Strenuous Decades

Global Challenges and Transformation of Chinese Societies in Modern Asia

Chi-cheung Choi, Tomoko Shiroyama, Venus Viana, Chi-cheung Choi, Tomoko Shiroyama, Venus Viana

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9783110757460
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

The movement of goods and passengers between port cities not only stimulates growth in coastal trading networks and centers but also inevitably changes the social and economic lives of people in these port cities and, subsequently, of their fellow compatriots farther inland. Studies of port cities have focused on the interactive political and economic relationship between trading centers. The center of attention in this book is socioeconomic life and cultural identity, which are shaped by the movement of goods, people, knowledge, and information, particularly when the community faces a crisis.

Transnational studies focus on cross-border connections between people, institutions, commodities, and ideas, with an emphasis on their global presence. This book looks at the responses of different localities to the same global crisis. It gathers a selection of the fifty papers presented at the conference on "Coping with Transnational Crisis: Chinese Economic and Social Lives in East Asian Port Cities, 1850-1950, " held in Hong Kong on June 7-11, 2016. The period from the 1850s to the outbreak of war in the Pacific in the late 1930s encompasses two major transnational crises with significant impacts on the Chinese population in Southeast Asian port cities in terms of their way of living and the construction of their identity: the emergence of bubonic plague in the 1880s and 1920s and the global economic crisis in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The authors discuss the social and economic lives in various South East Asian port cities where many residents had to cope with these transnational crises. They do so through examining institutional measurements, rituals and festivals, communication, knowledge and information exchange as well as identity (re)construction. In addition, they explore how local communities responded to knowledge and information between the port cities and cities as well as inland locations.

The chapters in this book offer solid grounds for future comparisons, not only based on a specific time or event but also on how society reacted over time, space, and various types of crises.

Part I: Traders and workers abroad: Coping with colonial powers and socioeconomic adversaries

 

Coping with colonial governments

Chapter 1 Hong Kong rice merchants and Saigon’s rice exports, 1870s–1920s

LI Tana

Note: I thank Frank Ching, who generously shared the sources that he collected on the Li family with me, when I visited Hong Kong in 1996. Thanks also go to Elizabeth Sinn, who gave helpful advice on the possible sources. This chapter is a revised and expanded version of “Saigon’s rice exports and Chinese Rice merchants from Hong Kong, 1870s–1920s”, in Jörg Thomas Engelbert ed. Vietnam’s ethnic and religious minorities: A Historical Perspective (Benn: Peter Lang, 2016): 33–52.

1 Introduction

The economic foundation of Cochinchina of today’s southern Vietnam was built on rice. Rice accounted for over 70 percent of total exports, half of which went to China. The income of all the inhabitants depended on the price of rice and the volume of rice exported (Shōzō 1939/1995: 87). Rice credit (also known as green rice loans), collection, transportation, wholesalers, and rice millers were structured around one goal: exporting as much rice as possible. Rice trade was thus the keystone of business and the index of prosperity of Chinese trade in Cochinchina.

A major puzzle occurs here: although rice was so vital to the economy of Cochinchina, we know virtually nothing about the Chinese merchants who operated the trade. Although the company names of Chinese-owned rice mills are known, we have little idea about their owners. Whereas shipping was crucial to the rice export, shipping companies formed no part of the business interests of Chinese rice merchants based in Saigon-Cholon. This contrasts sharply with Singapore’s Straits Steam Shipping (Shideli lunchuan gongsi 實得利輪船公司) founded in 1890, or the Sino-Siam Steam Navigation (Huaxian lunchuan gongsi 華暹輪船公司), founded in 1909 (Akira 1989: 55). Even more striking in Vietnam is the absence of insurance companies, a critical sector for the long and risky shipping of the commodity. Between 1912 and 1933, eight of the nine insurance companies in Siam (now Thailand) were Chinese (Akira 1989: 102), but no Chinese insurance company was in Vietnam until well after World War II (Zhang 1956: 92–95). Banks were even farther away from the local Chinese capacity, except for a short-lived Banque de Cochinchine in 1908.

Two Chinese sources exist. The first was written by a Chinese diplomat who visited French Indochina in 1905 and contains a list of leading Chinese shops and rice mills in Tongking (northern Vietnam) and Cochinchina, and the second was compiled in Saigon in the 1950s, listing the pioneer Chinese leaders in Vietnam. However, more puzzles arise from these sources because we have two sets of names of Chinese elites in Cochinchina that do not correspond to each other. None of the rice mill owners on this list appeared as leading figures of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, nor did they appear in any biographies of the Chinese in Vietnam, before or after.

