Street Criers: A Cultural History of Chinese Beggars [1 ed.] 080475148X, 9780804751483

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Contents
Illustrations and Tables
Preface
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 On the Rivers and Lakes
CHAPTER 2 Sympathy Versus Antipathy
CHAPTER 3 Legend Has It
CHAPTER 4 Coping with Mendicants
CHAPTER 5 Ruling the Street
CHAPTER 6 The Wisdom of Mendicancy
CHAPTER 7 Men's Limbs and Women's Mouths
CHAPTER 8 Chairman Mao Picked on a Beggar
Conclusion
Character List
Appendix: The Sound of Mendicity
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Street Criers

Street Criers A Cultural History

of Chinese Beggars

HANCHAO LU

Stanford University Press Stanford, California 2005

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

© 2005 by the Board ofTrustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lu, Hanchao. Street criers : a cultural history of Chinese beggars I Hanchao Lu. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8047-5148-x (cloth : alk. paper) I. Beggars-China. 2. Beggars-China-History-19th century. J. Beggars-China-History-2oth century. 4· China-Social conditions19th century. 5· China-Social conditions-2oth century. I. Title: Cultural history of Chinese beggars. II. Title. HV46IO.A4L79 2005 305.5' 69' 095r-dc22 2005009127 Original Printing 200 5 Typeset by G&S Book Services in ro.s/12.5 Bembo

For Linlin, Frederic, and Jeffrey

Contents

Illustrations and Tables Preface

ix

xi

Introduction I.

On the Rivers and Lakes

2.

Sympathy Versus Antipathy

3· Legend Has It

13 34

54

4· Coping with Mendicants

5· Ruling the Street

go

108

6. The Wisdom of Mendicancy

133

7· Men's Limbs and Women's Mouths

158

8. Chairman Mao Picked on a Beggar

178

Conclusion Character List

196 207

Appendix: The Sound of Mendicity Notes

215

Bibliography Index

261

243

211

fllustrations and Tables

MAP

China at the Tum of the Twentieth Century

xvi

FIGURES I.

2.

3. 4· 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. ro. I

r.

I 2.

IJ. I4.

I5. I6. I7. I8. I9. 20. 21.

Beggar of the Longhua Pagoda 3 Beggar figurines 29 Worshipping a patron saint 56 Emperor Zhu 58 Han Xin 61 Wu Zixu 66 The Eight Immortals 69 Beggar "godfather" father 83 A beggar's "waist plaquette" 92 Children at a Beijing soup kitchen g8 A beggar headman 1 o6 A night watchman 111 Beggars on government duty 131 The God of Fortune 135 New Year's spectacle 141 A funeral procession 147 Sidewalk petitioner 151 Snake charming 160 Mother and child 171 Competing with a dog for food 192 Lai Dongjin in Mao's hometown 194

TABLES I. I

I .2

Vagrants in the I93 1 Yangzi River Flood 23 Shanghai Beggars' Previous Occupations and Incomes

26

Preface

has been written mostly by intellectuals and by and large on subjects related to the powerful, the well-known, or the privileged. Until recently, the common people have not been among the most popular topics in historical writing, although in any given time and place they composed the majority of any society. Even less on the agenda were the disadvantaged, whose lives and experiences, with a few noticeable exceptions, had typically fallen into oblivion. Recent scholarship has significantly altered this situation. Vigorous accounts of the lives of the unknown and energetic debates in the fields of socioeconomic history and cultural studies have diversified academic approaches and enhanced our knowledge of human experience. It is my hope that the present work can contribute to the great enterprise of bringing the obscure and disadvantaged to record. This study is about beggars' culture and the institution of mendicancy in China from late imperial times to the end of the Republican era, with a reference to the resurgence ofbeggars in the post-Mao era. Among the topics discussed are the concepts and practices of mendicancy, organized begging, state and society relations as reflected in the issue of poverty, public opinion about beggars and the various factors that contributed to almsgiving, the role of gender in mendicancy, and so on. Panoramically, we will see that the culture and institution of Chinese mendicancy, which had their origins in earlier centuries, remained remarkably consistent through time and space. In virtually all cultures-and the Chinese is no exception-a socioeconomic gulf separated street people from mainstream society and beggars were generally stigmatized. However, mendicancy constituted a culture in China that was more complex than just a mere tale of social outcasts. The social role of Chinese beggars overlaps with an extraordinary range of others. Mendicancy by definition is asking for alms without payment or recompense, but Chinese beggars frequently offered makeshift services while they were begging. An authentic beggar could be now and then a true street

