Journal of Social History 33.1, 1999, 7-36

Becoming Urban:

Mendicancy and Vagrants in Modern Shanghai

Hanchao Lu

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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

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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, [End Page 7] 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

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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, 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

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 [End Page 8] 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 hunü 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.

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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

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According to the 1933 survey of the previous occupations and incomes of 700 beggars, the great majority (over 77 percent) had an occupation prior to becoming beggars. In the process of losing or giving up one's previous occupation to become a beggar, there was no "grace period" (such as being unemployed). Because of the low income of these occupations, the investigators explained, these people "had been almost as poor as beggars, and once there was an incident in their lives they simply became beggars." 22 [End Page 9] Well over a quarter of the beggars came directly from peasantry; many of the other occupations listed were also rural-based. But the beggars of Shanghai could not be described as just a group of former farmers. One is struck by the great variety of the beggars' previous callings: not only unskilled laborers became beggars, but what might be described as elite occupations such as doctors, school teachers, private advisors (shiye ), and shopkeepers were also on the list.

Another survey on Shanghai beggars (conducted in 1927) highlighted the complexity of beggars in so far as their background is concerned. Of the 122 beggars surveyed, 11 had been unskilled workers, 10 had been farmers, and 10 had been cart or rickshaw pullers. The remainder ranged from personal servants, bricklayers and snake hunters, to policemen and merchants. 23 Although beggars came from a wide variety of walks of life, most had been poor before slipping into beggary. According to the 1933 survey mentioned above, before becoming beggars, the average monthly income of those surveyed had been $9.68 ($10.28 for men, and $7.40 women). By comparison, the survey found that the average monthly income by begging was about $4. 24 This figure may not necessarily indicate a decrease in real income, because the food, clothing and other daily necessities of beggars came entirely from alms--i.e., on top of the $4 in cash. In addition, while a beggar's previous occupation was a one person's job, begging was frequently an entire family's business, which means the $4 income could be multiplied by family members who were begging. Indeed, women and children were found to earn more alms than adult males, because of the general sympathy toward female and child beggars. 25 Under the circumstances, being a beggar represented no significant slip in income. As we shall see, in some cases beggars earned much more than four silver dollars a month. Mendicancy in fact could be remarkebly profitable.

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Public Opinion

Poor Creatures

In Shanghai as elsewhere in the world, beggars were commonly regarded as the utterly destitute. An old popular saying in China paired death with begging: "in human life There is no catastrophe except death, one cannot be poorer than a beggar." 26 Such a dim view of beggars combined with the ubiquity of mendicancy in Shanghai led the creation of a local name for "beggar," a name which soon become common throughout the country.

There is more than one Chinese word for "beggar." Qigai, a rather literary term, was often found in formal writings. 27 A much more commonly used term was, and remains, taofan (begging for food, or more specifically, begging for rice). Beggars were also commonly called "jiao huazi" or "huazi," a name which originated in Beijing and other North China cities. 28 In the early twentieth-century, Shanghai produced a new word for beggar, biesan, which, like many other terms that emerged in the city, had its origin in pidgin English. "Empty cents" was an expression created by Shanghai compradores to mean "one who has no money." Through mispronunciation, the word "empty" became "biede," "cents" became "shengsi," and "empty cents" became "biede shengsi," which, in Shanghai, connoted that "there is not a single penny in one's pocket." The expression "biede shengsi" was simplified into "biesan" which simply meant beggar. 29 [End Page 10]

Here, the first character, "bie," means shrivelled and blighted, and the second character, "san" (three), was often used in slang to refer to vulgar figures. 30 Once combined, these two originally unrelated characters convey a graphic image of a wretchedlooking tramp who lives by begging or stealing. The term was soon current nationwide. Mao Zedong once (in 1942) used the term as a figure of speech to criticize stereotyped Party writing (or dang ba gu, the "Party eight-legged essay") that was in fashion among Communist cadres in Yan'an. Mao remarked that the drab writing "reminds one of a piehsan biesan. Like our stereotyped Party writing, the creatures known in Shanghai as 'little piehsan biesan ' are wizened and ugly. If an article or a speech merely rings the changes on a few terms in a classroom tone without a shred of vigor or spirit, is it not rather like a piehsan biesan, drab of speech and repulsive in appearance?" 31 Mao's satiric tone reflected the power of a popular image: the stereotype of the urban poor in the mindset of this great revolutionary was virtually no different from that held by the public. 32