CHAPTER XXVII.

THE WAGES AND ORGANIZATION OF INDUSTRY.

THE distinction between the cultivator and the artisan, the peasant and the mechanic, is less strong in China than Europe; the difference between the standard of comfort in the two classes is probably also slighter, while the difference, if any, may be in favour of the peasant. Chinese wages are low when stated in European currency, but taken in connection with the purchasing power of coin in China, they do not compare unfavourably with the earnings usual in most European countries. Of course wages, as well as rents, vary in different parts of the country; but the following statements correspond fairly with the generalization of a Chinese writer, who puts the average earnings of a workman at a franc a day, half of which is enough to feed a family of five.

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Carpenters and masons earn 20 to 30 cents a day, or about Is., boarding themselves. The usual wages of farm servants are about £3 10s. per annum with food,1 and as prices in general are about one-fifth or one-sixth of those in Europe, this can scarcely be put as less than equivalent to £1 a week. Servants boarding themselves receive 4 to 6 dollars a month, or at the same estimate of the value of money, £50 to £80 a year. But a man appears well off with £8 6s. (25 taels) a year. Clerks and accountants receive 10 to 30 dollars a month, or as much in actual money as many of their trade in Europe, while food, clothing, and house rent are indefinitely cheaper.

There has been little or no change in the rate of wages in the last two centuries, for the penal code specifies 7d. a day as the amount which officials must pay to carriers or workmen, whom they have wrongfully pressed into their service for work required by them in their private capacity only.3

A theatrical company, including perhaps thirty performers, is paid £6 for a performance lasting 48 hours; the theatre, as already mentioned in the description of Wang-mo-ki, is provided by the locality, but the dresses are often very costly, and the employers have a right to call for which pieces they please out of the usual repertory. There are few villages so poor as

1 Doolittle, Social Life, i. pp. 61, 167. Wang-ming-tse gave his farm labourers £4 a year, and the maid-servant 1 125., but the former did not sleep on the premises.

2 Margary, Journal and Letters, 1876, p. 213.

The duration of a legal day's work is from the rising to the setting of the sun.

to deny themselves once a year the amusement afforded by one of the numerous itinerant companies of players, who set before the rustics exactly the same interminable historic dramas as are played before a critical town audience.

Tuition fees in China vary, with the teacher's reputation and the age of the pupil, from 2 to 20 dollars a year. Private tutors generally live in their employer's house; they are treated with great respect and allowed to have pupils from outside. "One who teaches thirty or forty boys at an average fee of 4 dollars is doing tolerably well in China, for with the same amount he can buy five or six times as much of provisions or clothing as can be bought in America."1 This estimate would make the tutor's salary amount to a nominal £32, in addition to his board, or the equivalent of £180 or thereabouts in the West; and this sum, which is not inconsiderable in itself, represents a much better comparative position there than the same income in a land of large fortunes and estates. Looking at the subject from the opposite side, M. Biot estimated the cost to the parents of a year's schooling at 15 frs. in a town, and at 6 frs., or its equivalent in rice, in the country. In many cases the relation between tutor and pupil is maintained through life, as indicated in the will of Yang-chi. Girls learn with their brothers up to the age of eleven or twelve, but the sacredness of the teacher's relation is maintained by the rule which forbids marriages between tutor and pupil.

The sword, as well as the pen, receives comparatively favourable treatment in China, a soldier's wages coming to about 12, which, at the rate agreed on by native and foreign authorities, represents between £60 and £70 a year. Both officers and privates receive half their pay in grain, and six months of this is advanced in time of war, when they receive two pays, one for themselves and one for their families-an institution which the British soldier, even when married "with leave," may well regard with envy. Funeral expenses and pensions are given to the families of those who die on a campaign; but, as a missionary observed at the beginning of the last century, there is so little real fighting that a berth in the army was coveted, like a place under Government elsewhere, as a kind of sinecure. As we imagine to have been the case in ancient Egypt, the soldiers receive a kind of retaining fee in time of peace, but the army is only really effective when its services are kept in constant request.

