The Lius of Shanghai

Sherman Cochran, Andrew Hsieh

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674073876
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Chine

From the Sino-Japanese War to the Communist Revolution, the onrushing narrative of modern China can drown out the stories of the people who lived it. Yet a remarkable cache of letters from one of China's most prominent and influential families, the Lius of Shanghai, sheds new light on this tumultuous era. Sherman Cochran and Andrew Hsieh take us inside the Lius' world to explore how the family laid the foundation for a business dynasty before the war and then confronted the challenges of war, civil unrest, and social upheaval.Cochran and Hsieh gained access to a rare collection containing a lifetime of letters exchanged by the patriarch, Liu Hongsheng, his wife, Ye Suzhen, and their twelve children. Their correspondence offers a fascinating look at how a powerful family navigated the treacherous politics of the period. They discuss sensitive issues—should the family collaborate with the Japanese occupiers? should it flee after the communist takeover?—as well as intimate domestic matters like marital infidelity. They also describe the agonies of wartime separation, protracted battles for control of the family firm, and the parents' struggle to maintain authority in the face of swiftly changing values.Through it all, the distinctive voices of the Lius shine through. Cochran and Hsieh's engaging prose reveals how each member of the family felt the ties that bound them together. More than simply a portrait of a memorable family, The Lius of Shanghai tells the saga of modern China from the inside out.

I

PLANNING A BUSINESS DYNASTY

1907–1932

1

Parents Who Dreamed of a Business Dynasty

ON OCTOBER 30, 1907, Liu Hongsheng and Ye Suzhen were married in their hometown of Shanghai.¹ Their families arranged their marriage “in every respect of the old fashion,” Liu later recalled.² Following well-established customs, the couple did not see each other until he lifted her veil after the wedding ceremony had been conducted. At that moment, they were both delighted to discover how each other looked. She was an attractive young woman by traditional standards, with delicate skin, fine-boned facial structure, big eyes, and bound feet covered by elegant silk shoes that she had embroidered herself. He was nearly six feet tall and gazed down at his diminutive new bride through intelligent eyes that were set wide apart in a broad and handsome face.

From that moment on, Ye did not doubt that Liu was the one man for her. Nor did she want ever to share him with another woman, even though men who could afford it still took concubines in China at that time. As she later told her children, for her it was love at first sight.³ Liu’s memory of the moment when he lifted Ye’s veil was equally positive and nearly as romantic. Writing to one of his sons twenty-five years later, he remembered feeling about himself and his bride that “had either of us been given the free will we could not have chosen better.”⁴

Negotiating a Marriage Agreement

For Ye and Liu, both age nineteen, the lifting of the veil was remembered as a spontaneous, romantic, emotionally charged moment, but for their families, the wedding was the outcome of a calculated, protracted, and tense process of negotiation. Both the bride and the groom came from business families, and in arranging the marriage, each family set its own business conditions.

On the Lius’ side, their biggest asset was Liu Hongsheng’s future promise as a new-style, forward-looking businessman. For a young man, he had already inherited or acquired a very impressive set of business credentials. Born in Shanghai, he had parents whose native place was Ningbo, a prefecture ninety miles southeast of Shanghai that was known for its successful merchants and financiers. The tie to one’s native place was different from loyalty to a hometown or a place of birth. All Chinese inherited native places from their fathers (in the same way that they inherited surnames), and in general Chinese preferred to deal with native-place associates rather than other Chinese because they spoke each other’s local dialects and expected eventually to retire in their native places, where they would be accountable for their lifelong treatment of their native-place associates. In the case of sojourners from Ningbo, the native-place tie was famously strong. Since the tenth century and especially in the nineteenth century, Ningbo had built up a reputation for producing merchants who migrated widely in China, created powerful networks for managing finance and long-distance trade, and showed fierce loyalty to their native place, making the native-place bond especially significant in this case.⁵

At a relatively young age, Liu Hongsheng felt the need to begin making native-place connections and laying plans for his future in business because his father, Liu Xianxi, had died prematurely at the age of thirty-five in 1894, when Liu Hongsheng was only six years old. During Liu Xianxi’s lifetime, he had held a job at China’s largest Chinese-owned shipping firm, China Merchants Steam and Navigation Company, and had provided adequately, if not lavishly, for his wife and five children, two boys and four girls. But after Liu Xianxi’s death, his family lived very modestly.

