The Rickshaw Pullers of Beijing: Citizens and Politics in the 1920s, by Shi Qiande, translated by Yuan Jian, Zhou Shuyao, and Zhou Yumin, Jiangsu People's Publishing House, September 2021, 392 pp. 88.00 yuan
In July 1927, Hu Shi left Beijing and traveled to The United Kingdom via the Soviet Union to attend a meeting of the Gengfu Advisory Committee, and when passing through Harbin, he had a "great discovery", that is, Harbin was the "junction of Eastern and Western civilizations", because rickshaws were not allowed in the "Daoli" area of Harbin, which was originally a concession, only trams and cars, and the streets of "Daowai" were full of rickshaws. Hu Shi sighed: "Isn't this the junction of Eastern civilization and Western civilization?" The boundary between the civilizations of the East and the West is only the boundary between the civilization of rickshaws and motorcycles. (Hu Shi's "Impressions of Roaming", The Complete Works of Hu Shi, vol. 3, Anhui Education Publishing House, 2003 edition, page 35) For Hu Shi, who embraced Western civilization, the rickshaw that used people as cattle and horses was obviously a symbol of tradition and backward civilization. In Beijing, where Hu Shi lived all year round, there was no area similar to Harbin's "Daoli", there were only a few cars and trams (Beijing's tram system was only completed and put into operation in December 1924), rickshaws were the absolute dominant means of transportation, and rickshaw drivers and their families accounted for nearly 20% of Beijing's population, which was commensurate with the economic development level of Beijing's former industry.
Interestingly, however, the rickshaw itself is a modern invention. It was born in Japan in the late 1860s and soon became popular across Asia due to low financial investment and technical thresholds. In 1886, the first rickshaws appeared on the streets of Beijing, and after the Gengzi Incident, they developed rapidly with the improvement of vehicle technology and road construction. Hu Shi's elevation of the rickshaw to the status of a symbol of "Oriental civilization" is a bit exaggerated, but if we focus on the city of Beijing, then this "modern" and traditional and backward means of transportation is an excellent metaphor for Beijing's modernity. In this sense, the American scholar David Strand's "Rickshaw Pullers in Beijing: Citizens and Politics in the 1920s", as the first monograph on the rickshaw drivers in Beijing, provides us with an excellent case study to explore the complexity of the modern process in Beijing in the Republic of China. The author captures the inherent tension of modernity embodied in the rickshaw puller and unfolds a vivid social history of Beijing in the 1920s from the perspective of urban politics.
In an interview with the Shanghai Review of Books, Shi Qiande said that his book was influenced by Victor Turner's doctrine of "liminality": "The 'intermediary stage' is a transitional social and psychological state that can produce more than one outcome. What attracted me to rickshaw pullers was this state of being between tradition and modernity, because in the 1920s, the general situation of Chinese cities was more or less the same. (Shanghai Review of Books, December 12, 2021) Whether Beijing can be a representative of the "average Chinese city" of the 1920s is open for debate, but it is indeed a keen observation that rickshaw pullers are in the "intermediary stage" between tradition and modernity. The term "intermediary" can also be understood in another sense, namely that rickshaw pullers play a kind of "medium" role in Beijing's urban life. As the most important traffic practitioner in Beijing, rickshaw pullers have direct contact with ordinary passengers, police, local elites, political party workers and other social people, and through the activities of rickshaw pullers, they can "spy on the operation of the whole city in politics, society, economy, culture and other aspects." That's why a book titled "The Rickshaw Drivers of Beijing" covers many aspects of Beijing's civic life and urban politics in the 1920s.
