Yung Wing Recruitment

LZ talked about the industrial and commercial situation of China in 1960s from 65438 to 2009.

This has to talk about the first batch of businessmen in China's modern history-the gentry merchant class.

Because the Opium War, which caused great pain to the rulers of the Qing Dynasty, was caused by foreign trade that was always neglected by the feudal dynasty. Foreign trade was exaggerated and linked to the survival of the country, forcing people to re-evaluate the role of commerce. Since the 1960s, Wang Tao, Ma Jianzhong, Xue Fucheng, Zheng, He Qi and Hu Liyuan have been advocating new social values. It is somewhat exaggerated for them to think that the war between countries is not only on the battlefield filled with smoke, but also on another kind of war, namely "commercial war". Zheng issued a call for "commercial war" in his masterpiece "Dangerous Words in the Prosperous Age". Since then, China's industrialists and businessmen have openly entered history with the ideal of "rich country" for the first time, and the first new social group, the gentry and businessmen class, appeared in China, which has always attached importance to agriculture and suppressed commerce.

In essence, gentry and businessmen are a combination of economic strength and political power. Its social foundation is very extensive, both those who had fame and fortune before engaging in industry and commerce and those who had the status of businessmen or comprador before becoming bureaucrats. The representatives of the former school are Sun Jianai (Xianfeng, 1859), Lu Runxiang (Tongzhi Jiazi, 1864) and Zhang Jian (Guangxu Jiazi, 1894). These scholars who won the highest imperial examination in traditional society have always been regarded as "cheap jobs". The representatives of the latter school are Hu Xueyan, Sheng Xuanhuai and others. Hu Xueyan used to be a businessman with a bank, but later he won an official position by helping the loyalist suppress the Taiping rebels, and was called the "Red Top Businessman". Sheng Xuanhuai's career is more vigorous. He helped Li Hongzhang and Zhang Zhidong "assist" Westernization, and his influence spread all over the wheel.

Shipping, electric power, textile, smelting and banking business, and later was awarded senior titles such as Shangshu in the postal department. In the process of its formation, this class has an infinite transitional form, and it is also an official and a businessman. The coexistence of politics and business is not only the biggest feature of this class, but also the biggest difference between them and traditional businessmen. Pure private capital had little room for development in China at that time. In the first decade of the Westernization Movement, Li Hongzhang basically prohibited private capital from intervening. It was not until the 1970s of 19 that official enterprise began to appear in the form of "official supervision and commercial operation" because of rampant corruption, serious losses and unsustainable funds.

The final result of this model is that businessmen pay, bureaucrats are corrupt and the benefits of enterprises are extremely poor. Businessmen finally abandoned this form, so the form of "cooperation between officials and businessmen" appeared. Zhang Zhidong, another giant of the Westernization School, has always rejected private capital. This situation lasted until the early Republic of China after the Revolution of 1911 (19 1). The control of the Beiyang warlord government on the economy has been greatly weakened, and some government-run or joint ventures have either shrunk or turned to commercial enterprises. During this period, the vast majority of newly established enterprises were commercial. Because the Beiyang warlord government at that time could not manipulate the economy and destroy it at will. China's economic development in this period is characterized by the initial development of liberal capitalism.

As we know,18-19th century China was a rare unified autocratic empire in the world at that time. Its state system not only completely inherited the county system in the Qin Dynasty in terms of political governance structure, but also completely abolished the feudal system that had been implemented for some time in the early Qing Dynasty, such as canonizing Wu Sangui and others as kings, which was conducive to the development of the decentralization system. At that time, due to the high-pressure rule of the Qing court, China implemented a highly monopolized centralization politically, a cultural absolutism thought that only respected Confucianism culturally, and a natural economic policy that emphasized agriculture, suppressed commerce and rejected science and technology economically.