HUMAN HISTORY

xu

Preface

entertainer of various sorts: singer, dancer, acrobat, snake charmer, monkey trainer, and on festivities, a "pageant" player. More than occasionally he or she could also perform as porter, errand runner, door guard, fortuneteller, storyteller, prostitute, barber, mourner-for-hire, debt-collector-forhire, night watchman, or even police officer and picket. Beggars typically were not criminals, but swindlers, thieves, and gangsters were not uncommon among them. Knights-errant and town eccentrics were also found in the ranks of mendicants and, in fact, such characters became favorite topics of both popular readings and literati writing. Thus the notion of mendicancy in China was richly ambiguous and ingeniously connotative. Moreover, there were perennial and lively interactions between the world of beggars and mainstream society. Major historical characters and cultural icons in China belonged not just to the more "regular" society but were shared with the underclass and indeed they frequently became a prominent part of the subaltern culture. The reverse was true as well. Through creative imagination, beggars' culture also had a profound influence on mainstream society, ranging from public opinion on poverty, morality, and individuality to practical application of the culture in daily life such as in cuisine and child rearing. A "culture of poverty" (to use Oscar Lewis's phrase) was never a prevailing phenomenon in China. Instead, there was a culture on poverty in China that engaged both mainstream society and the subaltern culture of the mendicants. No matter how much of an outcast a beggar was in late imperial and modem China, he or she might never completely lose his or her place in society and culture. The culture of other vagrants-from medieval European Gypsies to contemporary North American tramps and hoboes-may find echoes in the world of Chinese beggars, yet rarely in history did beggars occupy such a prominent and colorful niche in a nation's culture as they did in China. But such conspicuousness should not be interpreted as meaning Chinese mendicants had a better life than that of vagabonds elsewhere. On the contrary, the richness of the culture of Chinese beggars was largely a result of sheer poverty and incredible misery. That culture, which arose from destitution, was an artifact of the human will to live. As the impoverished vagrants received little or no assistance from the state, by begging and applying an extraordinary variety of begging techniques, they were forced to make the whole of society accountable for their misfortune in order to live. And, with little social assistance, the destitute organized themselves after a certain fashion to assure some degree of security and fairness within the group and to increase their chances of survival outside it. Thus, paradoxically, the most scattered and rootless people were at the time extremely well organized, and the most vulnerable social group could transform its poverty

Priface

xm

and adversity into "ammunition" and make the entire society vulnerable to its grievances. In the process, various types of exoticism and mannerisms associated with beggars came into being. A major challenge to writing on mendicancy is that beggars, like all subaltern groups, seldom write about themselves and, other than telling of their bitter life for the purpose of appealing for alms, beggars tend not to talk about their experiences. Researchers therefore have to rely heavily on the narratives provided by outside observers, to which biases were almost inevitably attached. A remedy for the dearth of beggars' self-portraits is to carefully look through and compare a variety of other canvases, including sociological surveys, governmental reports, eyewitness accounts, personal reminiscences, missionary reports, literary notes, and, of course, beggars' own words and ditties. The ubiquity ofbeggars in early twentieth-century Chinese cities had prompted some social-minded individuals and institutes to investigate and write on the subject. For instance, an investigation of700 beggars in Shanghai conducted in the early 1930s left a valuable unpublished field report, which has been extensively used in this study. The Culture and History Institutes ( Wenshi ziliao guan) that were widely established in China in the 1950s-6os are a unique source for social and cultural history, with a mine of published and unpublished firsthand sources on the underclass and underground society across the nation. The opening of a number of archives and the recent boom of the publishing business in China have made some previously rare materials more accessible. With due awareness of the political motivation and, more recently, commercial drive behind the availability of some of the materials, researchers may find that more balanced sources for writing on the urban underclass are encouragingly increasing in number. Academic writing can be a lonely endeavor. Fortunately, we live in a world where scholarly communications are vibrant and often cross cultural and national boundaries. Parts of this study were presented at the annual meetings of the Association for Asian Studies (2002) and the European Association of Chinese Studies (2ooo) and urban and Chinese history conferences held in Changchun, Lyon, and Los Angeles. I would like to thank the conference organizers and panel commentators, particularly Kathryn Bernhardt, Christian Henriot, Philip Huang, Perry Link, Kerrie MacPherson, and Richard J. Smith. The Journal of Social History published a small portion of this study (fall 1999), and I received encouraging words from Philip Kuhn and Dorothy Solinger that had more impact on this work than they might have guessed. The East Asian Institute of the National University of Singapore, headed by Wang Gungwu, granted me a visiting fellowship for 20002001 that allowed me to concentrate on research and writing. The Georgia Tech Foundation generously supported my research trips to China, which

x1v

Priface

proved to be tremendously beneficial to this project. Ming-te Pan, Douglas Reynolds, and Qin Shao, among others, cheerfully shared their study andresearch materials with me. Richard Gunde, whose generosity has been noted in numerous author's acknowledgements in the China field, once again helped me with his insights and unfailing moral support. At Stanford University Press, senior editor Muriel Bell and her associate Carmen Borb6nWu, and senior production editor Judith Hibbard, have been a constant source of guidance and assistance for this project. I also wish to express my gratitude to two anonymous readers for the press, whose comments have significantly improved the final version of this work. Hanchao Lu Atlanta, Georgia May 2004

Street Criers

W U L I YASUTAI (MONGOLIA)

····..

