Becoming Urban: Mendicancy And Vagrants In Modern Shanghai

Journal of Social History, Fall, 1999 by Hanchao Lu

The beggars in Republican Shanghai were viewed by the city's Chinese authorities not only as part of the youmin problem but the worst type of youmin because these people were not temporarily out of their home villages but had become permanent vagabonds in the city.(13) These vagabonds were mostly unskilled, illiterate, and at the beginning found themselves total strangers in the city. A survey on 1,471 vagabonds conducted by the Shanghai Municipal Social Bureau in 1929 identified 818 of them or 60 percent of the people under the survey as illiterate.(14) An investigation conducted in 1933 of 700 professional beggars in Shanghai found that most of them were rural immigrants and about a quarter of them were driven directly by natural disasters and others by war, banditry, bankruptcy, unemployment, disability, dysfunctional family, and so on.(15) Earlier, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of China (Zhonghua hunu jiezhi xiehui), a Shanghai-based Christian organization that was active in creating social relief programs, reported that there were five major causes of begging in China, all of which were quite consistent with the 1933 survey: natural disasters; civil war; handicaps and disease; bad habits; family heritage.(16) Driven by various reasons, these people became street beggars.

Although according to conventional wisdom becoming a street beggar signalled an obvious failure in life, I wish to emphasize that mendicancy was nevertheless a job option for the poor. This is why many beggars were found among family members of rickshaw pullers, unskilled workers, peddlers, and other low-income occupations. Here mendicancy was a job and a way to supplement family income. Here beggars were not, as they were commonly presumed, homeless people or people who had lost all family ties.(17) It was observed that Chinese beggars did not resent being called "poor people" (qiong ren), but one had to be "very careful" not to use the word "beggar" to address them, "for many of them resent very much being called 'beggar' for they claim that they are not beggars, but that they are only poor people, using this means of getting a little of something to enable them . . . to live." This resentment was caused by, according to one explanation, the general assumption that "the beggar had no home and no family ties . . . whereas the poor man had some place to call home and some family ties."(18) Of course, family and kinship ties were exceedingly important in the Chinese tradition, although in modern China "the line between extreme poverty and beggary is frequently so narrow that the passage from one to the other is an exceedingly easy one."(19)

Mendicancy was thus frequently a method for the urban poor to eke out an existence in the city. In China's chaotic modern period, even skilled workers sometimes became street beggars. For instance, during the Sino-Japanese War when the Japanese occupied Shanghai's Jiangnan Shipyard, many skilled workers left the shipyard, partly being forced out, partly out of patriotism. These workers made their living in the city by various means, of which the most common were street peddlers, garbage gleaners (gleaning trash for something to sell), rickshaw pullers, and so on; a number of them simply earned a living by begging.(20) But there was mobility in the other direction also. Some thrifty and shrewd beggars were able to save enough capital to open their own businesses such as a sesame-cake store or a barber shop, or to become street peddlers selling small commodities such as sweet potatoes or fried dough sticks. Some beggars managed to spin yarn or make toys at home to sell. When business was bad, they returned to street begging.(21)