It was with this backward national system that the Manchu ruled China. Will it naturally grow into a world power in the era of western industrial revolution and the rise of representative politics? I absolutely dare to say that even if Emperor Kangxi was allowed to continue to rule China according to a lyric written by some contemporary China people in a TV series praising Emperor Kangxi, although this country was once ahead of the world in a stagnant world and was highly praised by western missionaries who came to China for the first time, if he did not keep up with the pace of the West and refused to make fundamental changes to the autocratic dynasty system, the Qing Dynasty would still be the most backward declining empire in the world.

In this regard, as long as we look at what happened in the Westernization Movement carried out by the late Qing government, we can naturally draw our own conclusions.

In the eyes of western sinologists and mainstream historians in China, the Westernization Movement in the late Qing Dynasty was a complete failure of China's modern economic history and state system reform. The main reason for the failure of the Qiang Bing Movement in this rich country now seems very simple: the Westernization Movement in the Qing Dynasty was carried out under the constraints that politics, legal system and national ideology could not be fundamentally changed; This movement was based on the political monopoly of the Manchu dynasty, the lack of judicial independence and the protection of private enterprises. Contrary to the Meiji Restoration in Japan, it completely imitated the western political, legal and economic systems, adhered to the system of government-run, joint venture between government and business or government supervision and business-run, and imitated the technology and industrialization model of developed countries on this basis and premise, completely ignoring the basic laws of establishing a modern enterprise system and a fair market.

The paradox of the Westernization Movement itself is reflected in the conflict of interests between the government monopoly industry and other emerging industries, which is incompatible with its position as an independent third party to play an arbitration role. That is, the government in the late Qing Dynasty is not only the judge of national economic activities, but also the interest subject in the market, and always uses its jurisdiction to pursue its economic interests in the market in a short-sighted way, regardless of whether the enterprise system and market order will be chaotic. The institutionalized state opportunism in the late Qing Dynasty made the government use its monopoly position to compete with private enterprises for resources and deliberately suppressed the development of promising private enterprises. In contrast, the Meiji Restoration Movement in Japan started later than the Westernization Movement in Qing Dynasty, but the effect was far greater than the latter. In the Meiji Restoration Movement, Japan not only did not give up the real power of the emperor in the national constitution and did not engage in a virtual monarchy, but also stipulated that the private property of the people was sacred and inviolable. Moreover, the basic system of the country turned out to be "completely westernized", completely imitating the political, legal and economic systems of Britain and Germany. At that time, the Japanese government basically did not run state-owned enterprises, except for a few nationals who did not know what a model factory was. Therefore, the Japanese government in Meiji era can give full play to the third-party arbitration function of fair justice and strict law enforcement without selfishness, thus enabling domestic private enterprises to flourish. In addition, during the reform period, Japan imitated the western company law and patent law, encouraged citizens to create inventions, simplified the examination and approval procedures for national entrepreneurship, lowered the threshold for national entrepreneurship, and enabled private enterprises to have a relaxed entrepreneurial environment, so that they could use their residual rights to protect and promote the interests of western patents. Therefore, since the Meiji Restoration, various advanced western technologies have been widely introduced, developed and rooted in Japan.

To illustrate the problem, we only take Li Hongzhang's China Merchants (1872), Kaiping Mining Bureau (1877) and Shanghai Woven Layout (1878) as examples. For these most famous enterprises in the late Qing Dynasty, it is hard for us to imagine that there is not a strictly defined concept at the institutional level in the operation mechanism of government-business alliance and government-business supervision. For example, Li Hongzhang, as a senior official of the imperial court and the boss of an enterprise, used joint-stock companies to raise capital from private enterprises and appointed people with donated titles or semi-official positions as managers, much like the enterprises with controlling rights or control rights in the government today appointed officials at all levels as chairmen and general managers. The biggest problem of this kind of enterprise is that the boss is not only a government official who makes the rules of the game, but also a major member who participates in the game. The conflict of interests caused by his dual identity makes national opportunism institutionalized, and it is impossible to establish a fair and sound modern enterprise system and market order, and private enterprises cannot develop naturally. In a word, these enterprises jointly organized or supervised by officials and businessmen in the late Qing Dynasty have all the disadvantages of bureaucracy, such as nepotism, abuse of funds by officials, corruption and so on, but their efficiency is not as good as that of modern private enterprises.

