The Kongsi’s Past as a Foreign Country
Bien Chiang
Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica
Institute of Anthropology, National Tsing Hua University
Among scholars of pre-modern and early-modern Chinese societies, issues
surrounding the nature and development of kongsi （公司） are often considered as
intriguing, puzzling and sometime morally sensitive.
In this essay, I wish to raise a
few points regarding the ideation aspect of kongsi.
I believe the transition from
kongsi
as
a folk
principle of social organization or
representation
of
human-relatedness (Wilkerson 1994; Allio in press) to kongsi as a profit seeking
operation - therefore the accepted Chinese translation of commercially oriented
“company” – is the source of much confusion in our understanding of the subject.
I
will review three major approaches in kongsi studies, namely historical, sociological
and anthropological, and try to point out what I think are the focal issues involved.
However, it remains to be seen whether or not there is sufficient historical and
ethnographic data available for us to work on these issues.
Kongsi in History
It is impossible to exaggerate the prominent position of kongsi in the studies of
Oversea Chinese (e.g. Groot 1996 [1885]; Ward 1954; Tien 1987; Chew 1990;
Sommers-Heidhues 1993; Trocki 1993, 1997; Wang1994; Yuan 2000).
The mining
kongsis in West Borneo and Bangka and the tax farming kongsis in Malay Peninsular
attract scholarly attentions mainly because of their territorial scales, politico-economic
might and eventful histories. Thanks to these works that we now have relatively
detailed documentations of the rise and fall of these kongsis. Most of these works
also acknowledge the root of kongsi in traditional Southern Chinese village
organization and “secret society” - both were perceived to be rather remote from the
latter commercial or entrepreneur-like operation in the face of encroaching Western
capitalistic powers.
It is to the credit of these studies that the term kongsi is
preserved throughout to denote its difference from modern “company”.
However, in
these works, kongsi as an organization and a historical agent is largely taken as it is.
Whatever its possible precursor, it is considered to be rapidly and adaptively
becoming full-fledged incorporated commercial company.
Other usages of the term kongsi appear in historical sources related to junk trade
in East and Southeast Asia in late Ming and early Qing dynasties (Chen 1991:307-8;
Matsuura 1993:95-98).
From these sources we find at least five different usages:
(1) “Kongsi’s cargo” （公司貨物） refers to the cargo of the ship owner, in contrast
to “auxiliary cargo” （附搭貨物，i.e., passenger’s cargo ）and “sailors’ cargo”
（目梢貨物）(Jiang 1979: 5924).
(2) In a Japanese document recording matters related to Chinese junk trade, there is
one entry referring to “shipmaster” （船主或船長, skipper）as “kongsi”, and an
officer running errands for the shipmaster is called “guan kongsi” （管公司）
(Matsuura 1993: 96).
(3) “Kongsi” refers to the common fund （公積金） raised among passengers and
crews on board a trading junk and fishing boat, entrusted to the ship master (ibid:
95).
(4) Better-off merchant passengers who had too many cargoes to be handled alone
could have a helper or servants on board.
These helpers had no duty in sailing
and ship operation. Their masters would pay a sum of money on their behalf to
the shipmaster. The shipmaster would keep the money and call it “kongsi” (Yeh
1877:5).
(5) The private cook of the shipmaster and his relatives on board is referred to as
“small kongsi” （小公司） (Yeh 1877:5).
It is well known that, in early Chinese junk trade, almost everybody on board
is a merchant in his own right.
The financer-cum-owner of the ship provided capital
for the shipbuilding as well as the main cargo.
In the case of single-family capital,
the owner often assigned one of the kinsmen, favorably an adopted son, as the
shipmaster. When the ship was built from collective capital, the shipmaster was
usually one of the investors. The shipmaster was, in addition to his share, entitled to
a substantial amount of cargo space (in some cases up to 100 units). Thereby he
could have his own cargo on board for trading, or he could rent the space out to the
passenger-merchants.
