Chapter 2 Preface Finding a "missing" class

One day in September 1979, French scholar Marie Claire Bergere was sitting in the office building of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, waiting to be received by an important official.Bai Jier is a well-known expert on modern Chinese history and participated in the writing of "Cambridge History of China" edited by Fairbank.She later recorded the meeting scene and wrote: "The official came in from the door, followed by five or six entourages. Judging from his appearance, he seemed to be younger than his actual age of 63 years. He was wearing a A Chinese tunic suit with a straight collar and patch pockets—this is the usual attire for Chinese officials, but the nimble gait and demeanor he displayed suddenly reminded me of an American businessman. The gold-plated pen in his breast pocket And the Patek Philippe watch on the wrist and the Italian leather shoes on the feet are enough to make people realize that this official is extraordinary."

The official who met Bai Jier was Rong Yiren.He was the son of Rong Desheng, the largest national capitalist in the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China. Rong Desheng and his elder brother Rong Zongjing once controlled nearly half of China's flour mills and cotton mills, and were called "China's Rockefeller".Just a few years before the meeting with Bai Jier, Rong Yiren was still criticized as a "representative of the bourgeoisie". He transported coal in the boiler room of the canteen of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce and cleaned all the toilets.During the "Cultural Revolution", he was often criticized and his index finger was broken by the Red Guards. In February 1978, he was rescued by Deng Xiaoping and returned.At this time, he was vice chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and chairman of China International Trust and Investment Corporation.In CITIC, there are also many capitalists from Shanghai who are over sixty years old.

"I found that my research object has been caught in a vortex of contradictions." Baijier wrote in the book "The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie (1911~1937)" published later, "I sincerely feel that if the popular The significance of studying the Chinese business class is extremely limited. The rise of Chinese entrepreneurs in the early 20th century constituted only a small episode in the long history, a simple process of historical exploration.” However, , with her in-depth observation of China, especially the zero-distance inspection of China's economic transformation after 1978, history suddenly showed another face. "China's current practice of prioritizing modernization over revolution prompted me to realize that it is necessary to re-evaluate the contribution of Chinese entrepreneurs in the historical process of the 20th century, and to clarify the long-standing phenomenon of dogmatically confusing revolution and modernization. "

So, in a longer historical span, is it possible for us—including international scholars like Baijier—to make new observations on a class that has been ignored or even demonized for a long time? Berger's curiosity is not the only one. In the late autumn of 2004, Wang Shi, the chairman of Vanke Group, the largest real estate company in China, came to Hangzhou and asked me to sit and chat with him at the Zhejiang Hotel by the West Lake.This used to be Lin Biao's "palace", but now it has become the most peaceful place for entrepreneurs to stay.Wang Shi suddenly asked me a question: "My father is an administrative official, my mother is a Xibe woman, and I have no business training. So, where did I and our generation inherit the entrepreneurial genes?" I was at a loss for words.

Obviously, doubts arise from another place.While chatting with Wang Shi, I have already started writing "Thirty Years of Surging: Chinese Enterprises 1978~2008".In the research and sorting out of many business historical materials and entrepreneurial success and failure cases, I have been troubled by such questions again and again-how are the growth genes and spiritual qualities of today's Chinese entrepreneurs formed?Is it a product of 30 years, or should it be examined in a longer historical breadth?Is their special anxiety, strong family-country complex, desire for rapid growth, hidden insecurity, worship of official business culture, and obsession with wolf culture a unique mentality of a generation, or do they have something more unique? For profound humanistic reasons?

