Secret Societies Reconsidered: Perspectives on the Social History of Early Modern South China and Southeast Asia

Perspectives on the Social History of Early Modern South China and Southeast Asia

David Ownby, Mary F. Somers Heidhues

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315288031
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A discussion of the development of secret societies within China and among Chinese communities in colonial Southeast Asia in the late 18th and 19th centuries.

1
Secret Societies Reconsidered

David Ownby

Why another book about Chinese secret societies? Scores of Chinese scholars have written thousands of pages on the topic since the Republican period, focusing largely on the question of secret society origins. Western academics produced a spate of studies of secret societies in the 1960s and 1970s, probing their roles in the rebellions and revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Journalists in the 1980s and 1990s continue to link the societies to worldwide narcotics smuggling rings. Sociologists scrutinize their structure and membership. Novelists and film-makers exploit their violent exoticism. At present, an impressive (some might say oppressive) bibliography treats the origins, social significance, and contemporary relevance of Chinese secret societies. One might be forgiven for thinking that there is little left to add.

The contributors to this volume believe that there is. Many of the chapters present evidence from a new source: the historical archives of the People's Republic of China, closed to most foreign scholars until after the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). This evidence is placed alongside studies of secret societies and their analogues (brotherhoods, hui, kongsi) in the Chinese communities of Southeast Asia, affording a broader perspective on the topic. Taken together, the evidence and viewpoints permit us to offer a new interpretation of the early history of secret societies, one that grounds them in the non-elite social organization and popular culture of South China and Southeast Asia, rather than in national politics or ethnic consciousness.

This interpretation relies on a methodology that embeds secret societies in their local settings and examines the relationships between the societies and other institutions in these settings. In fact, many of the contributors concentrate as much on the local social context as on the secret societies themselves. Applying this approach to different settings helps to avoid reducing "secret societies" and their members to any single definitive characterization—not "primitive rebels," not "criminal gangs," not even "innocent practitioners of mutual aid." Instead, taken together, the chapters in this volume identify a continuum of organizational forms—brotherhood, hui, secret society, kongsi—and a corpus of cultural symbols—clustering around the notion of Active kinship—that could be drawn on by groups of non-elite Chinese in a variety of contexts and used for a variety of purposes. From this perspective, secret societies, with their complex rituals and professed political agendas, were only one manifestation of a broader set of non-elite social practices. The interpretation of these social practices employed in this book is spelled out in more detail later in this introductory chapter, but the following paragraphs introduce our approach and our most important findings.

We focus on South China and Southeast Asia. South China (for present purposes, chiefly Fujian and Guangdong provinces) teemed with brotherhoods, hui, and secret societies earlier than other parts of China, as evidenced by the greater number of cases from this area in the Qing archives, the chief source for most of our contributors working on China. The Chinese communities of Southeast Asia were composed almost entirely of immigrants from this South China region, and it is not inappropriate that these areas be considered part of a common culture. Our essays also concentrate on the early history of the societies, the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the case of South China, the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries in the case of Southeast Asia. Focus on this early period is important because in both South China and Southeast Asia, the periods examined predate the full criminalization of secret societies and provide evidence of brotherhoods and secret societies dedicated to a wide range of activities.

The impulse to organize these associations grew out of circumstances somewhat unique to the regions under examination. In Taiwan and Southeast Asia, settlement of genuine frontiers by young, single men without the protection of lineage, village, or state prompted organization along the principles of brotherhood. In mainland South China, a complex of factors, including the protracted and disruptive dynastic transition in the late seventeenth century, followed in the eighteenth century by rapid population growth in a violent region already pressed for arable land, produced significant numbers of marginal young men who found organization by Active kinship equally useful.

In some cases, these organizations were little more than ad hoc survival strategies—some protective, some predatory, some both (Perry 1980, 1-9)—but in other instances the associations facilitated cooperation and organization on a remarkable scale. Particularly in Southeast Asia, where Chinese brotherhood associations were not constrained by a jealous state and a local elite that owed much of its legitimacy to that state, brotherhood associations blossomed into shareholding corporations that mined gold in Borneo and organized plantation agriculture in the environs of what came to be Singapore (see chapters 3 and 4). In nineteenth-century Malaya, secret societies were accepted by Chinese, Malays, and British alike as social institutions that, among other functions, produced political leadership in the Chinese community (see chapters 4, 5, and 9). In South China, although fictive kinship in a somewhat different sense did play an important role in the settlement of Taiwan, facilitating the organization of surname groups where lineages were slow to grow (Hsu 1980, 88; Jordan 1972, 12-26), brotherhoods per se did not achieve the same size and influence as in Southeast Asia. Nonetheless, the early history of what we have heretofore taken to be "secret societies" might be as fruitfully linked with non-elite associationai behavior such as funeral societies and rotating credit societies as with criminal entrepreneurship and rebellion.