The impression of the average reader on the old Beijing rickshaw puller is probably largely shaped by new literary works. During the "May Fourth" period, Hu Shi, Lu Xun and other new literary writers all wrote poems on the theme of rickshaw pullers, who mainly appeared in the image of poor and working people in urgent need of relief (see Meng Lin, "The Image of Rickshaw Pullers in the Early Days of New Literature", Journal of Zhengzhou University, No. 6, 1998). Although the protagonist Xiangzi pursues an "individualistic" philosophy of life, the novel actually always buckles Xiangzi's professional identity as a rickshaw puller to unfold the narrative, depicting the "toiling society" of the entire rickshaw driver group (see Lao She's "How I Write "Camel Xiangzi"). Paying attention to the professional behavior and professional personality of the characters of old Beijing is a common feature of Beijing writers, including Lao She (see Zhao Yuan' "Beijing: City and People", Beijing Normal University Press, 2014 edition, pp. 37-38), and scholars such as Qi Rushan also include "foreign car travel" in his "Three Hundred and Sixty Lines of Beijing" (Qi Rushan, "Beijing Three Hundred and Sixty Lines", Liaoning Education Publishing House, 2006 edition, 172 pages). Whether it is the depiction of rickshaw pullers by early new literary writers, or the deliberate reproduction of rickshaw pullers by Lao She and Qi Rushan as a sample of Beijing's unique professional culture, they all come from a certain external perspective, and the rickshaw pullers as a group thus present a relatively static and stable characteristic. In contrast to this, shi qiande breaks the stereotyped imagination of rickshaw pullers, who constituted an active social force in Beijing in the 1920s by introducing the perspective of urban politics.
Sydney Gambaugh photographs a rickshaw puller in Beijing
Compared with other asian cities, the speed of action and organization of rickshaw pullers in Beijing is not very fast, the low rent has somewhat resolved the tension between the owner and the driver, the small-scale shop-style car factory business model makes the contradiction limited to the individual level, large-scale conflict is unlikely, coupled with the large number of drivers and wide distribution, the city-scale organization or action is very difficult. In this case, "coachmen can only rely on traditional merchant-guilds to protect their interests" (p. 72, the Chinese translation translates the mercant-guild as "chamber of commerce", which is less accurate and easily confused with the official Beijing Chamber or the Beijing Chamber of Commerce). Under this traditional guild system, the owner of the depot and the coachman will form a kind of family-style patronage relationship, and modern class politics is difficult to intervene in. Sociologist Huang Gongdu was disappointed to find in a survey in the summer of 1929 that the rickshaw driver did not have the "proletarian" consciousness he had hoped for, and that the enemy in the minds of the coachman was not the owner of the car but the cars and trams that competed with them, "they did not hate the owners alone, and they also thought that the owners were of the same class as them" (p. 292). This is a reflection of traditional industry consciousness in modern urban politics, and also laid the groundwork for the October 1929 riot that shocked the country's rickshaw pullers to destroy trams.
The guild tradition is not only preserved in the rickshaw industry, but handicrafts or services such as masons, carpenters, watermen, dungmen, etc. all have their own guilds, which is of course related to the lack of modern industrial workers and related institutions and organizations in Beijing as a pre-industrial city. The enduring persistence of guilds is not a reflection of cultural inertia, but rather that "they are very effective in representing the interests of the workers" (p. 170). In addition to the workers, businessmen, lawyers, students and other classes also established their own groups in Beijing in the 1920s, and they all relied more or less on the autonomous traditions of pre-modern society. The difference is that the public welfare activities of local elites such as gentry in pre-modern Chinese society retained greater autonomy, while in the late Qing Dynasty, along with the process of modern state building, groups of local elites appeared to be specialized and institutionalized, and were placed under the leadership and control of the state, as Shi Qiande pointed out in the book, "In the last decade of the Qing Dynasty, the official support for the establishment of some autonomous industry associations (corporations) such as chambers of commerce, bar associations, and banking associations. The tendency to hand over considerable power to the gentry has been formalized" (p. 20). Even in Beijing in the 1920s, when the central government's power was waning, "businessmen, students, workers, journalists, and others would pander to the Beijing bureaucracy in the hope of gaining privileges, decentralization, and care" (p. 227).