Another more penetrating question is, what role did the entrepreneurial class play in the 30 or even 100-year history of China's progress? Huang Renyu, a Chinese historian who is famous for his writing, believes: "In the period of the Republic of China, China rebuilt the upper-level structure of society. Among them, the overall rise of the merchant class is obviously a very important phenomenon." American scholars who visited China in 1932 Fairbank asserted in "Cambridge History of China": "In the development of this long historical drama in China, the Chinese merchant class did not occupy a prominent position. It is only a supporting role—maybe there are a few lines—obedient to the emperor, bureaucrats, and diplomats. officials, generals, propagandists, and party leaders.” Even the most eminent historians of our time, such as Shi Jingqian of Yale University in the United States—who is widely known in Chinese intellectual circles for his unique and vivid historical writing—in the famous "In Search of Modern In the book "China", it was written from 1600 to 1989, a full 389 years, but there was almost no shadow of entrepreneurs.That seems to be a group of people who never appeared, although they brought machine-spun cotton cloth, electric lights, radios and air-conditioned houses to the daily life of the Chinese.

These are some very ambiguous, conflicting and complementary conclusions, and what we seem to be facing is a "missing" class. However, this is clearly an unfair phenomenon. It is precisely in order to answer the above-mentioned questions that after completing my writing, I mustered up the courage to go back to the source and start to reorganize the history of Chinese enterprises from the 1870s to the 20th century.The sea of ​​history is vast, and I set out to salvage the memory fragments sleeping at the bottom of the water.Due to the impact of war and political turmoil, the inheritance of Chinese corporate history is fragmented, with few traditions to speak of.It is like a map that has been roughly torn again and again, everything is in disarray, some pages are missing, and it looks incomplete.

Only 100 years have passed, and it is difficult for me to witness the glory of that year in person. There is no trace of Zeng Guofan's Anqing Arsenal; Zuo Zongtang's Fujian Shipping Bureau now has only a shipbuilding museum with few tourists; Zhang Zhidong's "Asia's largest steel factory" Hanyang Iron Works, only a pile of The black and old machine tools that people remember; Li Hongzhang’s Shanghai headquarters of China Merchants Steamship is now a fashionable leisure club; the "mother of machines" Jiangnan Manufacturing General Bureau is being demolished, and it will become the main exhibition area of ​​Shanghai World Expo in two years ; In Nantong, which Liang Qichao praised as "the most progressive city in China", Zhang Jian and his Dasheng Group have become legends in the mist of history. , the plum garden of the Rong brothers is full of flowers, and their textile mills and flour mills have become "industrial relics" that need protection;

Does anyone remember Fan Xudong?It was he who developed the refined salt that freed the Chinese from the shame of being a "soil-eating nation"; does anyone still remember Yu Qiaqing?It was his "shipwreck" that broke the Japanese military's attempt to "destroy China in three months"; does anyone still remember Mu Ouchu?He is not only the benefactor of Kunqu opera, but also the person who knows cotton best in China; does anyone remember Zhang Gongquan?He headed China's largest bank at the age of 27; does anyone remember Zheng Guanying?He not only wrote "Words of a Prosperous Age", but also a representative of the comprador class who has been despised for a long time; does anyone still remember Lu Zuofu?The thin and taciturn "Chinese Ship King" with a tiger-like personality.

Even, how should we evaluate Sheng Xuanhuai, Hu Xueyan, Zhou Xuexi and Song Ziwen?Are they just a bunch of ugly businessmen with a pile of white ash on the tip of their noses? "Fossils" remain, and business lines have been broken.A corporate history is like a Grand Canal that has been blocked for many years. Can we clear the silt and continue? I also tried to find the figures and voices of entrepreneurs at the turning point of the great history. What kind of combination of capital and talents started the "Westernization Movement" when the country was poor and poor?When Empress Dowager Cixi fled and the Eight-Power Allied Forces ravaged Beijing, who kept the commercial prosperity of the South?When the constitutional wave becomes the consensus of the whole people, who is the most active promoter?In the artillery fire of the Revolution of 1911, who defended the stability of the market?In the slogan of the May Fourth Movement, who are the supporters behind the square?In the era of warlord separatism, who once managed China's largest industrial and commercial city?When the Japanese army blatantly invaded China, who kept the "accompanying capital" Chongqing safe and diverted the country's last vitality?