But realistically speaking, the government-run commercial enterprises before the collapse of the late Qing Dynasty were more like modern enterprises than many state-owned enterprises after the founding of the Republic under the economic system norms formulated by the Qing court. Especially at the end of the Qing Dynasty, after the government planned the constitutional reform again and again, it promulgated Article 9 of the General Rules for Merchants and Article 30 of the Company Commercial Law in June 2 1904, and promulgated the Company Registration Law in 1905, which was passed in 1906. For example, domestic private enterprises have developed rapidly in 1904- 1908, with as many as 272 registered enterprises. Helpless, the good development trend of the national economic system reform in the late Qing Dynasty was finally interrupted by the social contradictions accumulated by the Qing court's delay in the national political system reform and the subsequent revolution caused by the national turmoil in the early Republic of China.

On the other hand, the Westernization Movement in the late Qing Dynasty was characterized by not only official monopoly of large industries, but also collusion between officials and businessmen, which excluded private enterprises from the beginning, making it difficult for private enterprises to obtain a relaxed entrepreneurial environment and development space. We can easily draw the conclusion that the first condition for the success of businessmen in the late Qing Dynasty is to have a good relationship with the government and get the protection of officials at all levels, among which the story of Hu Xueyan's prosperity is the most typical example.

Hehe, I just like watching & gt

/kloc-In the late 9th century, Hu Xueyan, which was a combination of government and business, relied on the government and the army to set up Fukang Qianzhuang, which should be regarded as an early commercial bank in China. The business of Qianzhuang was very prosperous. Then, relying on the money earned by the bank, he began to set foot in the trade field and engaged in the import and export business of arms and machinery; Later, the company requisitioned land, acquired many folk medicines and prescriptions, recruited a large number of famous doctors and expanded into the pharmaceutical industry. Hu Qingyutang grew into the largest Chinese medicine chain company in China at that time; Finally, the company is very optimistic about the silk industry monopolized by foreign capital, and established a silk factory in Shanghai through high-priced acquisition, which almost monopolized the market. Hu Xueyan's "investment company" almost monopolized the financial, pharmaceutical, trade, silk and other industries. Obviously, it is a company with "growth desire", but Fukang Bank did not grow up like Citibank.