Shi Qiande introduced Habermas's concept of the "public sphere", defining the field in which various professional groups in Beijing in the 1920s participated and interacted with each other as the "new public sphere": "This new political arena, or public sphere, is a combination of old and new conventions and attitudes", and points out that due to the dependence of the urban elite on bureaucracy and internal differentiation, this "new public sphere" has never reached full "autonomy" (p. 194). Whether the concept of the "public sphere", which originated from the european historical experience of the nineteenth century, applies to Beijing society in the early years of the Republic of China, there is no shortage of doubts in the academic circles, and Wei Feide is clearly critical of this (see Wei Feide's "Controversy on Civil Society and the Public Sphere: Westerners' Reflections on Contemporary Chinese Political Culture", in Huang Zongzhi, "Discussion on the Paradigm Of Chinese Studies", Social Science Literature Publishing House, 2003, pp. 163-165). However, it seems to me that In his research, Schiender has succeeded in transforming the concept of the "public sphere" not only to the bourgeois or local elites, but also to include low-level civilians such as rickshaw pullers. Therefore, Shi Qiande paid special attention to the expanding aspects of political participation in the "new public sphere", which was also the logic of the evolution of Beijing's urban politics itself in the 1920s. The protagonists of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 were students and businessmen, while in the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925, the "Patriotic Rickshaw Pullers' Patriotic Corps" appeared in the demonstrations, and the workers of the waterworks, the printers and even the peasants in the suburbs also participated (p. 214).
The expansion of political participation cannot be separated from the mobilization of political parties. In the book, Shi Qiande outlines the historical clues of the participation of the Communist Party and the Kuomintang in Beijing's urban politics at different times, from which we can see the entanglement of modern class politics with traditional factions and industry disputes. In the eyes of the early Communists, Beijing, as a city with handicrafts, commerce, and services as its economic pillars, lacked the class foundations of radical politics. During the May Fourth period, Deng Zhongxia and others failed in their attempts to organize rickshaw pullers, and their turn to the railway workers in Changxindian was successfully completed (pp. 166-167). Around 1925, changes in the political situation in Beijing made labor once again the target of mobilization and organization of radicals, and the Communists and Nationalists formed a competitive relationship in this regard. "The Kuomintang found that the foundation of the Communist Party was mainly in the modern factories of the city, so they sought support from the vast unindusrated economies in the city." (p. 190) The Kuomintang was more tolerant of the mode of operation of guild politics than the Communists, and they soon penetrated into the watermen, dungmen, and rickshaw pullers. After the victory of the Northern Expedition in 1928, there was no room for communist activities in Beiping, and in June of that year, the Beiping City Federation of Trade Unions, organized by the local party department of the Kuomintang, swept away modern factories and traditional industries, and tram workers, printers, dung workers, and rickshaw drivers all established their own trade unions with the support of the party department and the federation of trade unions (260 pages). However, if traditional guilds can represent the interests of workers in the same way as trade unions, then trade unions "can also operate like guilds, regenerating a set of internal politics with strong personal overtones and factional tendencies" (p. 191). The workers' politics of the Kuomintang did not regard the Beiping workers' organization as a force for collective struggle, but was filled with disputes and tilts between industries and factions around their respective interests, and eventually fell victim to political struggle.
In fact, the establishment of the Beiping City Federation of Trade Unions itself is one of the means by which the Beiping Party Department of the Kuomintang seeks its own power. The Party Department of Beiping City was elected by the party members of the former Underground Organization of the Beiping Kuomintang, which was ideologically biased toward reorganization, and had only a very loose organizational relationship with the Kuomintang Central Committee, and they were also abandoned outside the Military and Political System of Peiping, which held real power. In this case, organizing the establishment of trade unions and developing workers' politics has become an important way for them to enter the political arena (see Du Lihong, "The Beiping Labor Tide and the Transformation of the Kuomintang in the Early Period of the National Government in Nanjing", Modern History Research, No. 5, 2016). At the same time, there was also factional struggle within the Beiping Municipal Party Department and even within the Federation of Trade Unions. Zhang Yinqing, the head of the Federation of Trade Unions and director of the Organization Section of the Civil Training Committee of the Peiping Party Affairs Steering Committee, was challenged by right-wing cadres supported by the Kuomintang Central Committee, and because he had made too many enemies in the workers' movement, the tram workers and electric light workers in the Federation of Trade Unions also formed allies with the opposition, with the intention of ousting him and the "old forces" he represented. Zhang Yinqing and his supporters then turned to the rickshaw pullers for help, trying to use the rickshaw pullers' power to maintain their position within the party and the General Trade Union (pp. 273-275). Rickshaw drivers used the opportunity to express their own interests, and in the autumn of 1929, the situation developed in an increasingly intense direction, culminating in a massive riot that destroyed the tram on October 22.