I think this is really a series of historical facts that need to be corrected. The reconstruction of Chinese industrial and commercial civilization is a century-old proposition.The beginning of China's modern history was the Opium War in 1840. That war was not the beginning of China's backwardness, but the result, the starting point of national awakening, awareness and rise.Since then, generations of Chinese people have been committed to the great rejuvenation of the country.As Zheng Guanying, a thinker in the late Qing Dynasty, said, "military warfare" and "commercial warfare" are the two major themes of China's revival, and the protagonist of the latter is the entrepreneurial class.From the Opium War to the Westernization Movement, from the defeat of the Sino-Japanese War to the Revolution of 1911, from the May 4th Movement to the War of Resistance against Japan, from the founding of New China to the latest reform and opening up, we can see that enterprises The active presence of homeowners - something that has been neglected for many years.We don't know if this is an inadvertent omission or a deliberate forgetting.The entrepreneurial class has never been the main force of the revolution, and even their professional attributes make them run counter to radicalism in many cases.However, this does not prevent them from becoming a force that cannot be ignored in the history of Chinese progress. In the past hundred years, the research on the relationship between the state and capital, the government and the entrepreneurial class is a very unique proposition.The role of the entrepreneurial class in history is subtle and ambiguous.In this work, I have drawn three basic conclusions: 1. The dialectical relationship between state power and civil society has always been the central issue in China's modernization. Over the past 100 years, the initiative of the government and the voluntary actions of civil society, the cooperation, division of labor and conflicts between state agencies and non-governmental organizations have constituted all the appearances of China's social progress.Among them, the entrepreneurial class played a very important role.At some point, they even dominated the evolution of history. The idealism displayed by many entrepreneurs is more rational and real than that of many intellectuals and politicians. 2. In the past 130 years, that is, from the Westernization Movement in the late Qing Dynasty to the present, the logic of the Chinese business world is surprisingly consistent. As the only country in the world that has continued to centralize power for more than 2,000 years, the regime's control of the economy has formed an institutional and cultural inertia.In today's Chinese economic circles, a topic that is often discussed but difficult to answer is, what does the growing state-owned monopoly capital mean for China's future?It is difficult to predict the future accurately, but history can give some inspiration in its own way.A seldom observed fact of history is that in the past 130 years, the central government has been fatally challenged by the same problem.At the end of the Qing Dynasty, it was a fierce game between state-owned capital and private capital that finally led to the collapse of the empire.In the 1930s and 1940s, the bureaucratic capital groups represented by the so-called "Four Families" obviously had a major negative effect on national governance.This historical lesson is worthy of people's vigilance. 3. In the history of China's century-old transformation, the entrepreneurial class was the first to closely combine its own destiny with the country's modernization. We can even draw the conclusion that the wave of progress and reform and opening up in China today is precisely derived from the experience that the Chinese entrepreneurial class has acquired in the past and has survived to this day. It is these experiences that enable the entrepreneurial class to survive.Although they are unlikely to occupy a dominant position in history, they can make the development of history more dynamic and full of vitality. In the past 100 years, Chinese officials and elites have been committed to the reconstruction of the country and the rejuvenation of the nation.The tragedy is that every 30 to 40 years, this process will be interrupted by external turmoil or internal troubles, which makes China's corporate history a history that lacks a sense of inheritance.Experts in different fields have given countless answers to the slow progress of Chinese business. In this book, we only observe from the perspective of corporate history.What we see are three phenomena: one is the interference of ideological debates on modernization, the other is the birth of state commercialism by the concept of centralization, and the third is the influence of traditional business-friendly and official business culture on the new entrepreneurial class.What makes people sigh is that in the many economic reform movements after the Westernization Movement, these three propositions all followed ghostly and could not be shaken off.Even in 1978, a hundred years later, when China started economic reform again, these three propositions still plagued the country.In this sense, we have never jumped out of a growth logic circle. China's century-old history is actually about the choice between revolution and improvement.The good news is that in the past 30 years, the experience of reform and opening