Why were such important businessmen nameless, even though each ran a mill producing from 500 to 1,000 tons of rice a day? Surely, this quantity of output required infrastructure consisting of large-scale transport and storage space in godowns, all requiring enormous capital. What seems to be missing in the rice sector of Saigon-Cholon, the leading trade and industry in French Indochina, is vertical integration among the leading Chinese rice business groups such as those that existed in Siam, the Dutch East Indies, and British Malaya. A closer look, however, reveals that integration did exist in Cochinchina, but to find it, one has to look across the South China Sea. Many of the leading companies and elites who accumulated their wealth in the Saigon rice trade were in late nineteenth-century Hong Kong. These businesses, in turn, gained them prominent positions in Hong Kong society. Among them were rice importers, shipping companies, insurance companies and banks – often all in one firm. If we want to better understand the societies on both shores of the South China Sea, we need to view these important commercial entities in the historical context of French Cochinchina. This chapter traces the history of some of these Chinese companies in Hong Kong in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, to start piecing together these fragments and thereby reconstruct the lost history of the Chinese rice merchants in Vietnam.

2 Saigon rice shipping to Hong Kong, 1860s and 1870s

In the early days of Saigon in the 1860s, the category of “rice merchant” existed but did not mean “rich and important,” as it did later in the century. Instead, the leading European or Chinese merchants – such as Behre, Hogg, Orroño, and Speidel, and Spooner, and the Chinese companies Tan Keng Ho and Ong Cat Xuong (Wing Cat Xuong 永吉昌?) – were listed as commission agents (Fr., négociants) (Annuaire de la Cochinchine française 1874–1879; The Directory & Chronicle for China, Japan, Corea, Indo-China, Straits Settlements, Malay States, Sian, Netherlands India, Borneo, the Philippines, &c 1877: 382). Although some people were listed as “rice merchants,” none emerged as dominant in the following decades, as they never made it that far. The business leaders who rose to prominence in the 1870s and 1880s mostly were previously commission agents. Hao pinpoints this change at the leading European firms:

The once gigantic houses, which were few in number and financially self-sufficient, gradually lost their monopolistic position in the China trade after the 1860s. The growth of business in a new direction in the 1860s saw the concomitant decline of the traditional commission agency business. Local shipping was perhaps the most outstanding and successful branch of business to be fostered … and also industrial undertakings after the 1880s.

(1970: 22)

When the Saigon port first came under French control, many European companies rushed to join the rice trade. In the 1860s, almost all the major European firms – Jardine, Matheson, Landstein, Siemssen, and A. Scott – were involved in Saigon–Hong Kong shipping. Augustine Heard, a Hong Kong–based company, was the agent for the China Sea, Saigon, and Straits Steam Ship Co. in the 1860s, and its Saigon agent was Wm. G. Hale (Almanac & Directory 1873: 89; Straits Times, April 16, 1870). During the 1880s, one of the leading figures in Hong Kong was Fung Ming-shan 馮明珊, the comprador to A.H. Hogg. As he was in Saigon until 1876, shipping rice to Hong Kong would have been one of his main activities (Hong Kong Historical Archives, Carl Smith Collection, card no. 3238; Smith 1985: 126).

Numerous Chinese companies were engaged in the Saigon–Hong Kong rice shipping trade.¹ Goods on board to Hong Kong often consisted of “Saigon cargo rice” (Daily Advertiser and Shipping Gazette, August 8, 1866: vol. 1, no. 59; October 31, 1866: vol. 1, no. 132), and rice from Saigon was usually over 33 percent paddy rice (unmilled rice), which was more than that of Siam and Burma (now Myanmar). Siam had three types of rice – cargo, paddy, and white rice – but this was the only type of rice en route to Hong Kong from Saigon. French sources confirm that most of the rice from Saigon that went to China was paddy rice.

Table 1 shows that in 1867–1868, Hong Kong was the largest importer of rice from Saigon.

Table 1:Rice Shipped from Saigon, 1867–1868.

Destination	Metric tons
Hong Kong	60,242,700
Singapore	22,163,960
Macau	5,049,420
Amoy	1,165,920
Swatow	2,965,680

Source: Annuaire de la Cochinchine française (1868): 227.

3 Rice mills in Hong Kong in the 1860–1870s

In the 1860s, the paddy and cargo rice shipped to Hong Kong created a rice milling industry because of the needs of the local market and the re-exportation of rice to the United States. These services were not needed for rice exports to China because they were performed there. According to the Hong Kong Daily Press, although the rice from Canton was partially cleaned, the rice from Saigo...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Traders and workers abroad: Coping with colonial powers and socioeconomic adversaries
• Coping with colonial governments
• Modern hygiene and medicine
• Collective survival of workers
• Part II: Banks and businesses during the great depression
• Silver and the Chinese economy
• Credit system without a central bank
• Qiaoxiang (Overseas Chinese hometown) in crisis
• The paradox of the consumer market
• Index