Becoming Urban: Mendicancy And Vagrants In Modern Shanghai

Journal of Social History, Fall, 1999 by Hanchao Lu

Georgia Institute of Technology

New Year's pictures (nianhua), a form of Chinese folk art primarily used as wall decorations and on calendars, often have as their subject matter daily life, customs, and folkways. In the 1920s, a series of New Year's pictures entitled "360 walks of life" (360 hang) were issued in Shanghai. Each picture in the series was an image of a profession or job, and the artists tried to draw hundreds of such pictures to illustrate the "360 walks of life," meaning, "every walk of life" or "all professions."

A beggar was one of the subjects in the series. Contrary to the common image of beggars as wretched-looking tramps dressed in rags, the series presented a gentry-like old man attired in a long gown with decorations on the front, wearing a skullcap and cloth shoes; there was not a single patch on his apparel. Why did the artist chose to portray the beggar in this way? It was, obviously, not because of the nature of New Year's pictures, in which an artist may sometimes artificialize a subject to meet people's concern that everything associated with the New Year be auspicious. The whole series was for the purpose of collection, and was plainly drawn, in a realistic style. A number of characters in the series, such as the pear seller and the goldleaf maker, appeared in patchy clothes and looked poorer than the beggar.(1)

The picture of beggar, perhaps unintentionally, reveals some important but overlooked aspects of the urban poor. If street beggars in China were a group comparable to hobos, tramps or homeless people in America, then, Chinese beggars drew less public attention and social concern than did their American counterparts, but provoked more "imagination" in culture (or, more specifically, in folklore). Scholars in America have used terms such as the "truly disadvantaged," the "dispossessed," the "Underclass," and so on, to refer to inner city urban poor.(2) While these terms might well fit conventional images of street people in China, they cannot convey some important components of the Chinese beggars' life and their ambiguous social status.(3)

This essay starts with an analysis of mendicancy as a competitive urban profession in modern Shanghai,(4) a city that had one of the nation's largest armies of street beggars. This is followed by a glimpse of the rich variety of public views on mendicancy that, taken together, formed what might be called a culture on poverty.(5) Most of the public views and images of beggars were skillfully exploited by the beggars themselves to develop begging tactics and techniques. This in turn affected the image of beggars in the public's eyes. Finally, by examining the relations between the state and vagrants, I wish to suggest that the absence of state intervention in the beggars' world brought forth begging rackets and politics. Beggars organized and governed themselves to achieve some degree of control over competition and to establish social order among themselves. In this respect, beggar society was not unlike other social groups in China, such as trade organizations, native place associations (tongxiang hui), professional societies, and the like, which existed to secure some degree of autonomy in their own domains in order to help with their members' success - or in some cases, sheer survival - in an increasingly competitive urban world.

MENDICANCY AS AN URBAN PROFESSION

Chinese beggars were associated with or referred to as liumin ("floating people") or youmin ("wandering people"). In casual use, these words overlapped to mean "vagrants" or "vagabonds." These terms started to be used no later than the Han dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D.220). Most of the people so described had been peasants driven by catastrophes (such as natural disasters and wars) in their native places to leave home in search of richer or safer areas.(6) However, there were subtle distinctions between the two. Liumin refers to vagrants but implies a tide of refugees which arises suddenly and on a large scale, and to people who have no choice but to flee their homes. As quickly as liumin tide arose, when trouble subsided, the tide receded and most of those who had fled returned to their homes. The liumin tide could also include seasonal beggars who regularly, almost as if on schedule, poured into cities from poor rural areas.(7) However, for various reasons, part of the liumin chose or were forced to choose vagrancy as a way of life and became so-called "wandering people" (youmin). Thus, when serious liumin problems evaporated, the youmin phenomenon lingered.(8)

While beggars were related to these groups, they were distinguishable as what could be called a recognized urban-based profession. Beggars, in particular professional beggars, took up residence in an urban setting, and became part of the on-going urban scene. In his research on the rural economy of Jiangsu in the late Qing, David Faure has noted the difference between youmin and beggars: youmin were a "perpetual phenomenon in 19th century China," and the term itself implied that the people so referred to "did not have a steady position" and "did not belong to the city." "Beggars, like all professions," on the other hand, were recognized by the state as part of the settled urban population and "could be banded into pao-chia [baojia] under a beggar chief."(9) William Rowe notes the same sort of phenomenon in Hankou.(10) Apparently, by the nineteenth century, Chinese beggars had long been regarded as part of the urban community. According to a Qing administrative regulation, each professional beggar was to be registered under the baojia system and issued an identification board by county yamen. Beggars were required to carry the identification board at all times; the purpose seemed to prevent wandering people from other areas mixing with the beggars.(11) Although we do not know if this regulation was actually carried out or, if it was, how effective it was, the rule itself indicates that beggars were considered by the authorities as a part of the city population.(12)