Hu (1823 ~ 1885), whose real name is Shunguan, is Xueyan, a native of Huli Village. When I was a child, my family was poor and I lived by helping people herd cattle. I stayed for a while. I was recommended as an apprentice to a surnamed Yu in Hangzhou, and I was appreciated by my boss. I was appointed as an agent. Xianfeng ten years (1860), before he died, he accepted a gift from a bank. He opened a Fukang bank, made friends with people in officialdom and became a big businessman in Hang Cheng. In the 11th year of Xianfeng (186 1), the Taiping Army attacked Hangzhou, and Yong Guang bought and transported arms and grain from Shanghai and Ningbo to help the Qing army. Left as the governor of Zhejiang, he was appointed as the general manager, presiding over the province's money, grain and military pay, so Fukang Bank made a lot of profits. Officials inside and outside Beijing take Fukang as their external library, regardless of the storage. He also helped Zuo to start a business, presided over the Shanghai Mining Bureau, and was in charge of the political situation like Fujian. He bought foreign machines and arms, invited foreign technicians, and got a lot of kickbacks from them. He also manipulated Jiangsu and Zhejiang businessmen, specializing in exporting silk and tea, manipulating the market and monopolizing finance. In the eleventh year of Tongzhi (1872), there were more than 20 branches of Fukang Qianzhuang, which spread all over the country. The capital is more than 20 million taels, and the land is 1 10,000 mu. Because of his assistance to Zuo Yougong, he once awarded Jiangxi alternate road and yellow jacket, which is a typical official and businessman. In the 13th year of Tongzhi, Hu Qingyutang Xue Ji Sinopharm was established, and in the 2nd year of Guangxu (1876), he bought land in Yongjinmen, Hangzhou, and built a rubber factory on 10 mu. Hu Ji's drug number, based on a well-known pharmacy, hired Zhejiang famous doctors to collect ancient prescriptions, summed up experience, selected more than 400 prescriptions such as pill powder and gel dew oil wine, and refined them into medicines, which are convenient to carry and take. At that time, wars were frequent and epidemics were prevalent, and drugs such as "Hu's spleen warming pill", "Zhuge San" and "Babao red collar pill" were very popular. Since then, Hu personally wrote the plaque "Never cheat", telling employees that "the pharmaceutical industry is related to life, especially not to cheat" and "the procurement service is true and the repair service is fine". The medicinal materials used are directly purchased from the place of origin, and a deer garden is set up. Hu Qingyutang has become a large-scale national medicine number of comprehensive preparations of Chinese patent medicines, enjoying a good reputation at home and abroad, and promoting the development of Chinese medicine. In the eighth year of Guangxu (1882), Yong Guang opened a silk factory in Shanghai, which cost 20 million taels of silver and collected millions of tons of domestic new silk at a high price, in an attempt to monopolize the silk trade, angered foreign businessmen and jointly refused to buy China silk. Because the customs delivery is in the hands of outsiders, it cannot be delivered directly. The next summer, I was forced to sell it at a low price, with a loss of 10000000, and half of my family's assets went, and the turnover was ineffective, and the news spread everywhere. Bureaucrats all over the country compete for deposits and organize extortion. 1 1 month, local enterprises closed down, the property was sold, and the rest of Hu Qingtang changed hands, declaring bankruptcy. Then, the Qing court ordered dismissal and investigation, and strictly investigated the charges. In November of the 11th year of Guangxu, Yong Guang deposed his concubines and servants and died.

According to historical data, Hu Xueyan changed from a banker to a tycoon because of his innate intelligence and calculation, as well as his chance to succeed by chance. Who gave him the chance? Is that Wang Youling who was treated well by him? What is certain is: no. Wang Youling did broaden his career by going to the top, but he was only a county magistrate and state capital. Later, after only one year as the governor of Zhejiang, he was hanged in Hangzhou by the Taiping Army. How can a small local official support a generation of wealthy businessmen? Obviously, writing novels is too mysterious. It was Zuo Wenxiang and Zuo Tang Zong who gave him this opportunity. A patriotic general who has never lost in the battle against aggression and defending the country. Zuo gave Hu Xueyan four opportunities to make a fortune: first, he was responsible for the accumulation and expenditure of funds for the formation of the army and made a fortune in arms; The second is to ask him to help build mawei shipyard and make a fortune by introducing technology and equipment; Third, it was ordered to set up the Shanghai Rotation Bureau to handle the materials and ordnance needed for the military affairs of the Western Expedition, and made a transshipment fortune; Fourth, invite them to introduce foreign capital to support the recycling of advanced weapons needed by Xinjiang and make a big profit in attracting foreign capital. Therefore, without the Left, there would be no Hu Xueyan.

It is only a matter of time before the Englishman Watt invented the steam engine and led to the industrial revolution. Hu Xueyan didn't miss this problem, but in order to maintain the livelihood of sericulture families in rural areas in the south of the Yangtze River, he didn't want to change course and succumb to the economic power of western capitalist countries. He accumulated raw silk in one hand and monopolized giant equipment in an attempt to force foreign businessmen to buy at a high price. However, Hu Xueyan overestimated his own strength and underestimated the strength of the other side. Foreign businessmen refused to buy the silk accumulated in Hu Xueyan, forcing Hu Xueyan to sell it at a low price, which led to bankruptcy.