Although not from a wealthy family, Liu Hongsheng was able to attend St. John’s Middle School and St. John’s University on a scholarship. His education in these schools, which were founded and operated by the American Episcopal Mission, was vital for his future in business, because St. John’s was the premier institution in Shanghai for producing a business elite.⁶ Besides learning English and studying business at St. John’s, Liu made contacts there with classmates who would prove useful to him for the rest of his life. Strapped for funds as a teenager, he left St. John’s University before graduation. In 1906, he took advantage of his bilingual command of Chinese and English to land a job as an interpreter for the British-led police in the International Settlement of Shanghai while he continued to look for a position in business.

All of these credentials—Ningbo native-place ties, education at St. John’s, command of English—showed that Liu Hongsheng was well prepared to become an internationally connected businessman, but as a prospective marriage partner in a wedding between business families, he was lacking in one important respect: he was not wealthy. No matter how talented, trained, and well connected he might have been, he could not count on his family to provide financial backing for any investments he might wish to make.

Ye Suzhen came from a family that could provide Liu with substantial financial backing, but during the negotiations before the wedding, her relatives were initially reluctant to approve the marriage because of the discrepancy between the two families’ wealth and prestige. The members of the Ye family were willing to entertain the idea of this marriage because they recognized that they had much in common with the Lius: both families came from merchant backgrounds, resided in Shanghai, and had Ningbo as their native place. But the members of the Ye family considered themselves superior to the Lius.

The Ye family members saw themselves as part of a distinguished merchant dynasty that had descended from Ye Chengzhong, one of Shanghai’s richest Chinese merchants, who had bequeathed to the Ye family on his death in 1899 between eight and ten million ounces of silver (taels; the equivalent of US$12.4–15.5 million at the time).⁷ Ye Suzhen’s father, Ye Shigong, had helped to sustain the Ye merchant dynasty by founding and managing the Xiecheng Match Mill, one of China’s early industrial enterprises. Admittedly, Ye Shigong had not left his children an inheritance as large as the one from Ye Chengzhong, but he had had less time to build up his fortune because his career had been cut short by his untimely death in 1899, the same year Ye Chengzhong died.⁸ Even though the fortunes of the Ye family had declined a bit in the aftermath of these two deaths, Ye Suzhen’s relatives had doubts about her taking Liu as a husband because they believed she would be marrying down.

Ultimately the members of the Ye family overcame their misgivings about the Lius and approved the marriage because they came to realize that they needed Liu Hongsheng to sustain the Ye business dynasty. Ye Suzhen’s mother and father were both deceased by the time she was eleven years old, leaving her and her two younger sisters and brother in the care of their maternal grandmother.⁹ The three girls, especially Ye Suzhen, were considered beauties, but they had no experience in business and took pride in their exclusive devotion to domestic matters, as Ningbo women were renowned for doing.¹⁰ None of the three sisters had much formal education; in fact, they were virtually illiterate and spoke only Shanghainese—not Mandarin or even Ningboese and certainly no foreign languages.¹¹ In addition, they were ill equipped to bear business responsibilities because they were all prone to anxiety and depression from an early age. Similarly, their only brother, Ye Chenghe, who was the youngest child, also suffered from depression and showed no ability or even interest in business. As a young man he was already notorious for squandering money on food, drink, women, and most of all, gambling. His relatives feared that if the family fortune were left in his hands it would soon be gone, bringing the family’s merchant dynasty to an end.¹²

After prolonged haggling about what each family’s contribution to the marriage should be, the members of the Ye family came to an agreement among themselves and with the Lius that the couple should wed for the sake of sustaining and extending a business dynasty. In this union, the bride was expected to bring to the marriage resources her family had accumulated in its business dynasty of the past, and the groom was meant to use these resources to develop and perpetuate a business dynasty in the future.

Opening Enterprises and Bearing Children

Once they were married, Liu Hongsheng and Ye Suzhen pursued the goal of achieving a business dynasty by establishing enterprises and producing children at a remarkable rate. Each of them predominated in a separate sphere, with her bearing the children and him opening the businesses. But each of them also crossed the line between the domestic household and the business enterprise, with Ye making a timely contribution to the founding of the businesses and Liu playing a decisive role in the education of the children.