Chinese workshops as a rule only employ a small number of operatives, six or eight at most, and little is known of the working of the few factories on a larger scale. Whenever it is feasible, the Chinese workman prefers piece or contract work to day wages, because competition is so far controlled by custom that the system is not used as an indirect means for reducing wages. The quality, the pace, and the price of the work are all fixed by custom, and the gain to the piece worker is allowed to include the whole price of the superintendence saved by the contract. The 1 When I was a Boy in China, by Yan Phou Lee, p. 52. 2 Ante, p. 202.

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"driving" of a foreman or the "chasing" of a fellow-workman are grievances which do not need to be resisted by the trade organizations of China, because the industrial community contains no persons capable of outraging custom in such a direction. If, for the sake of argument, one imagines it possible for a wealthy manufacturer or landowner to aim. at introducing new forms or conditions of labour, unacceptable to the operatives, and the dispute were referred to the tribunals, there can be no question that the officials would condemn the innovation, and uphold the demands of the trade union, in accordance with the old English legal maxim, Cuique in sua arte credendum est.

It does not seem to have occurred to Chinese employers to regard as an evil the natural solidarity of feeling which subsists among those who follow the same occupation, and as a consequence their small essays in the way of profit-sharing are not received with suspicion. M. Simon mentions a foundry in Sz'chuen, at which a red flag is hoisted every day that the output exceeds 36 tons; if it exceeds 40 tons, the workmen receive a small ration of meat in addition to their regular wages; if it exceeds 45 tons, this ration is doubled; and if the output reaches 54 tons, two glasses of rice wine are added to the meat.2

We are indebted to Mr. Little's good fortune for a glimpse of the working of another Chinese factory on the larger scale. Like M. Simon, he was invited to tea by a gentleman through whose land he was passing, and then, without further introduction, pressed to stay the night. The host in this case was a well-to-do gentleman farmer, of old Catholic family, with an income in grain equivalent to about £300 a year: this family possessed also a silk-weaving establishment with twenty looms, besides spinning gear, and a shop in Ching-king for the disposal of their wares. But they lived themselves on the produce of their garden and farm, spending in actual money only some £30 a year. About 100 men were employed in the factory of this family, earning 5d. a day and their food.

Coal-miners in the same district, working in two shifts of twelve hours, receive about 7d. a day and food estimated at half as much more. Their wages are paid every ten days, pay-day being a holiday, so that ten days' pay is given for nine days' work. As already intimated, they take a warm bath on coming off their shift; and the galleries are not allowed to be less than 8 feet high, for the sake of ventilation, nor to go so far underground as to incur the least danger of accidents to life or limb.3 The average wages of miners at a coal-field in Shantung is 9d. a day, while coal

1 English trade unionists use the word "chasing" to describe a tacit understanding between a quick workman and an employer, whereby the former gets through an extra amount of work in a given time, so that his earnings may serve as a pretext for requiring the other men in the shop to take a lower price,-it the work is paid by the piece,—or to turn out more work in the day, if it is paid by time. The system is unfavourable to skill, as fast work that will just pass muster pays better than really sound production. 2 La Cité Chinoise, p. 116.

3 Little, .c., p. 280. It is said that the stability of the Imperial Dynasty itself would be imperilled if any human operation resulted in such a mortality as arises frequently in Europe and America from mining or railway accidents.

at the pit's mouth fetches 5s. a ton.1 Pumpelly mentions a coal-field in Chih-li where the miner's wages amount to one-third of the value of the coal got by him, or about 20d. per ton, the output varying from 6 cwt. to half a ton per diem, so that the earnings range from 6d. to 10d. a day.2 The same writer roughly estimates the value of money at Peking as twenty times as much as in New York and London; and, though this must be an exaggeration, it represents fairly the impression of extreme cheapness produced by comparing the cost of travellers' luxuries there with the prices charged to English and American tourists in English and American capitals.

Hired tea-pickers are paid 5d. a day, but experts can earn 6d. to 9d. a day piece-work: wages of labourers in the tea districts range from 2d. to 3d. a day with their food, which is almost always furnished by the farmers, and which may cost about 3d. or 4d. more, making the whole day's labour amount to 6d. to 7d.3 Women and children earn about 3d. a day for picking the dead leaves from tea. Boatmen, like the cultivators in summer, eat five meals a day, and receive 5d. a day in addition. The boatmen of a salvage corps, or sort of Humane Society, on the Yang-tse-kiang, are paid 6d. a day, besides 8s. for every living body they rescue, and 6s. or 7s. for every corpse. Junkmen in Sz'chuen get 8d. a day and five cupfuls of cooked rice; 5 and, though this class is reckoned among the lowest of the population, Mr. Little found them paying 5d, to hire a flower boat to give them a concert. The pay of a horse and man is given at 9d. a day. In another district the men employed in an Imperial gun-foundry earn 6d. a day and their food; but at the salt works, where, however, some perquisites in kind are probably enjoyed, only 2d. a day and food."

