Review: Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796-1895

碧云飘鹤

原创首发，课堂作业。

Review:

Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796-1895

(by William T. Rowe, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989)



William T. Rowe is the John and Diane Cooke Professor of Chinese History, Johns Hopkins University. This book is the second book about the history of Hankow after his first important Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796—1889 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984). He is very interested in modern East Asia urban and socio-economic history, and published several famous books besides the above two, such as Saving the World: Chen Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) and China’s Last Empire: the Great Qing (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).

    The author’s purpose to write this book is to provide “a fruitful means of understanding late imperial China society” through researching the similarities and differences between 19[sup]th[/sup] Hankow and Western large cities of roughly a century earlier.[1]

    The structure of this book is simple as the author himself said. There were four parts: part one studied people in Hankow and its urban space, and compared Hankow with metropolises of early modern Europe, such as Paris and London; part two focused on Hankow’s community mainly including popular welfare, goods and services, and also examined the evolution of the institutional structure; part three surveyed structures of conflict, different dangerous classes and laboring classes, and sects and secret societies in Hankow; part four looked at several forces of order, such as dynastic defenders, urban militia and pao-chia (bao-jia), crisis by rebels and the city’s response.

    The author borrowed ideas and theories of community, conflict, civil society, public sphere, and urban development from other scholars, such as Jurgen Habermas, Keith Schoppa, Henri Pirenne, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and George Smimmel. However, Rowe did not simply imitate these theories, but developed and revised them by studying the case of Hankow urban history.

    Rowe impressively used many primary sources in Western Languages and Chinese, such as documents of London Missionary Society and Methodist Missionary Society, the British Parliamentary Papers, Ming-Qing archives, old papers and journal, diaries, and gazetteers. What’s more important is that he also used the Han-k’ou chu-chih tz’u (Songs of the Bamboo Branches of Hankow, by Ye Tiao-yuan), which was always ignored by most scholars. Before Rowe’s book there were many books studying on Chinese large cities, such as Shanghai, Beijing, and Tianjin, etc., which were influenced by the West in the late imperial, and the former scholars mainly used primary sources in Western languages, but Rowe paid more attention on local documents. Therefore, he could make an incisive analysis on the urban history of Hankow.

    In his first book about Hankow he focused on the trade, merchants, elites and the mechanisms of its management, but this book “broadens the focus of the earlier beyond the world of the commercial elite, to look in detail at the concerns and behavior of the city’s working classes.”[2] However, it seems that this book still paid more attention on the elites than workers and beggars. More importantly, this book ignored the foreign people’s activities in Hankow, so readers can’t see the foreigner’s response to these rebels, riots, and public services, etc. Perhaps Rowe just wanted to avoid the impact-response model to study history of modern China, but, obviously, he was overcorrect.

    Although the author used many primary and secondary sources, there were several errors in this book. For example, 1) Rowe said Hankow was a tinderbox, and “its very name was synonymous with ‘fire’,”[3] but I don’t think there is any relation between 漢口 and 火 in Chinese. 2) Rowe said the “Hui-chou Guild’s two brigades were each made up of one headman and 21 firemen,” but the original document showed that there should be two headmen and 20 firemen.[4] 3) He also pointed out that the “Hui-chou Guild allocated 84 taels per year for the wages of its firemen, an average of nearly two taels per men, for more than it paid its guildhall watchmen, gatekeepers, and custodians, none of whom received more than a quarter of a tael per year apiece.” However, actually, the average annual wage should be 84/22=3.8 taels per fireman, and 11 taels per watchman, 6 taels per gatekeeper, and 18 taels per porter. Therefore, firemen’s wage should be lower, not higher, than others.[5]

    One of Rowe’s most highlighted viewpoints in this book is that he refuted Max Weber’s conclusion that people in modern Chinese cities lacked a corporate sense of urban community to “create public services and promote popular welfare.”[6] This book also attracted many scholars’ attention to discuss further on these notions and terms of community and public domain, etc.[7] In short, it is an outstanding urban history book which establishes “a high standard of excellence for urban specialists to follow, whether their focus is on China or elsewhere.”[8]



   

Han-k’ou Tzu-yang shu-yuan chih-leuh《漢口紫陽書院志略》, Vol. 8, p. 26.

Han-k’ou Tzu-yang shu-yuan chih-leuh, Vol. 8, pp. 58-59.

Han-k’ou Tzu-yang shu-yuan chih-leuh, Vol. 6, p. 48.

   

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[1] William T. Rowe, Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796-1895, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), p. 3.

[2] Ibid, p. viii.

[3] Ibid, p. 158.

[4] Ibid, p. 166.

[5] Dong Guifu, ed., Han-k’ou Tzu-yang shu-yuan chih-leuh (Brief Gazetteer of the Tzu-yang Academy of Hankow), N. P. 1806, Vol. 6, p. 48; Vol. 8, p. 26, and pp. 58-59.

[6] Linda Cooke Johnson, “Review: Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796-1895,” in Pacific Affairs, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Autumn, 1990), p. 388.

[7] Hu Yuehan, “City, the Elite, and Public Domain in Modern China,” in Journal of Wuhan University of Science and Technology (Social Science Edition), Vol. 11, No. 1 (Feb 2009), p. 107.

[8] Linda Cooke Johnson, “Review: Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796-1895,” in Pacific Affairs, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Autumn, 1990), p. 388.