up has proved that a country's economic take-off can be achieved without going through social and political revolution.In the 30 years of peaceful rise, no large-scale social turmoil broke out, no famine, national division, and ethnic confrontation occurred. The vast majority of the people are the beneficiaries of this reform, and the gradual thinking has become the mainstream consensus of society. This is a very remarkable achievement and the greatest contribution of the Chinese people to the world.In the next 30 years, what we need to prove is that this gradual change path and model may bring new possibilities to a wider and deeper social change in China. One of the goals this book hopes to achieve is to redefine certain logics of Chinese social progress by restoring, analyzing and refuting the historical role of the entrepreneurial class. In fact, in European and American countries, the recognition of the role of entrepreneurs is also lagging behind.The greatest business historian in the United States, Alfred D. Chandler Jr., once said when he wrote the history of American business: "Historians have long been attracted to entrepreneurs, but pay little attention to the creation of these entrepreneurs. Historians, in contrast, have debated whether these entrepreneurial forebears were robber entrepreneurs or industrial politicians, good or bad.” In China, the role of entrepreneurs is even more awkward and ambiguous. In a movie or TV series, the most attention is of course the "male number one", followed by the "male number two", but few people pay attention to the "male number three".In almost all history books about modern China, politicians are the "male number one", intellectual elites are the "male number two", and entrepreneurs are the "dispensable" "male number three". This is a group of "male number three" who have been ridiculed and ignored in history.No one examines them from the perspective of intellectual history. Although the British novelist Somerset Maugham said that "even razors have their philosophy", the Chinese entrepreneurial class has nothing.In various versions of modern history books, their stories are like shattered porcelain pieces, always shining worthlessly and lonely in the inadvertently dark place.In troubled times, entrepreneurs always seem to be absent, cowardly, and irrelevant. They are just a group of people waiting to be blackmailed, and they are a group of people who are ungrateful for profit. They were born in chaos, grew up in horror, lacked experience in growth, and their development was interrupted again and again. They never had a moment of ease, and it seemed that they never had their own "rite of passage".This class is born without grand ambitions and vast imagination; they are too calm and conservative, so that they will be considered cowardly in some passionate moments; they are born believers in rational logic, which is very ridiculous in the era of belief revolution ; Their defense of their own wealth seems a bit hateful. Entrepreneurs seldom have thrilling excitement in their lives. They always seem to be calm, don't speak slogans, and are always not very pleasing.Their blood is cold, their souls are golden, and their anger has a cost limit. Even if they are furious, they will not go and slap the railing all over in the heavy rain.The "light business culture" that China has formed for thousands of years has seriously affected the society's perception of entrepreneurs—this is especially prominent in their interactions with officials and senior intellectuals.This deep-rooted cultural gene even distorts their own evaluation and judgment, so that at some critical moments, they cannot always appear as an independent class.The most astonishing thing is that this chaotic scene has lasted for a hundred years and has not changed so far. But is that really the case?I want to prove in this book that in the past hundred years, entrepreneurs in those generations of troubled times were so heroic. In those times when the country's fortunes were failing, their future was hopeless, but they never lacked enthusiasm for the country.Business wisdom and long-term practical immersion make them often have a more realistic foothold and vision than politicians and revolutionaries.Even in the most helpless and desperate situation, they still hope to use their own strength to achieve as much progress and peace as possible.They have played the most staunch supporters of progressive forces, or in some cities, they have become protagonists for a time, who have the opportunity to change the destiny of the country and themselves.They also have a weak side. At some important historical moments, they made completely wrong choices, thus bringing their fate into the quagmire.They never knew how to handle their relationship with the powerful government machine. Sadly, their various efforts are often ignored, even swallowed up by political forces, interrupted by wars, and distorted by writers.On the stage of historical dramas, their voices are always drowned out by brilliant revolutionary slogans, and their figures are always covered up or even uglified. They seem to be a group of prominent "invisible people", even after a hundred years, they are still blurred and indistinct. Small. While writing, I have noticed that the growth of Chinese enterprises is actually an accompanying phenomenon of social transformation, or in other words, it has been deeply affected by social