•

Major cities

• County seats or prefecture seats o Towns

C hina at the Tum of the Twentieth Century

YUNNAN

HEILONGJIANG

..anzhou

Chengdu

Introduction

of the oldest social phenomena in human history. The Chinese word for "begging" appeared as early as the eighteenth century B.c., in oracle-bone writing, and continued to be used in the literature of the Bronze Age. 1 Records describing begging in public appeared in Chinese documents as early as the third century B.c. 2 The modern Chinese word for "beggar" (qigat) first appeared no later than the early years of the Song dynasty (960-1279). 3 Like many other seemingly all too clear and familiar terms that are actually hard to define, the word "beggar" can imply many things. It does not, in other words, necessarily refer simply to a person who "begs" for a living. The anthropologist David Schak has succinctly summarized the situation: MENDICANCY IS ONE

The term beggar and its Chinese equivalents are quite nebulous in the way they are used by both Chinese and Westerners who have written on the subject, despite the fact that in both languages the equivalent words have relative clear primary denotation. Thus ... one will see references to "beggars" who work, entertain, perform services, extort, coerce, steal, and even rob. 4

This is of course not to suggest that the term is misleading. Rather, it accentuates the diverse ways street people struggled for survival in the grim social environment of modern China. It is this subject that forms the primary focus of this study. As we shall see in the following chapters, the manifold manners in the world of mendicants did not prevent them from being identified, either by the general public or by themselves, as beggars.

Time and Space: The Boundaries cif This Study The culture and institution of Chinese mendicancy remained remarkably consistent throughout time and space. The temporal boundaries of this

2

Introduction

study are marked by the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949 on one end and by the early nineteenth century on the other-a conventional periodization for "modem China"-but much of the beggars' culture in this period had its origins in earlier centuries. Because of the murky nature of the world of beggars, dates of certain cultural artifacts and events related to mendicancy cannot always be specified, but virtually all sources indicate the subaltern culture and customs of the nineteenth century had ancient roots. More specifically, many of the institutions of and concepts regarding beggars can be traced back to the thirteenth century, when vibrant trade and material growth led to a higher degree of commercialization than China had ever before experienced. Beggars were both victims and beneficiaries of this development. Over time, beggars increasingly became a more visible part of Chinese society and by the last imperial dynasty, the Qing (1644-19II), throughout the country mendicancy had long been an established, albeit despised, profession. The ubiquity of begging continued to 1949. The urban reform and Republican revolution of the early twentieth century did not fundamentally change the institution and its culture. Geographically, this study encompasses dozens oflocalities across the nation, from the traditional heartland of Chinese civilization on the banks of the Yellow River to the less sinicized Mongolian and Manchuria frontier, from the coastal Yangzi valley in the east and the Pearl River delta in the south to the deep hinterlands near the Tibetan plateau. In terms of China's urban hierarchy, these widely scattered places encompassed everything from small rural towns to major metropolitan cities, including in between county seats, regional hubs, and provincial capitals (see Map). In virtually all things related to mendicancy, from the concept of beggary, to public opinion on beggars, to the ways and techniques of begging, to beggars' organizations and the way Chinese officials coped with them, the similarities across the country greatly outweighed the differences. Ever since G. William Skinner's call for regional studies, a main trend in research on China has been to emphasize local history and regional differentiation. Given the size of China and the diversity and complexity of its culture and society, research with a local focus is certainly appropriate. Much of this study is indeed based on local findings. However, we shall see that shared characteristics of Chinese beggars across the country overshadowed regional variation and provided mendicancy with a remarkable degree of cultural homogeneity. 5 In that sense, micro studies can contribute to a macro perspective on China as an essentially unified cultural entity.

Introduction

3

The Subaltern and the Mainstream The living conditions of Chinese beggars, who perhaps more than any other group suffered from the widespread poverty in modern China, were disheartening. It usually took an effort for outsiders to comprehend how beggars in China managed to consider themselves clothed when they only had a few rags to hang on their body, how their hovels could make a dwelling

Degg:u· uf tho Loong-11 wa. l'agoda lh•t' 13ott~o r t.lt.:r Lung-Chwt l'ab"udc .Lc .ll.u JH) I:tllt de Ia l'ngtJdll do l tlllll"-1 11. lll~~ldit;mf:u tlull