In his book, Shi Qiande describes the experience of the riot in great detail, affirming the "political enthusiasm" of the rickshaw pullers: "They used all the collective tactics and public tactics available to the city's residents, which stemmed from the inheritance of the May Fourth and May Thirtieth Movements, the practices of the corporations and guilds, the mass political framework provided by the Kuomintang cadres, and their own habits of fighting in the streets." (p. 278) Other scholars, however, disagree, with Du Lihong arguing that Shi Qiande 's interpretation of the 1929 rickshaw pullers' riots was too idealistic, failing to notice the complexity of the rickshaw pullers themselves and overestimating their political initiative." She pointed out that the root cause of the riot was that the rickshaw drivers had a difficult life, hunger and cold, and they believed that the tram company had robbed them of their jobs, and that there was only a way out if the trams were destroyed. Most of the rickshaw drivers are ignorant of the factional struggle within the Beiping Municipal Party Department and the Federation of Trade Unions, they did not take to the streets to support Zhang Yinqing's faction, but at the instigation of the other side, they destroyed the tram to vent their long-standing dissatisfaction, so the riots had a great accident and were the result of the situation getting out of control. On the other hand, the Federation of Trade Unions established by the Kuomintang Party Department did not really improve the living conditions of rickshaw pullers, but became a tool for politicians to control and manipulate (see Du Lihong, "From Relief to Resistance: Reanalysis of the 1929 Peking Rickshaw Puller Riots", Social Science Series, No. 1, 2012). The riot was brutally suppressed by the military and political authorities in Peiping, four were sentenced to death, a large number of rickshaw pullers were detained and later expelled from Peiping, and the Beiping Federation of Trade Unions was explicitly cancelled in February 1930. The riot eventually became a double tragedy for rickshaw pullers and Peiping workers' politics.
How do you see the role of rickshaw pullers in The Urban Politics of Peking in the 1920s? In Shi Qiande's pen, rickshaw pullers are no longer silent objects, and they have made a strong voice for their own interests through guilds, trade unions and other forms of organization. However, it is undeniable that the activities and struggles of the rickshaw pullers retain a large number of pre-modern elements, and they have not acquired modern class consciousness, but have taken the "moral economy" that relies on the traditional concept of "people's livelihood" as their appeal. In this regard, it is difficult to say that the rickshaw drivers of Peking in the 1920s have grown into conscious political subjects. A related question is, how does the Communist Party view the riots? Under the historical conditions of the defeat of the Great Revolution, the Communist Party was in an underground state in Peiping, and basically did not develop organizations among rickshaw pullers, and between 1929 and 1930, there were only two Communist Party members among the rickshaw pullers in Beiping (see Du Lihong's "From Relief to Resistance: Reanalysis of the 1929 Peking Rickshaw Puller Riots", Social Science Series, No. 1, 2012, p. 152 Notes), one of the four killed people, Jia Chunshan, was the head of the Taiping lake branch of the rickshaw workers' union. When the contradiction between the rickshaw driver and the tram worker intensified, Wang Qingshi, secretary of the Beiping Youth League Municipal Party Committee, commented: "Since the revolution is at a low ebb, the party's task is mainly to accumulate strength, and the rickshaw drivers and tram workers are both laborers, and it is necessary to persuade the rickshaw drivers not to smash the trams." He warned Jia Chunshan not to get involved in the Kuomintang factional struggle, but Jia Chunshan, who was "bent on supporting the poor brothers and seeking interests", joined the team of smashing trams and was eventually killed (see Zhang Qiusheng and Tao Xiaokang, "Jia Chunshan and Beiping 'Rickshaw Puller Riot' Incident", Beijing Party History Information Newsletter, No. 6, 1986). This detail may be used to illustrate the "backwardness" of Jia Chunshan's political consciousness, but it also shows that the Communist Party has a very different vision from the Kuomintang based on class politics.
