When Mao Zedong set out for Beijing in March 1949, he carried with him two ancient texts: Annals of History (史记, c.100 BCE) and Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government (资治通鉴, c.1050 CE). Never short of words, the Chairman also carried tow modern Chinese dictionaries, the Ciyuan (辞源, Commercial Press 1915) and the Cihai (辞海, Zhonghua Books 1936).

Mao’s choice of reading material is no trifling matter for Christopher Reed, author of Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876-1937. Rather, it symbolizes the importance of the two modern industrialized publishing firms and the development of print capitalism, the origin and culmination of which reveals one of history’s most striking shifts.

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In the 19th-century, Shanghai was a city on the make with a tenuous grasp of law and order. As such, it was an especially harsh place for immigrants newly arrived from other parts of China. This sense of alienation prompted many migrant workers to seek lodging, kinship and entertainment – not to mention protection in this often dangerous new world – from their native place associations, commonly known as tongwianghui or huiguan. Today, vestiges of these groups can still be seen in Shanghai along Guangdong, Fujian and Ningbo Roads, which were named after these sojourner associations.

Serving the needs of communities from the same province or area, these groups were organized on the basis of labor which had traditionally been divided along regional lines: tea traders from Anhui, carpenters from Canton, blacksmiths from Wuxi, silk merchants from Zhejiang and Jiangsu and machinists from Ningbo and Shaoxing.
Whole industries came to be dominated by certain groups, so that Shanghai homebuyers, for example, would commonly remark that without the involvement of a Huizhu person (from Anhui ), they stood little chance of getting a mortgage. Read the rest of this entry »