Chapter 9 A generation of "business fathers" who are figures in corporate history

In the century-old corporate history, Sheng Xuanhuai is regarded as the "Father of Business", and he is a peerless genius official businessman.However, it was precisely because of his outstanding talent and strong will that he also led the Westernization cause to an abyss that would never be restored. Every time Sheng Xuanhuai started a business, he would do it himself, and he didn't mind the trouble.When the railway was built, he was over fifty years old, and he suffered from asthma, dysentery and other serious diseases from time to time. He still traveled around and dealt with affairs on his sickbed.He has a wide range of contacts. According to records, there are as many as 2,000 people who correspond with him all the year round. Whenever there is a private and important letter, he must personally write it. His energy is really frightening.

Throughout his life, all of Sheng Xuanhuai's careers grew stronger in the competition with international capital.The practices he developed, whether it is shipping, mining, telegraph, or railway, steel, and banking, are the basic industries of a modern commercial country, and each of them is related to the national economy and people's livelihood. Book.What is even more shocking is that he is living in a chaotic world where wealth is depleted, the people are poor, and the country suffers from aggression and humiliation. The treasury is empty, the bureaucracy is corrupt, and the people are superstitious. Assuming the posture of a strongman, he regained many national sovereignty and economic rights and interests from the great powers.

He has always been very repulsive to foreign capital, and contended with it with a strong posture.During the period of China Merchants, he fought a 10-year "water battle" with the British and American companies on the Yangtze River shipping. Forced to the negotiating table to sign a "price contract".When he was running the telegraph office, he withstood the pressure and, through arduous negotiations, completely dismantled the wires of the two foreign-funded telegraph companies in the coastal area, preventing "foreign lines from landing on land" and safeguarding the country's sovereignty.The same is true for running iron factories and building railways. He insisted on focusing on himself and opposed the intervention of foreign stocks. He even publicly argued with Li Hongzhang, Zhang Zhidong and other important foreign affairs ministers because of this.In terms of mining exploration and mining, whenever he heard that foreign merchants discovered or planned to mine a certain project, he must write to the imperial court in a hurry, either to stop it or to preempt it.Over the past few decades, at many moments, Sheng Xuanhuai has indeed played the role of a defender of the country's economic interests, which is also something he deserves to be respected and missed.

An important means for Sheng Xuanhuai to compete with foreigners is to make full use of government monopoly resources.As early as when he founded China Shipping Merchants Bureau, he proposed to use 400,000 shi water transport business as a "baseline" for the company. When he was fighting with foreign businessmen, he asked Li Hongzhang to give various preferential policies, such as Reduce or exempt water transport air return ship tax, reduce or exempt tea tax, increase the shipping fee, and delay the extension of official certificates, etc.When setting up ironworks and repairing railways, he even pursued a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, he demanded that "rails should be built by the factory" to ensure the profits of Hanyang Ironworks. On the other hand, he completely excluded foreign capital from entering. In 1893, a fire broke out in the machine weaving layout in Shanghai and caused heavy losses. Sheng Xuanhuai was sent to rescue the situation. He proposed two major industrial policies on the grounds of protecting the national textile industry. The sales of textiles distributed by weaving companies are "tax-free". Once this card is exempted, it will open up a way out for companies in trouble.

Sheng's business strategy was not unfamiliar to later Chinese economists, and it was almost a must-kill tactic for all state-owned monopoly enterprises.The advantage is that monopoly can generate huge benefits and competitiveness. The disadvantage is that enterprises suffer from "policy dependence syndrome" and have not formed real market competitiveness. Just like countless state-owned enterprises a hundred years later, they are getting rid of After overcoming the initial difficulties, the inherent institutional drawbacks of the state-run system will inevitably intensify and eventually become incurable diseases.According to the records of people at the time, many enterprises affiliated to the Sheng family were down-to-earth, with fellow villagers everywhere, and inefficient. Fairbank described the Commercial Bank under the chairmanship of Sheng Xuanhuai in "Cambridge History of China", "The main concern of the directors is to control the provinces and Beijing. The profitable business of remittance of government funds among the government has no intention of providing loans to industries. Its small number of industrial loans are mainly given to enterprises controlled by Sheng.” The advantages and disadvantages of this monopoly state-owned enterprise, after a hundred years Seeing it is still obvious.Therefore, Fairbank's evaluation of him is: "The most obvious example of an official turning into a bureaucratic entrepreneur is Sheng Xuanhuai...he likes to play tricks in the officialdom without sacrificing sound and reasonable business management methods. He obviously enjoys Enterprises that are monopolistic or heavily subsidized by the government win, and those that compete often lose."