Therefore, we may wish to make a new interpretation of the fate of ruan Ming in Lao She's novel "Camel Xiangzi". In the first version of Xiangzi the Camel, Nguyen Minh was an unprincipled union organizer who amassed wealth under the guise of progressive ideas, and was eventually killed by Shoko's betrayal. This image has long been seen as a distortion of revolutionary politics, for which Lao She was attacked by left-wing critics and omitted Nguyen Minh and his related plot in a revised version in 1955. As Sun Jie correctly pointed out in her article "Why 'Camel Xiangzi' Didn't Write About the 1929 Foreign Coachman Riot" (Shanghai Review of Books, December 13, 2021), there is a "huge dislocation" hidden in this, because Ruan Ming's prototype, Zhang Yinqing, was precisely a self-interested politician, not a revolutionary imagined by left-wing critics, although the Kuomintang at that time also called itself a "revolutionary party". Lao She may not be familiar with the inside story of the internal political struggles of the Peiping Kuomintang in 1929, and his general dislike of modern politics reflects his own sense of morality, but he inadvertently reveals the internal logic of the urban politics of Peiping in which the rickshaw pullers participated, which his left-wing opponents are not able to reach.
Movie "Shoko the Camel"
Perhaps precisely because the rickshaw pullers' riots of 1929 were not a revolutionary struggle led by the Communist Party, did not meet the definition of the proletarian workers' movement, and were hardly written into the mainstream history of the workers' movement, and left-wing critics could not understand it. From the perspective of classical Marxism, the relatively backward mode of production and class attributes of the rickshaw puller class also make it difficult for them to become a revolutionary force that the Communist Party really relies on. As Pei Yili points out, "Although the coachmen are the epitome of the oppressed, they are also uncomfortable remnants of backward society, so young progressives tend to dismiss them" (Pei Yili, "The Shanghai Strike: A Study of Chinese Workers' Politics", The Commercial Press, 2018 edition, pp. 275-276). Does this also explain to a certain extent the tragic fate that rickshaw pullers have always been difficult to get rid of during the Republic of China? However, it is this extremely difficult social situation that makes their struggle so tragic and moving. With his delicate brushstrokes, Shi Qiande has left us with an active figure in the cracks of history, which is an important reason why his books are still charming more than thirty years after publication.
Shi Qiande does not deny the "backwardness" of rickshaw pullers, but the backwardness and at the same time deeply embedded in beijing's urban politics in the 1920s reflect the "contradictory nature" of Beijing's modernity and even the transformation of modern Chinese society: "The more we resist progress, the more we will be involved in the development of modern capital and modern state power" (323). This brilliant statement is the finishing touch to the profound significance of the rickshaw puller as an "intermediary" in understanding the paradoxical nature of modernity.
Finally, a brief introduction to the translation of this book. The book was completed by a number of translators, but there is no sense of incoherence in reading, which shows that the translators are quite careful in polishing and unifying the writing. On the whole, the translation and writing are fair and accessible, which can be called accurate, and individual places may be debatable, but the flaws are not hidden. Page 7 of "Unshaven Canvas" corresponds to the original text of palimpsest, an image often used in urban studies, usually translated as "rewritten version" or "rewritten parchment", which originally referred to an ancient Greek parchment that could be repeatedly scraped off the original traces and rewritten, so it was used to describe the erasure and residue of historical traces in urban change. The second chapter is titled "Rickshaws: Ways to Make a Living for All Ages," originally titled "The Rickshaw: Machine for a Mixed-up Age." Mixed-up Age here means a mixture of old and new, and it is obviously not appropriate to translate it as "suitable for all ages". Page 30 reads "To the helplessness of mule drivers, the number of rickshaws has surpassed that of mule carts", originally "But by the teens the rickshaw had overtaken the mule cart in popularity", which should be translated as "But by the 1910s, rickshaws had surpassed mule carts in popularity". p. 42 "But at the same time, rickshaws are not simply replaced with mechanical devices for animal power or manpower", "not only" the original text is "instead of", which should be translated as "no", although only one word is missing, but the meaning is very different. p. 74, "Although coachmen tend to appear to be unruly and give a bad impression", the original text is "Even though pullers tended to be poorly organized and represented", meaning that coachmen are often not well organized and represented. p. 177 "This contentious process is simply a miniature version of statehood", where "statehood" is originally "state building", which should obviously be translated as "state building", which is a common term in sociology and political science. The above articles belong to The White Bi Wei Wei, and I hope that there will be a chance to be revised when it is republished.