Becoming COMPANY: a study of the Chinese KONGSI as ‘régime of labour’ dwelling on its spaces of representation in nineteenth-century Penang

Abstract

The modern meaning of the standard Chinese KONGSI signifies a business enterprise. This sense only constitutes one of the many meanings that its equivalent English word COMPANY has. Same was to the dialectal kongsi in the preexisting context of several age-old southern Chinese provincial languages, including, at the least Hokkien and Hakka, of which the word might have possessed. KONGSI represents an entity which is most widely adopted by modern entrepreneurial capital as operating unit in going after its sole profit. Modern KONGSI makes much of the abstract value and universal assessment of efficiency and monetary gains rather than peculiarity of unalienable human labour as well as inalterative core in what they produce.
There is major rupture in current literature on the historical origins and evolutional links of KONGSI, between its meaning in twentieth-century standard Chinese as the translation of COMPANY, and the convention that the phenomena which were called kongsi in provincial dialects took on a variety of appearances in nineteenth-century South China and Southeast Asia. Historical evidence indicates that, the dialectal kongsi, in its broadest sense, could mean all types of voluntary associations in the time. Notwithstanding, varying and conflicting images prevailed. A unique case had been one of the exclusive same dialect-surname-village clans renowned locally for being wealthy and powerful, such as, one of the Hokkien speaking Big Five Surname Clans (‘Goh Tai Seh’) of Penang, Leong San Tong Khoo Kongsi, from Zhangzhou Prefecture of southern Fujian. Cemetery kongsi following demarcation along dialect lines would have been one of the more inclusive type. There were troublesome secret society kongsis whose activities aroused suspicion and oppression from the colonial government. There were autonomous mining and plantation coolie kongsis pioneered the colonial inland frontier of the East Indies. There were maritime merchant kongsis sailed the Eastern Seas carried area Junk Trade already for centuries. Furthermore, there were relatively recent revenue farming kongsis attempted entrepreneurship in opium, gaming, and liquor tax farming monopolization in colonial entrepots. Finally, apart from the patriarchal tradition, there was emerging kongsi breed which took to the new way conterminous to a corporate form of modern COMPANY. The thesis comes at the hypothetic points on the apparent problematics of the phenomenal diversity against the substantival coherence, i.e., they are all under the identical signifier of kongsi.
The study takes key concept of ‘régime of labour’ in analyzing historical formation and transformation of the substance (the signified) of the very entity of kongsi. Dissertation focuses on Southeast Asia, for the area came under impact at the frontal progression of modern World System in early nineteenth-century, with Penang as contextual stage where COMPANY and kongsi first encountered. Both occurrences of the substance changes on each of COMPANY and kongsi, and of the transformation of kongsi (as substance) into Chinese equivalence of COMPANY, did end up with COMPANY (as substance) taking over the dialectal name of kongsi. History might have led to this misalliance of the substantive (in this case, the signifier KONGSI) to the substance it was supposed to signify. While KONGSI in standard Chinese survived in use, kongsi nonetheless foredoomed. As history stands, kongsi in its substance, had then been ancien régime readily outmoded by the modern.
Provisional conclusions reached at each chapter progressively draw up total picture of the systemic influence of the modern capitalist production of space over the ever transitory existence of kongsi. Space, or spatial representations rather, was medium whereby modernist aggressor gained its forestall. Space is therefore the discursive mainstay built-in with methodology of this study. Not only representations in the form of city and architecture are received as major objectives of the study, ritual praxis in labour is also given centralized heed. Ritual labour is emphasized, vis-à-vis the more usual economically producing labour. The study intends to explore the boundary within which labour contributes towards cultural domain in the course of its ritual production.