions of southern Fujian. They arrived in the Lukang area during the late sixteen hundreds, but this part of the coastal plain was not really settled until the early eighteenth century. The new arrivals organized themselves into groups defined by common place of origin or common family name, and Lukang became a minor rivermouth port on the northern fringes of the Chinese settlement.
The growth of Lukang's trade and population until it became the island's second city (officially it was never more than a chen, or township) took place between 1730 and 1780. The most important reason for its expansion was the settlement of the Changhua Plain and the production of exportable surpluses of rice and sugar. A secondary reason was that by 1740, all the other ports of central Taiwan were silted up. Lukang harbor thus developed into the most important center for cross-strait trade in the whole of central Taiwan.
Even in those days, such trade was both essential to the island's ec onomy and hedged around with regulations and restrictions that made much of the traffic technically illegal. During the nineteenth century, the city was home to a wide range of middlemen, with many large firms devoted to trade in rice, cloth, sugar, timber, and pottery. But by the second half of the century, the trade that kept Lukang going was already starting to shrink, and a variety of other factors soon contributed to the city's inevitable decline.
With the development of the tea industry, northern Taiwan became much more important to the economy, and Taipei started to grow. Lukang was bound to suffer. Then again, Lukang's primary export to the mainland had always been rice; but in the latter years of the nineteenth century the island's population grew to the point where there was nothing left over to export, and in any case, Fujian province found it could buy rice in Southeast Asia at a lower price.
Improved transport technology was the last nail in Lukang's coffin--for many decades, it was the only place where produce could be moved into and out of the Changhua Plain, but the railway deprived it of even that advantage. Entrepreneurs started to move north to Taipei, where the action was. Once entrenched, they stayed there. Nowadays, to use the author's words, "the poor but clever lad who goes to Taipei and strikes it rich through superior cunning and commercial acumen is celebrated in local folklore."
It was to this town that DeGlopper brought his notebooks and professional skills in April 1967. He devotes a fair number of words to justifying the assertion that the time lag between his fieldwork and publication (1995) is largely immaterial, because what he reports is "either still significant or provides a baseline for appraising the present." This claim seems bold, and it repays study.
On one, obvious level, Lukang is an immensely different place from what it was in the late 1960s. It is now part of a pluralistic political democracy: something that it would have been treasonable to advocate on the streets of Lukang in 1967. A major north-south highway runs within a few miles of the place; that was not built until 1974. Semiconductor manufacture, the government's Go-South investment policy, cross-strait trade and cultural exchange, the bids to join the WTO and the UN, vastly enhanced prosperity--things have moved on. The real question is whether they have moved on in such a way as to affect the theses of this engaging book.
The probable answer is that Lukang itself has not changed too much in the interim, for the sad fact is that history now passes the city by. (The author records a consensus among the inhabitants that the place is "just right." But just as there are said to be no gangsters in Lukang, "there are no opportunities, either.") All the current hot topics--semiconductors, the WTO, and so on--are about as relevant to this backwater as they are to Podunk.
Now it has already been noted that this is not one book but two. As a his tory of racy small-town politics, associations, festivals, family clans, cults, factions, rivalries, and the famous Eight Guilds of Lukang, this volume is hard to beat, and it does not particularly matter which era is under discussion. But as regards anthropology, the author frankly notes in his preface that a number of respected colleagues questioned the wisdom of relying on such ancient fieldwork. The lay reviewer can do little but note the controversy and pass on.
To the author's central question--How did business get done in Lukang?--the answer seems to be: through a number of complex factors, principal among which were the existence of trade associations and professional guilds, coupled with a willingness to accept an introduction from a reliable third-party intermediary. Once the ice was broken, it then became a matter of building up and cultivating kan ch'ing( 感情 ), a kind of emotional rapport that is hard to gloss, ranging as it does from mild acquaintance to wild desire. And from kan ch'ing, eventually and with luck, sprouted hsin-yung( 信用 ).
Hsin-yung is a firm's most valuable asset, bar none. It refers to an informal credit rating, to a reputation for meeting one's obligations. People told the author that to start a business one must have capital, but that capital alone was nothing without hsin-yung. To earn hsin-yung--it is never given, assumed, or ascribed--one must know people and have a good reputation with a set of other people, most often those in the same line of business. Banks are not a common source of operating capital for small businesses in Taiwan, because they demand too much in the way of collateral--a habit which, according to one critic quoted by DeGlopper, means they are more like pawnbrokers than bankers in the modern sense. Against such a background, hsin-yung is equivalent to the philosopher's stone.
DeGlopper's overall conclusion about doing business in Lukang is that the ideal small businessman had "a lot of amiable, matey, b ut not too intimate ties with as many people as possible," on the footing that "it is better to have limited relationships with a lot of people than very close ties with only a few."
But the author's concerns extend much further than a simple consideration of how Chinese do business. The book uses the framework of a community study to address such questions as the adequacy of Confucianism (which he perceives as a sociology quite as much as a philosophy or a religion) as a model for Chinese society, and the structure of Chinese society generally. How is a place like Lukang held together?
The first thing to note is that just about everybody the author spoke to described the place in words like "old-fashioned," "traditional," and "refined." This reputation is not confined to Lukang's inhabitants, either--it is known throughout the island for being a very "traditional" and a very "Taiwanese" sort of place. As regards language, Taiwanese is spoken there with a distinctive accent that other inhabitants of the island recognize as "heavy" or "different." Some good Ching dynasty domestic architecture has survived the bulldozers, and in one quarter of the city an impressive renovation project involving a whole street is nearing completion.