Based on this arrangement, “kongsi’s cargo” refers only to the
cargo of the ship owner(s), not the total investment of the passengers and crews on
board (Chen 1991: 302-15).
In appearance, calling shipmaster “kongsi” seems
self-evident according to this arrangement. However, we need to keep in mind that,
while the major maritime trading groups of East and Southeast Chinese coastal
provinces in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties are well documented (Tien 1987;
Lin 1987), none of these groups are known as “kongsi” in historical sources.
In
Koxinga’s Taiwan, the trading groups organized by the Cheng family were called
hang （行）; in Xiamen, the incorporated capital was represented simply by the name
of the ship, often bearing the label hau （號）(Chen 1991:306). Kongsi was nowhere
documented as a name to represent to others the join business venture.
On the other hand, we see that the common fund pooled together by the
passengers and crews on board was also called kongsi.
It is important to note that
this fund was apparently not a join capital for commercial venture, which was in
principle carried out individually.
The term “small kongsi” mentioned above
suggested that it could be the fund for common meal.
We need further information
about the daily routine, especially meal arrangement, on those junks to establish this
denotation of the term. However, we should also keep in mind the connection
between meal, feast and ritual in the context of Chinese culture. We will return to
this point shortly.
Although in his book “The Origin of Chinese Kongsi” Wang Tai Peng (1994:
26-36) considers the partnership and democratic principle on board a trading junk as
one of the roots of Chinese kongsi, he has not examined the actual usages of the term
in maritime context.
In terms of ideational continuity, there is still a conspicuous
gap between these meanings of kongsi in the maritime trading context and their
reputed descendents in the eighteenth century Southeast Asia.
Sociological Insight on Kongsi
The organizational characteristics of Chinese kongsi are also the focus of many
studies. Most scholars agree that the spirit of egalitarianism and partnership was
central to the kongsi organization, at least ideally. J. J. M. de Groot’s (1996 [1885])
classic study pointed out that these two features or principles had their origin in the
village organization of South China.
transplanting these principles oversea.
Kongsi, therefore, was the result of
He especially concerned himself with the
supposed connection between kongsi and Chinese secret societies. As the leading
defender of Chinese in West Borneo against Dutch colonial officers and scholars, de
Groot emphatically argued that, even though kongsi bore resemblances with the
alleged Chinese secrete societies in some of their organizational principles and
recruitment procedures, they were not branches of those secrete societies. These
kongsis turned secret only after being suppressed by the colonial authority. While
acknowledging the moral and humanitarian motivations behind de Groot’s work, later
scholars also consider this work as having laid out the basic framework for
sociological studies of kongsis (Ward 1954; Yuan 2000: 5-11). As Barbara Ward
puts it:
The kongsi system had its roots in the village organization of China.
Those who see it as something apart, without recognizing its
connection with the basic Chinese social structure and with the
historical and geographical environment in which it developed, tend to
fall into one or other of two errors. Either they see the kongsi as a
secret society, conspiring to thwart all regular civil government, in
which case they condemn it; or they see it as a prototype of modern
republican democracy, in which case they eulogize it. Both views are
misconceived. As de Groot was at such pains to prove, the kongsi
system was naturally developed out of the experience of Chinese
immigrants, coming in compact clan and village groups to a strange
land in which they had to fend in all matters completely for themselves
(p. 360).
This connection between kongsi and “village organization of China”, although
largely undisputed, remains opaque in essence.
Share holding is sometimes resorted
to as the sole index of this continuation (Wang 1994). The reputed egalitarian or
democratic spirit, though well documented in early descriptions, was shown to be
unfeasible in the later stages of kongsi development (Somers Heidhues 1993: 77).
Regarding Chinese village organization, these works generally acknowledge the high
percentage of “single surname village” in South China, and incline to implicitly equal
village organization with descent group. The general argument is that the difficulty
in maintaining a real descent group after migration forced people to rely more on the
principle of voluntary association, although often buttressed by common territoriality,
and organize kongsi.
