The Role of Chinese Huiguan

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 51-52:

The huiguan [会馆] were Chinese versions of the mutual aid organizations that virtually all immigrant groups formed on the basis of a common regional origin, known among eastern Europeans as Landsmannschaften and among Mexicans as mutualistas. In China huiguan dated at least to the Ming Dynasty, when traders and sojourners in big cities formed hostels and guilds where they could commune among people from their home districts, speaking their own dialect. Chinese formed native-place huiguan wherever they emigrated abroad, including North America and Australasia.

Chinese in America translated huiguan as “company,” not in the narrow sense of a business but more generally as a corporate entity. The first huiguan to organize in California were the Siyi (Sze Yup) Company and the Canton Company or Sanyi (Sam Yup) Huiguan, both in 1851. The Siyi people were the most numerous, but the Sanyi Huiguan’s concentration of cosmopolitan merchants from Guangzhou and its three surrounding counties gave it disproportionate influence. In the 1882 the California huiguan formed a coordinating body called Zhonghua Huiguan, formally translated as Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association but familiarly known as the Six Chinese Companies. In Victoria, Siyi and Sanyi people also formed huiguan, as well as associations for people from Xiamen in Fujian province (Figure 9).

Huiguan served as organizations of both solidarity and social control. A new immigrant arriving at San Francisco or Melbourne would find a representative from his home district at the dock, who would take him to the huiguan’s headquarters in the Chinese quarter. There he would find a place to sleep, a hot meal, information about mining and other job prospects, and where he might find his cousins and village friends. The individual merchants who financed credit-tickets that covered emigrants’ passage collected debt payments through huiguan. The associations adjudicated disputes among members, cared for members who were sick or indigent, buried those unlucky enough to die in America, and at a later date, sent their bones back home. Some huiguan provided translators and paid legal fees for members who ran afoul of the law.

Huiguan leaders represented the community to white society in public discourse, in formal meetings, and in bringing civil rights lawsuits. The larger and wealthier huiguan bought land and erected buildings in San Francisco and Melbourne for their headquarters. Their offices boasted full-time officers and staff, including a secretary, a treasurer, clerks, a translator, cooks, servants, and altar-keepers. They often had representatives in the goldfield towns wherever there was a concentration of Chinese.

Merchants traditionally ranked at the bottom of the Confucian social hierarchy, below farmers, workers, and soldiers. But through their leadership roles in emigrant communities, Chinese merchants found prestige and power. Their social status would filter back to China as well. But Euro-Americans imagined that huiguan were despotic organizations that brokered slave labor and exercised total control over their members. White Americans and Australians who were actually familiar with the Chinese community understood that huiguan were mutual aid associations similar to those organized by other immigrant groups. Chinese themselves considered their membership in huiguan not as enslavement but as integral to the networks of trust forged through native-place and clan lineage. They also considered the repayment of debts a matter of honor, and most Chinese cleared their debts fairly quickly, in less than a year in Australia.