Chapter 22 Section 3 The Formation of Business Groups and the Rise of New Types of Businessmen

During the Ming and Qing Dynasties at the end of the feudal period, the accumulation of commercial capital was unprecedentedly huge.Merchants from all over the world formed many large and small regional business gangs, mainly such as Huizhou merchants, Shanxi merchants, Fujian merchants, Guangzhou merchants, Ningbo merchants, Dongting merchants, Longyou merchants, Jiangxi merchants, Shandong merchants, and Shaanxi merchants. Big Business Gang".A business gang is an ancient business group, which has greater activity energy than a single business. The main economic reason for the formation of business gangs from the same area is that some areas have dense mountains and narrow fields, many people and little land, and limited room for agricultural development. The surplus population has to find a way out from the commercial side.At the beginning, they used local raw materials (bamboo, wood, soil) to make handicrafts and sold them abroad, or sold special products in the region (tea, fruit, wood, even silk, and pond salt), and sold them to other places. Huge business gang.Huizhou merchants, Shanxi merchants, Longyou merchants, and Dongting merchants belong to this type.In some areas, the commodity economy is relatively developed, the resources (cotton, tea, fur, and even grain) are abundant, and there are a large number of handicraft products (mainly textile industry and porcelain industry) and surplus agricultural and sideline products that need to seek markets outside. On such a material basis, business operations, accumulation of capital, and formation of business gangs are no longer limited to the original promotion of local products.Shangdong, Jiangxi, and Shaanxi merchants belong to the latter type.The rise of some merchant groups was also related to foreign trade (Guangzhou merchants, Fujian merchants, and Ningbo merchants).The most important business of the merchant gang is the patented commodity tea and salt; cotton cloth, grain, handicraft raw materials (cotton, silk), various regional special products and imported products are also sold.Large business gangs comprehensively operate various industries to form a whole.For example, Shanxi merchants, who are also known as the great merchants of Qin and Jin Dynasties together with Shanxi merchants, transported millet to the frontier (Kaizhong), processed salt to Huaiyang and Hedong, sold cloth to Wuyue, and transported tea to Sichuan and Shu.The same is true of Huizhou merchants and Shanxi merchants.Shanxi merchants are, "serve merchants in Gyeonggi, Sanjiang, Lianghu, Lingbiao, east, west and north, and get rich thousands of miles or more than ten thousand miles away" ("Wutai Xinzhi", Volume 2, "Livelihood").Really goes far enough.

Although there are many rich and powerful businessmen in the business gang, and they dominate, but in terms of number, small and medium-sized businessmen are more numerous.Most of them do business with the money of big families, with capital or loans, and some of them are clan partnerships, and people of the same clan pool money to do business.There are also many who have completed their three-year apprenticeship and are employed by big businessmen in their hometown as clerks. There are more than 100 businessmen and clerks in a Huizhou family with a capital of more than 200,000.The merchant gang was doing business abroad, and when they met for business, the upper Jia took the upper seat, the middle Jia took the second place, and the lower Jia had to accompany him.Different identities are different classes.However, the business gang adopts the form of doing business in the whole township, collective migration, and a group of relatives and relatives. To a certain extent, it conceals the class differences within the merchants.

Business gangs—the collectivization of merchants, united, sufficient capital, many industries, large scale, wide connections, long-distance "radiation", multi-angle management, flexibility, self-regulation, reducing risks and increasing benefits.Under a certain organizational form, such as a guild hall, it is conducive to external competition and internal unity.In this way, the strength is great and the accumulation is fast. The commercial capital of Ming and Qing merchants (especially in the early Qing Dynasty) is far greater than that of the previous dynasties, which has a certain relationship with the formation of merchants.So it is indeed a new thing, and it is a major feature in the commercial development of Ming and Qing Dynasties.

Another new feature among merchants in the Ming and Qing Dynasties is that a new type of merchants is also emerging while the old-style merchants tend to be privileged.This is another division of the merchant class. In the Ming and Qing Dynasties, because the feudal government pretended to sell monopoly commodities and certain official businesses to merchants—for example, the salt merchants under the “Guide Law” of salt in the late Ming and Qing dynasties, and the foreign copper merchants in the early Qing Dynasty were entrusted to monopolize foreign trade. Foreign merchants and merchants supported many prominent and privileged merchants for a while. These merchants actually represented the interests of the government.In the past, there were not so many powerful and privileged merchants. They were a specialty of the Ming and Qing Dynasties.Privileged merchants with a high degree of feudal monopoly often strengthened the combination of commercial capital, land, and usury, and strengthened the traditional feudal landlord economy.Even wealthy businessmen without privileges, most of them are keen to buy land, lend usury, rely on the government to seek official positions, and belong to the same type of political orientation as privileged businessmen.They are all people who share the fate of the feudal regime and are conservative forces who maintain the old system.

From the middle of the Ming Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty, another part of the private middle-level businessmen who had little (or no) connection with land and usury, did not have the privileges granted by the feudal government, and did not deal with the government much, and even some wealthy businessmen and big businessmen were enlightened People began to integrate with production, investing commercial capital in the field of production instead of land.The combination of commercial capital and production takes many forms.One is that businessmen act as package buyers and organize small producers to produce at home.For example, the "accounting room" opened by merchants in the silk weaving industry in Nanjing and Suzhou in the Qing Dynasty was the general accounting office of large buyers with a large amount of capital, raw materials, and looms. controlled small producers.In addition, in Foshan's iron nail and soil needle industry, and in Jingdezhen's porcelain red furnace industry, there is also a contract buyer system.The second is that merchants act as employers and hire workers for production, but the production link is not an independent accounting unit, and the wages of hired workers are paid by the firm.This is most common in the processing of agricultural products. From rice hulling (longlong), grinding to oil, sauce, wine, and vinegar, there are merchant-employer systems.The big ones, such as the kick room in the cotton cloth industry in Suzhou and the wood farm in Zhongnanshan, Shaanxi, also belong to this form.The third is investment by businessmen, who set up paper troughs, sugar houses, and wood factories with independent accounting, and even set up factories to mine, smelt iron, dig wells, and cook salt.These are independent handicraft workshops, which are the further development of the combination of merchants and production.Fourth, merchants rent land and hire people to grow tea, fruit, trees, vegetables, medicinal materials, mushrooms, fungus, etc., and link them with processing, transportation and sales.This is not a handicraft industry, but a commercial agriculture as the management object. The merchants control the production and use non-dependent and free wage labor, and it is not temporary seasonal wage labor. The new relations of production—the germination of capitalism, injected new vitality into the development of commerce.

There are two different types of newly-started industrial and commercial operators or operators who are both farmers and merchants, and the old-style feudal merchants who combine land, commerce, and usury and are closely connected with the government.They are associated with larger-scale development of natural resources, more complex organizational management, and more advanced production methods (capitalism), and have a certain historical progress.Similar to the historically progressive free merchants emerging during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, at the turning point of great changes in the social system at the end of the feudal society, the merchant class was divided again, and some emerging forces that followed the direction of historical development emerged.These forces are also uniting to try to join certain political factions and fight against feudalism.In the Donglin Party in the late Ming Dynasty, there were small and medium-sized businessmen who did not enjoy feudal privileges and had little connection with the government, and even larger businessmen participated.