Unlike de Groot, later scholars (e.g. Mak 1995; Trocki 1993,
1997) usually equip their studies of kongsi with an already un-stigmatized notion of
hui (association, [secret] society). They feel more comfortable and free to point out
the similarities and direct connection between kongsi and hui.
They recognize that
even when the capitalistic and commercial characters were already well underway, the
kongsis still maintained the notion and ritual of sworn brotherhood of the hui.
Thus
Trocki (1997: 68-70) writes:
The kongsi changed shape as it came to terms with European
capitalism in the nineteenth century, with the Chinese adopting some
European business practices; thus the kongsi gained a degree of legal
status while at the same time maintaining some of their original
characteristics.
In the absence of families and villages, kongsis undertook social and
political functions in Southeast Asia. As brotherhood organizations,
they reaffirmed solidarity through the triad rituals of south China.
But unlike secret societies in China, they were the major actors in the
economic development of Southeast Asia.
The brotherhoods
controlled labor and capital and undertook the responsibilities of
government for the communities of laborers in the isolated areas where
Chinese miners and planters worked. These became secret only when
their existence was seen to threaten the colonial states and laws were
passed banning them.
Trocki (1997) entitles his article “Boundaries and Transgressions” to highlight both
the transnational and the cross-domains (i.e. economic, political and social)
characteristics of kongsi.
This, I think, is a fair and concise verdict of kongsi’s past
from a sociological point of view. What remains unsolved, however, is the choice of
the term and the idea “kongsi” by those immigrants in the first place. Since there is
no intrinsic semantic connection between kongsi and company,
1
without further
historical evidence, it is difficult to assume that early immigrants chose to organize
themselves around the notion of kongsi with the perspective that the term will
facilitate their transformation in the modern capitalistic world.
In addition to hui,
huiguan （會館）, tang （堂）, ting （廳）and she （社） were all available concepts
and vocabularies for the Chinese immigrants to organize themselves (Mak 1995:
34-38).
For business operation, southern Chinese also provided a rather rich
vocabulary that included hang （行）, hau （號）, ji （記）etc. Kongsi, on the other
hand, is rarely seen in the sources of Chinese economic history.
Under what
circumstances and for what reasons that the term and the notion “kongsi” was chosen
as an organizational focus, therefore, is not an issue that should be casually brush
aside.
Kongsi in Taiwan Ethnography
Even in modern Chinese language, where kongsi principally means commercial
company, other, more locally rooted meaning of kongsi persists. Wilkerson (1994)
and Allio (in press) tell us that, in Penghu (the Pescadores Islands), Quemoy, Tung-an
and Tainan, people refer to local temple corporation as kongsi.
In Hungluo Village
of Penghu, the main temple is Pei chi tien （北極殿）.
The corporate activities of that temple are described by the term
“kung-suu (kongsi) e tai-chi” （公司的事情）, and cover maintenance
of and ritual focusing on all community religious sites. In addition to
including all village community ritual, it also includes all intervillage
1
In Chinese official documentations, European “company” was first translated as 「公班衙」.
bilateral ritual relations of inter-village alliance between Hungluo
Village and other individual villages as well as multilateral ritual
relations in a harbor watch …(Wilkerson 1994: 9).
According to Wilkerson (ibid: 14), “all ‘corporate’ (kongsi e) rights and duties of the
temple corporation are explicitly organized around share (fen 份).” Allio (ibid) also
points out that
The crucial ideas the word [kongsi] and its concept imply in the field
of a localized cult community is the existence of a whole divided into
“shares”, hun, which have an equal value and are interdependent.
There are as many hun as there are households.
This emphasis on “share” bears resemblance with the kongsi studied by the various
Southeast Asianists mentioned above. However, Allio (ibid) stresses that, while this
notion refers to an economic reality, it should be understood as a “vase and
complicated domain we could define as ‘symbolic economy’.”