transformation.This feature will appear more clearly in this book.If you do not know anything about the country's macro environment and policy history when running a business in China, the probability of sustainable success is very low.When we observe all successful people, we must consider the influence of political environment and system design.Such observations have to make us take a new look at the role of the entrepreneurial class—especially the wealthy class that relies on the power of private free capital—in China’s progress. In the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, the entrepreneurial class once again became a group that did not know how to deal with themselves.Almost all the people who participated in the rescue became "heroes", including officials, soldiers, media personnel, volunteers, entertainers, beggars who threw money into the donation box, and every passerby A or B who cried at the camera, except It was entrepreneurs who were attacked and condemned, although according to statistics, their donations accounted for more than half of the total, although many entrepreneurs also rushed to the scene or expressed their love in various forms.The "unforgiveness" of the people towards the entrepreneurial class has reached its extreme in this earthquake.Few people are even willing to defend them, which would be seen as lackeys and fellow travelers of the rich. The emergence of this phenomenon once again shows how embarrassing the role of Chinese entrepreneurs in social change is.The public's bad comments and crusade against the entrepreneurial class is a social phenomenon worth pondering.It shows that under the surface of Chinese society, there is an angry force surging, and its constituent elements are "disparity between rich and poor", "social injustice", "weak grassroots order" and so on.It flows like ground fire, and once it encounters a crack, it will erupt uncontrollably, causing a huge damage that cannot be explained.What we have observed is that for quite a long time in the past, in almost every social-economic event, entrepreneurs were the object of criticism and attacks, whether it was the sharp rise and fall of the stock market or the high price of housing prices, no matter Whether it is the price increase of pork or the outbreak of blue-green algae, entrepreneurs are almost always playing the role of "grabbing huge profits", "black hearts and unscrupulous", and "speculative chaos".Attacks and slanders on entrepreneurs have always been moral, unquestionable, and delightful.These voices cover up the institutional flaws of Chinese society and lead the crisis in the opposite direction. This is a very dangerous fact.The emotional antagonism and value conflict between the people and the wealthy class will greatly blur the main direction of China's reform, and this kind of damage will be fatal. We have come to realize more and more deeply that the reassessment and confirmation of the social value of the entrepreneurial class is, in a sense, a "liberation of the mind" that has never been carried out. When I started writing in 2004, I quoted French writer Roland Barthes (Roland Barthes) to write a preface "I am always puzzled by the nature of history".Today, several years later, I am still puzzled by the nature of history, but my research mentality seems to be much calmer.Sometimes, I even feel that I should look at history in a more relaxed manner, stay out of history, believe that it is enough to leave a mark on the world, but at the same time not believe in it.In this way, I can keep my freedom of thought. I also like the saying of Walt Lippmann (my favorite American columnist): "News can't tell people how to think, only what to think." In fact, the same is true of history.In this increasingly familiar territory, I often walk on eggshells.I often worry about a detail for several days, and I will be ecstatic about an unexpected acquisition.I am often moved by those passionate lives, and saddened by their disappearance in the fog of history. In essence, this long writing project, which has consumed five years of my life, is simply a struggle against oblivion. The dead are like rusty bells, which cannot be revived by non-pious and hard blows.Many historical truths can only become a little clear when looking back from a certain distance. This is a defect in human cognitive ability and a component of human sorrow.Every era is full of uncertainty.China's commercial history is always without rhyme, rough and lack of decoration, very much like our bumpy and confused life.To be exact, latecomers will never be able to get the truth of history, we are just getting closer infinitely.Just like I tried to clarify every texture and logic of history this time, it is likely that in the near future, all these efforts will be considered absurd and futile. Writing is so boring.Those were nights that were silent and shimmering.When I am tired, I will stand on the balcony, watch the silent flow of the canal, and look up at the looming and mysterious Jiangnan starry sky.I feel that there are some eyes watching me silently from afar.At this time, I will think of the poet Bei Dao: I seemed to really hear that a group of familiar strangers were standing outside the door.They have been forgotten by the country they once loved so much. At this moment, they traveled through centuries of history, dressed in green shirts, expressionless, and were knocking on the door knocker.