It is almost as obvious to the casual contemporary visitor as it was to DeGlopper thirty years ago that the economy of the city is characterized by a large number of small businesses (few employ more than ten people), and by extensive specialization and division of labor. Walk along one street, and every other shop makes and sells mirrors. Walk along another, and all the craftsmen are working on temple furniture or sedan chairs for carrying images of deities.
In the light of the above it is tempting to conclude that this is a circumscribed Confucian society, but the author expressly warns us against that assumption. He contends that Confucianism does not describe wha t actually goes on in Chinese society--any society, not just Lukang's. He describes this as a paradox and tries to get out of it by saying that there were lots of Confucian rules that were never written down and if we knew more about those rules, Confucianism might be seen to approximate more closely to known historical facts. But is it not simpler just to say that Confucianism, like Christianity, is an ideal that most people fall short of most of the time? Or as the author puts it, "All too often foreign observers have taken the Confucian picture of what should be for a description of what is."
So if Confucianism did not power Lukang along, what did? Family organization, perhaps? DeGlopper debunks the family, that legendary source of Chinese strength, in refreshingly blunt language--"Most human beings, after all, belong to families"--and sums up his conclusions in this area by saying: "Many common Chinese associations and relations shared the same form and might be considered to re flect the same model, but that model was not kinship."
Religion certainly plays a part in bringing and binding people together. Lukang boasts a lot of temples, each with its own neighborhood association, and they remain active community centers. As the author points out, "temples include everyone, symbolizing wholeness and harmony, and distribute supernatural benefits to everyone equally." In a pleasing visual image, he uses the incense burner to reinforce his notion of temple as microsociety: identical sticks of incense presented by every household burn down to a common residue of ash, and each line of smoke mingles in a common cloud.
Some of the book's most brilliant passages deal with local politics. Even allowing for the fact that the fieldwork was done more than a quarter of a century ago, DeGlopper's analysis of what happens on the ground during local elections is electrifying. After setting out the constitutional and administrative framework he turns to the question of pat ronage, under the illuminating section heading, "The Rewards of Office Holding." The longest, most penetrating, and certainly the funniest paragraph in the book begins thus:
When a muddy road is paved it is only reasonable for the local member of the county assembly to claim credit for persuading the public works department of the county government of the urgent necessity for such work. Nor would it be too unlikely for the work to be done by a building contractor whose sister is married to the head of the town council, and who hires a truck belonging to the brother of the head of the town public works department.
And so on, for a full page, leaving no stone unturned and no creepy-crawly undisturbed. He then expands on why vote-buying actually works--why you can be sure that the votes you purchase will be delivered, in other wordsbefore turning to an analysis of the way in which competing factions actually carve things up. The author obviously devoted considerable time and e nergy to this part of the book, and his conclusions are worth noting. "In the world of local politics," he writes, "sudden reversals of fortune are common and the innocent do not prosper." Of local politicians he has this to say: "They are not nice men, nor are their lives uniformly or consistently successful. I doubt that many people want their sons to become local-level politicians." (Later he tellingly adds--"not nice men, and by the standards of their community, not mine.") Here, at least, his research would stand the test of time.
DeGlopper rounds off the book by examining the model he has constructed and concluding that in fact there are many models: that what he has really uncovered is an amalgam of overlapping frameworks, sets of structural poses, and situational interpretations. "I think of a stack of transparencies, or overlapping slides projected onto the same screen by many projectors." And that, he believes, is broadly why the inhabitants of Lukang failed to describe themselves to him as he saw them.
The author obviously feels great affection for Lukang, but he knows that the place is living on its past. He ruefully observes that if Taiwanese towns were in the habit of announcing themselves with roadside signs, Lukang's would look something like this: "Lukang--Once second only to Tainan. Lukang--Taiwan's Oldest Matsu Temple. Lukang--City With That Old-Time Atmosphere." To use an overworked term, Lukang is not really "relevant" anymore. What DeGlopper has done is take its fascinating history and use it to educate us about the ways of Chinese cities and their inhabitants. In the author's own words--
Although this book contains a great deal of detail about Lukang between the 1760s and the 1960s, it is not in the last analysis about Lukang. It is about patterns of Chinese society and of thought about that society. It is about culture and distinctively Chinese patterns of culture, and about what we, as outsi ders, see when we look at that culture.
And one thing that we see on almost every other page is the name Shih.
Lukang: Commerce and Community in a Chinese City contains so many fun anecdotes that it seems churlish to single one out, but the temptation proves irresistible. Why are there so many Shihs in Lukang? Well, in the seventeenth century, Admiral Shih Lang conquered Taiwan and the emperor came to visit him. Anxious to impress upon the emperor that the people were loyal to him, Shih Lang ordered everyone to change the name on their door posts to his own family name of Shih. He also collected a sum of money from each household. When the emperor had departed, Shih Lang announced that everybody was free to change their names back again, but that he would keep the money of anyone who did. Those who retained the name Shih, however, got their money back. And that is why half the people of Lukang are named Shih.
The story is entirely apocryphal--for one thing, no emperor ever se t foot on Taiwan--but it tells us a lot about the island, past and present. A family name is, after all, a family name: an essential part of one's identity. And half is rather a lot, isn't it?
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Jonathan P.F.Chiang is a freelance writer based in Taipei.