In sum, this volume seeks to broaden our understanding of secret societies by grouping them together with other associations founded by similar types of people in similar contexts, employing similar organizational principles and cultural symbols. We are not rejecting the characterization of the secret society as a clandestine association with its own particular set of rituals and beliefs and a written tradition to pass on these rituals and beliefs—indeed ter Haar's chapter in this volume illustrates what can be done when scholars take seriously the documents and rituals of the Heaven and Earth Society (Tiandihui). Nor are we denying the frequent link between secret societies and rebellion. We are, however, asserting that preoccupation with exotica, violence, and rebellion has obscured important aspects of the social history of early modern South China and Southeast Asia. In the brotherhoods, hui, kongsis, and secret societies of South China and Southeast Asia, we see a flexible, non-elite response to the challenges of the mobile, commercial, competitive order of the early modem period, a complex of popular corporate activity with broad implications for our understanding of the evolution of the social histories of South China and Southeast Asia.

Historiography of Secret Societies

A brief overview of the imposing historiography of Chinese secret societies will bring our approach and findings into sharper focus. This overview can only skim the surface; a forthcoming study of the historiography of the Heaven and Earth Society alone includes nearly 350 bibliographic entries (Murray 1993). A comprehensive treatment of the literature on brotherhoods, hui, and secret societies in China and Southeast Asia would begin with commentary by Qing officials and lawmakers (which Antony discusses in his chapter in this volume), and include at least comparisons between Triads and Freemasons by nineteenth-century treaty port "sinologists," reports of colonial officials in Southeast Asia, and even popular journalism on Triads and gangs in Chinatowns throughout the contemporary world. For our immediate purposes, we narrow the relevant scholarship to four schools: Republican-period Chinese scholarship; Western scholarship of the 1960s and 1970s, often associated with French scholar Jean Chesneaux; recent archival scholarship in China and Taiwan; and the investigation by social scientists of secret societies and their analogues in Southeast Asia.

Republican-Period Chinese Scholarship

Several Republican-period Chinese scholars undertook the first attempts at genuine scholarly research into the origins and history of secret societies. Consistent with the statist orientation of Chinese historians throughout the ages, these scholars, of whom Xiao Yishan and Luo Ergang are the best known, pledged their energies to the consolidation of the new Chinese Republican government (for representative works, see Luo 1943; Xiao 1935).

The link between an academic history of secret societies and the consolidation of the Republican government lay in founding father Sun Yat-sen's political activities before the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912. Exiled from China, Sun traveled the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, visiting communities of ethnic Chinese and asking for their help in toppling the Manchu regime and establishing a modern republic (Ma 1990; Schiffrin 1968; Wilbur 1976, ch. 2). Frequently, he found that courting—and even joining—local secret societies was essential to mobilizing the resources of the communities. These resources might range from financial contributions to concrete assistance in planning uprisings in China proper, if local Chinese societies had maintained active links with societies on the mainland. To encourage such financial and organizational aid, Sun praised the nationalist, anti-Manchu origins of secret societies, hoping to rally the latent patriotism of North American and Southeast Asian societies, which had historically been closer to mutual benefit societies than cabals of rebels-in-waiting. In his contacts with mainland secret societies, Sun again found it useful to stress the societies' early anti-Manchu history; by so doing, he hoped to redirect the activities of the frequently xenophobic societies away from foreigners and toward the Manchu rulers. As part of this general mobilization, "scholar-revolutionaries" like Tao Chengzhang and Hirayama Shu put together popular, journalistic histories of secret societies reflecting Sun's political intentions around the time of the 1911 revolution (Hirayama 1912; Tao n.d.), but it fell to the postrevolution scholars to comb the historical record for genuine evidence to substantiate Sun's claims (Murray 1993, ch. 4).