How did Hu Xueyan fall? It's impossible to make it clear just by using a steam engine. Strictly speaking, Hu Xueyan was dismissed and confiscated because he lied about the interest rate to the court when he introduced foreign capital and left the backwater; But the real reason is that he gradually completed the transformation from comprador, bureaucratic capitalist to national capitalist, and gave a strong counterattack to foreigners' economic aggression against China. In order to resist the exploitation of China silkworm farmers by foreign businessmen, he spent a lot of money, starting from Baosang Garden, buying all the silk and then selling it to foreign businessmen at a higher price, which made foreign businessmen feel very embarrassed. What Hu Xueyan did even caused the London market to fluctuate at that time. The hatred for foreigners, coupled with Li Hongzhang's struggle with the Left, naturally made Li Hongzhang put forward the secret order that "the Left must be defeated first", making Hu Xueyan a victim of political struggle.

Hu Xueyan first realized the diversification of business models: trade (raw silk, grain, tea, arms), real estate, finance (pawn shops, money houses) and industry (pharmacy-Hu Qingyutang). Many entrepreneurs admire Hu Xueyan because he can build such a business empire in just 30 years, making money from everything, which is a model of successful diversification. In contrast, Shanxi merchants and Huizhou merchants, once all-powerful in history, have only succeeded in one or two industries, no matter how big their business is, such as Shanxi merchants opening banks and Huizhou merchants doing trade circulation.

The answer to the business legend that Hu Xueyan can go from "a banker to the biggest official in China" is actually very simple, that is, success means "rent-seeking" of rights, collusion between officials and businessmen, and integration of officials and businessmen.

At the end of the Qing Dynasty, with the germination and development of capitalist commodity economic activities, rent-seeking activities in the modern sense also emerged. Hu Xueyan clearly realized that money comes from resources, and the biggest allocation of resources is bureaucratic groups. Therefore, if you want to be rich, you must first "collusion between officials and businessmen" and then "integration between officials and businessmen". So all the officials he "colluded with" were decision makers who mastered the largest local resource allocation, including He Guiqing (the governor of Liangjiang) and Zhejiang (the governor of Zhejiang) who controlled the southeast, and later became the confidant of the left who was in power in the ruling and opposition parties. Hu Xueyan's real take-off was to get a chance to meet Zuo, and the gift he brought was 100,000 taels of silver to serve the army. So how much tangible profit did his "rent-seeking rent" finally win for him? As Hu Xueyan failed to pay during the counter-insurgency in Xinjiang, Zuo entrusted Hu Xueyan to raise foreign funds and buy ordnance for him in Shanghai. Hu handled six transactions, with loans of17 million and 2 million, and accumulated interest of 8 million and 2 million. This alone, he personally made a net profit of about 2 million taels of silver. In the real business society, many successful entrepreneurs get some scarce resources (land, cars, cigarettes, primitive stocks) as soon as they change hands just because they are greeted by a certain leader, thus earning their first bucket of gold. From a historical point of view, can they not really admire Hu Xueyan?

If we look at Hu Xueyan's industrial structure along this line of thinking, which industries, such as trade (raw silk, grain, tea, arms), real estate, finance (pawnshops, banks) and so on, have not developed by relying on the support (or even monopoly) of the rights and resources behind the government? No matter how powerful Hu Xueyan's business empire is, its core depends on one person-Hu Xueyan. More precisely, to some extent, it depends on the trust and mutual utilization of Hu Xueyan by the whole bureaucratic group. Therefore, once the core chain linking this relationship is lost (the death of Zuo), Hu Xueyan's business empire will collapse. In fact, there is no diversification in Hu Xueyan's commercial groups, but when the right capital and commercial capital are combined to maximize profits, it will be manifested in various forms.