Ye Suzhen helped Liu Hongsheng make a start in business by bringing a dowry with her into the Liu household and serving as a conduit for the transfer of other funds from the Ye family to the Lius. Following Chinese custom, she married out of her natal family and into her husband’s family, and as soon as she had done so, she became aware of the Lius’ demands on her and her family. As she later recalled, the Lius “had to get a lift” from the Ye family to launch her young husband’s career in business, and her widowed mother-in-law was the one who put the financial squeeze on her. In Ye’s words, since her husband “was not yet in any real position, [my mother-in-law] often ‘cracked me like a walnut in order to eat the meat inside,’ and that was because my own parents had money.”¹³ She surely did not enjoy being “cracked” by her mother-in-law, and like many Chinese daughters-in-law, she never did feel fully at ease with her mother-in-law, who did not die until 1931—twenty-four years after Ye married into the Liu family.¹⁴ Under pressure from the Lius, Ye Suzhen channeled considerable resources from the Ye family into her husband’s businesses soon after she married Liu, providing a timely infusion of capital when he needed it to launch his first industrial enterprises.

In the 1910s, Liu Hongsheng supplemented the Ye family’s capital by drawing on a variety of other sources. In 1909 he took a job at the Kailuan Mining Administration, a Sino-British coal-mining company, and he rapidly rose up the corporate ladder, especially during World War I (1914–1919), when British managers were called back to Europe, opening the way for his advancement as Kailuan’s bilingual comprador in China. He also took advantage of contacts in his Ningbo native-place network to distribute Kailuan’s coal and mobilize capital from Shanghai’s banks (where Ningbo financiers predominated).¹⁵ In the 1920s, he used this capital to establish several major enterprises, including China Coal Briquette Company, Shanghai Portland Cement Works Company Limited, China Match Company, China Wool Manufacturing Company Limited, East China Coal Mining Company, and Chung Hwa Wharf Company. Perhaps the single most personally satisfying investment for him was one of his first, his purchase of the Xiecheng Match Mills in 1920. This company had been founded by his father-in-law, and when he bought it from his in-laws, he took pleasure in demonstrating to them that they had been wrong to doubt his prospects as a businessman before his marriage to Ye Suzhen thirteen years earlier. If the Lius had once swallowed their pride and deferred to the Ye family in the past, they would not do so in the future.¹⁶ By 1930, still in his early forties, Liu had come to preside over all of these businesses, making him one of China’s richest and most powerful capitalists.

During the same years, while Liu Hongsheng was extraordinary for opening industrial enterprises one after another, Ye Suzhen was also extraordinary for having children one after another. In one twelve-year stretch of her marriage (1909–1921), she had nearly one child per year. Altogether she gave birth sixteen times, the last one in 1929. She lost four children in their infancy and brought up the other twelve—nine boys and three girls. Of these twelve, the first seven were all boys.¹⁷

In raising her children, Ye Suzhen depended heavily on wet nurses, nannies, and other servants, especially when she suffered from an unstable psychiatric condition. In 1930, the year after their last child was born, Liu engaged a physician, a woman named Kwei, to examine Ye’s “mental and physical soundness,” and Dr. Kwei discovered that Ye suffered from a debilitating disorder that she had apparently inherited. Like her sisters and brother, every few years she had, in her doctor’s words, “a period of over-activity, excitement and violence followed by a period of depression and a general slowing up of activity.” In her married life, the first such attack occurred in 1917. After catching the flu and having a miscarriage, she began alternating between a manic phase and depression over a period of six months.

For relief, Ye took up opium smoking, a habit that was common in China and especially Shanghai. In the 1920s, she had two more episodes—one in 1923 and another in 1928. In each case she followed the same manic-depressive pattern for six months, and she often slept for as many as twenty hours out of twenty-four. During the five or six years between episodes, she functioned normally, according to her doctor, except that “she absolutely does not recall anything that occurred during an attack but a feeling of weakness and generalized pains.”¹⁸

Despite her condition, Ye Suzhen remained on good terms with Liu Hongsheng and her children, even when her emotions swung to extremes. “When patient is violent,” Kwei observed in 1930, “she seldom hits her husband but is apt to be violent tow...