The Consular reports from Chinese treaty ports do not give the kind of information respecting wages and the conditions of industry which have been furnished of late years from other countries. Such details as they give incidentally, however, confirm the statements of the mass of travellers. The weekly wages of the operatives in a single cotton mill recently opened in Shanghai range from 35. to 4s. 6d. for women, and from 4s. 6d. to 12s. for men. "All the operatives are Chinese, who have been trained to the work within the brief period since the mill began, and they do their work quite as efficiently as foreign hands, though in some departments double the number is still required."7 The leisurely character of Chinese industry is also noted by an engineer, who observes that the "cost of a given quantity of work is the same here as in Italy, for the Chinese,

1 Williamson, p. 117.

2 Smithsonian Contributions, vol. xv., art. 4, p. 20. In a lead-mine he found the day's work consisted of eight hours. (lb., p. 103.)

3 Fortune, Residence, pp. 42, 198.

Blakiston, Five Months on the Yangtsze, 1862, p. 201.

5 Cooper, Pioneer, p. 66.

6 Williamson, Journey, p. 307.

Trade Reports, No. 1101, Shanghai, 1892.

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though they receive far lower wages, have not the strength of Italians, and cannot do the same amount of work." 1

The absence of the middleman and the large capitalist in Chinese enterprise is also illustrated by the account of the soap-stone mines, forty miles from Wenchow, the use of which has received a large development owing to the foreign demand for curios. The hills containing the steatite used are owned by twenty to thirty families, who either work the quarries themselves or employ miners. The stone is sold at the pit mouth, while still soft, to carvers at a uniform price of about d. the lb., and the carvings are hawked about by pedlars at the same (or even a lower) rate than that at which the carvers themselves offer them in the neighbourhood.

The people are most prosperous in the most fertile parts of the country, or where articles of commercial value, like tea and silk, are produced; "they have more comfortable houses, are better fed and better clothed than they are in other places." "I never," says Fortune, "saw the people as a whole better dressed than those of Hoo-chow. Every person I met above the common working coolie was dressed in silk or crape, and even the coolies have at least one dress for holiday wear." These observations are confirmed by another authority. Notwithstanding the dense population of Honan, where the value of the wheat and cotton crop is very great, wages, according to Baron v. Richthofen, are id. to 1d. a day more than in Hoope and Hunan; this shows that all classes profit proportionately from the fertility of the soil-a result which, as Cobbett observed, was so far from being attained in England that the rights of Common of the poor subsisted longest in the counties which were by nature least attractive to the moneyed encloser, so that the poor were best off on the worst land.

A well-informed writer has suggested, as a means of estimating the comparative rate of real wages in China and other countries, that the number of years should be calculated that it will take a young man, beginning his industrial life at eighteen, without capital, to earn and save enough to keep himself, marry, and buy land enough for himself and his family to live on by their own labour-a way of looking at the question which eliminates all uncertainty as to the purchasing power of money wages. According to Dr. McGowan, whose facts are taken from the neighbourhood of Wenchow, the wages of able-bodied young men average $12 a year, with food, shoes, and free shaving. Clothes may cost $4, so that $8 yearly are left for saving. $180, the savings of ten years, will buy one-third of an acre of land (worth $450 an acre) and implements to work it. On this the man can live and save enough in another ten years to bring his

1 Ib., No. 1044, Hankow, 1892. Chinese competition would not be dreaded by Australian and American operatives if it were only cheap in proportion to its inefficiency. It is, therefore, instructive to know that Chinese labour is really just about as cheap as Italian labour, which also competes to an unpopular extent.

2 lb., No. 1212, Wenchow, 1893.

3 Fortune, Residence, pp. 300, 353.

• Dr. McGowan. Journal, China Branch, R.A.S., March, 1887.