In addition to
offerings, the member households of a temple corporate have the obligation to
provide financial, physical and moral support for the temple or cult related activities.
In return, they have the rights that
Concern free expression of one’s opinion and prospect for the
community affairs, the right to supernatural and collective protection,
to a share of communal prestige or symbolic capital of any kind, and
virtually, of collective property and benefits, which are reinvested
automatically into the community venture (ibid.)
Wilkerson (ibid) investigates this “symbolic economy” from the point of view of
the mutual constitution between individual social person and the collective person
kongsi.
He argues that, through various cycles of ritual exchange between the
households and the temple in the forms of levies, corvée, offerings and feast or
ritually-blessed food, the villagers in Hungluo have upheld the notion of kongsi as a
non-Western and non-capitalist way of organization and human relatedness. Kongsi
as a collective person is thus constituted of individual social person that is different
from the Western-capitalist notion of individual. As the people in Penghu have been
involved in a trans-oceanic commodity market system since the sixteenth century, the
kongsi can be said as having the similar role of buffering the confrontation between
Hungluo villagers and the market of commodity exchange.
Points of Departure for Further Research
Because of the inadequacy of source material, it is extremely difficult to
reconstruct in details the history of the notion kongsi.
However, the vitality and the
prominent position of this Chinese term in present day global community warrant
further efforts to try to elucidate whatever the particular cultural and ideational
background of the term as in contrast to the pure Western concept of “company”.
Basing on the above discussion, I would like to highlight the following points for
further investigation.
When and in what context the kongsi became named?
We notice that in both
junk trade and temple organization contexts, kongsi is more likely used in internal
dialogue then as a collective appellation vis-à-vis other similar social group or in the
face of domestic and foreign bureaucracies.
In Chinese usage, when people say such
and such are “kongsi’s affairs”, it is more likely that they are contrasting these affairs
to other affairs, such as those of the lineage, households and personal.
As shown in
historical documents, businesses were often known as so and so ji （記）or hang （行）,
while ships as hau （號）. Temple organizations were represented either by the name
of the temple or the name of the main deity. The kongsis of the eighteenth century
Southeast Asia, however, were named.
Documentation providing insight into the
beginning of naming kongsi will help to clarify the transformation of the notion.
When and in what context the common fund of kongsi changed from ritual and
feast fund to become collective capital to be invested in mundane ventures.
In
addition to the aforementioned occasions, there is also a very clear record about the
kongsi’s responsibility as ritual host of trading junk between Shanghai and Luzon:
When the ship arrives at Yang-shan, kongsi provides three sacrificial
animals for the god; arrives at Pu-tuo, provides vegetarian offerings
consisting of tea and fruits, while all the passengers burn ritual money
and worship from afar; arrives at Xiamen, kongsi prepares offerings
for Ma-zu; arrives at Hua-kua border, kongsi offers color paper boat
while all the passengers contribute ritual money; in the evening,
performs the virtuous rite, all the passengers contribute ritual
money; … arrives at Chicken Mountain Passage, there is a stone
Kwan-ying in the sea water, kongsi prepares vegetarian offerings while
all the passengers burn ritual money. The same procedure is followed
on the return journey (Yeh 1877:5)
This further confirms the original characteristic of kongsi as an agent of collective
ritual.
It is therefore inevitable that early Chinese kongsis in Southeast Asia
continue to have a prominent ritual function.
In this perspective, we understand that
the money contributed by newly recruited miners to the kongsi should not be
understood as investment in the narrow sense.
Money did not automatically make
the new recruits a partner, which could only be established through at least one year’s
hard working to prove oneself as a worthwhile member. The transformation of
kongsi’s common fund from the fund for collective ritual and feast to the fund for
pure commercial or productive investment is, therefore, the turning point of capital
assuming the status of fetishism in the real sense.
Information on how this transition
actually took place in the kongsi context would be invaluable not only as historical
reconstruction but also as building blocks for theoretical refinement.
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