Sheng Xuanhuai's mentor, Li Hongzhang, once described Sheng Xuanhuai in sixteen characters, "with one hand official seal, the other hand abacus, both official and businessman, both ways".In the orthodox Confucian thinking of thousands of years, businessmen are profit-seeking by nature, and their social status is lower than that of officials, peasants and workers, and they are in the same class as beggars and prostitutes.As the country declined in the late Qing Dynasty, almost all people of insight began to change their perceptions of merchants. It was both helpless and progressive to supervise merchants.However, in actual operations, the government has always been unable to curb its desire for power. When the situation is critical, businessmen are greatly pushed ahead, and when the environment changes slightly, they immediately take action ruthlessly. Chasing people, never false colors.

As the initiator of the "government-supervised private-run" model, Sheng Xuanhuai's basic philosophy is: "Private capital can be used, but it can also be bullied. Foreign capital can be used, but it must not be trusted." All of his businesses have a common feature, that is, they all involve private capital. He firmly believes that "non-commercial operations cannot seek their own benefits, and non-government supervision cannot prevent their disadvantages." In the case of saving the Hanyang Iron Works, Sheng Xuanhuai's industrial His philosophy is obviously much more pragmatic than that of Zhang Xiangshuai who only knows "political correctness" but never "doesn't ask how much money is spent".However, from a practical point of view, it is not necessarily true that "non-commercial operations cannot seek their own benefits" or "non-official supervision cannot prevent their disadvantages" as a commercial truth.In government-supervised commercial enterprises, commercial shares have no right to speak in the operation, and are only available.In Sheng Xuanhuai's management team, there are many professional managers who are compradors, and there are many management geniuses like Zheng Guanying among them. However, these funds and talents are nothing more than "things" that can be used in Sheng's view.He has maintained a firm grip on all projects as a government custodian.

Whether Sheng Xuanhuai was an official or a businessman was controversial at the time. In June 1897, when he was in full bloom, one of his subordinates, Jing Yuanshan, the general manager of the Shanghai Telegraph Bureau, raised this question sharply.Jing Yuanshan was a money dealer in his early years, and he and Zheng Guanying once sworn brothers to Jinlan. He was also a person with radical reform ideas. He once founded China's first girls' school "Jingzheng Women's School" in Shanghai.In a letter to Zheng, he bluntly stated that Sheng Xuanhuai's "identity is unknown", "being an official supervisor, he still neglected to coordinate the expansion of the overall situation, and serving as a commercial office, he still failed to concentrate on his work." He also quoted a Suzhou According to the words of the merchants, Sheng's style is "coercing officials to bully merchants, and coercing merchants to deceive officials".

For decades, Sheng Xuanhuai was impeached by the officials many times, and most of his accusations were "the public will benefit if the harm is done, and the self will benefit if he benefits".The enterprises run by Sheng Xuanhuai often do not distinguish between public and private, there is no avoidance system, and there is no transparent and open supervision system.After he signed the China Merchants Bureau, he expelled Xu Run and Tang Tingshu, who were compradors, from the company. At the same time, he took their shares as his own. After years of secret operations, he finally held 22,000 shares worth 4.4 million taels of silver. largest individual shareholder.At the beginning of the takeover, when he was liquidating the property, he found that 47 properties worth about 500,000 taels were not included in the account books when Qichang Foreign Bank was acquired. An 8% annual return is available, and Li is asked if he is willing to attach shares.When he founded the Commercial Bank, in order to win the support of the court, he openly bribed the academician Wang Wenshao to "retain 500 shares" in the bank for him.

It was in this kind of ambiguous business activities that he became the "richest man" in the late Qing Dynasty after Hu Xueyan.After his death, the Sheng family invited Li Jingfang, the eldest son of the "family benefactor" Li Hongzhang, to preside over the liquidation of the property, and determined that the total property was 13.49 million taels of silver.Sheng Xuanhuai claimed to be a national economic strategy all his life, and he tried to say, "Everyone who speaks refers to the interests in his hands. I don't know that these are the public interests of thousands of people, not the private interests of one person...but if you want to develop business, gradually become self-improvement, and become a A person who stands up to the sky and the earth is just to let the countries know that there are still people in the Central Plains." Under such a generous statement, it is a great irony that in an era when the people are destitute, they can actually amass such wealth.

Sheng Xuanhuai's appearance of "genius-type officials and businessmen" is both accidental and inevitable. All in all, it is a tragedy of China's commercial progress.He used extraordinary means to accomplish the impossible, but he still couldn't get rid of the logic of government and business.In a sense, it was his strong experiments that set off a round of industrial construction in the sluggish late Qing empire and made amazing breakthroughs. On the other hand, because of his strong official and business style, the Westernization Movement The temperament of state-run monopoly is more and more intensely shrouded.