The central mission of the Republican-period scholars thus came to be the location of evidence to prove that secret societies were founded in the early Qing period out of anti-Manchu sentiment. They focused their efforts on the Heaven and Earth Society, the earliest and most influential of the southern Chinese societies. The scholars quickly discovered that the standard court-produced historical works contained little information on the society and turned to other, society-generated sources. These sources, many of which the scholars themselves unearthed in the course of their research, consisted largely of various versions of the Heaven and Earth Society origin myth, generally called the Xiluxu (Preface on the Xilu), part of the written tradition of the society in circulation since the early nineteenth century, as well as poems and songs also recorded in Tiandihui handbooks.

The seemingly simple task of tracing the Heaven and Earth Society's historical origins produced decidedly complex results. Not only were there several versions of the origin myths (most of which were similar in narrative structure and iconography, revolving around the tale of the monks of the Shaolin temple; Murray 1993, appendix B, offers translations of several key versions of the myth), but it proved extremely difficult to match up the "facts" revealed in the origin myths with what the scholars knew about early Qing history. Mysterious people and places remained mysterious, even after extensive research. Dates of important events made no sense. Important places and events that should have been mentioned in any history of popular anti-Manchu resistance in the early Qing (Jiading and Yangzhou, for example, sites of notorious Manchu massacres of Ming loyalists) were omitted. Eventually, the historians decided that the language of the origin myths, as part of the esoteric cant of the secret societies, must be veiled in secrecy as well, and that the specific names, dates, and places discussed in the Xiluxu "reflected" (yingshe) their actual historic equivalents rather than recording them directly.

This prudent decision to view the origin myths as "coded" allegories—which they undoubtedly are, as ter Haar illustrates below—was unfortunately accompanied by imprudent use of the methodology of "reflection." Since it was difficult to determine the principles by which the symbolic elements in the origin myths reflected their authentic historical referents, scholars found themselves free to speculate—in ways that often strike the current reader as fanciful and unsubstantiated. As a result, the Republican-period scholars were unable to demonstrate conclusively the early Qing anti-Manchu origins of the Heaven and Earth Society. Even though they remained personally convinced of this interpretation, the ongoing debates concerning the concrete time and place of the society's founding, and the nature of the "reflected" material revealed by the origin myths, demonstrate a lack of scholarly consensus. The interpretations of this branch of scholarship thus have not stood the test of time, most of its assertions crumbling under the evidence produced by more recent archival historians.

Even if much of this scholarship seems flawed by today's standards, it remains nonetheless influential. Scholars in post-1949 Taiwan have continued to elaborate on the themes discussed above, supported in their efforts by the Kuomintang, which on occasion likened its position on Taiwan to that of the Ming loyalists who fled south in the seventeenth century to avoid the Manchus— and supposedly founded the Heaven and Earth Society. In addition, although some Western texts adopt an interpretation of Tiandihui origins closer to that arrived at by Chinese archival scholars in the 1970s and 1980s (Fairbank and Reischauer 1989, 290-91; Fairbank, Reischauer, and Craig 1973, 467-68; Michael and Taylor 1975, 43; Spence 1990, 113—14), others are clearly indebted to the Republican-period scholarship (Hsu 1990, 127-29; Hucker 1975, 338). Finally, we should not forget that the Republican-period scholars performed an invaluable service in locating and reprinting large numbers of documents that continue to enrich current studies of secret society origins and practices (see chapter 6).

Jean Chesneaux and the Radicalization of Secret Societies

Despite frequent mention in nineteenth-century treaty port writings and occasional articles in twentieth-century scholarly publications, secret societies did not become the central focus of any sustained body of Western academic scholarship until the 1960s and 1970s, when a series of publications associated with the Frenc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Secret Societies Reconsidered
• 2. Chinese Hui and the Early Modern Social Order: Evidence from Eighteenth-Century Southeast China
• 3. Chinese Organizations in West Borneo and Bangka: Kongsi and Hui
• 4. The Rise and Fall of the Ngee Heng Kongsi in Singapore
• 5. Chinese Culture and Polity in Nineteenth-Century Malaya: The Case of Yap Ah Loy
• 6. Messianism and the Heaven and Earth Society: Approaches to Heaven and Earth Society Texts
• 7. Migration, Protection, and Racketeering: The Spread of the Tiandihui within China
• 8. Brotherhoods, Secret Societies, and the Law in Qing-Dynasty China
• 9. Epilogue: Ritual Process Reconsidered
• Glossary
• Index