Comprador

A comprador or compradore (English: /kɒmprəˈdɔːr/) is a "person who acts as an agent for foreign organizations engaged in investment, trade, or economic or political exploitation."^[1] An example of a comprador would be a native manager for a European business house in East and South East Asia, and, by extension, social groups that play broadly similar roles in other parts of the world.

comprador
Traditional Chinese	買辦
Simplified Chinese	买办
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin mǎibàn Yue: Cantonese Jyutping maai5 baan6
Alternative Chinese name
Traditional Chinese	江擺渡
Simplified Chinese	江摆渡
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin jiāngbǎidù Yue: Cantonese Jyutping gong1 baai2 dou6
Second alternative Chinese name
Chinese	康白度
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin kāngbǎidù Yue: Cantonese Jyutping hong1 baak6 dou6

Etymology and usage

The term comprador, a Portuguese word that means buyer, derives from the Latin comparare, which means to procure.^[2] The original usage of the word in East Asia referred to a native servant in European households in Guangzhou in southern China or in the neighboring Portuguese colony at Macao - such persons went to market to barter their employers' wares.^[2][3] The term then evolved to mean the native contract-suppliers who worked for foreign companies in East Asia or the native managers of firms in East Asia.^[2][3] Compradors held important positions in southern China - buying and selling tea, silk, cotton and yarn for foreign corporations and working in foreign-owned banks.^[3] Robert Hotung (1862–1956), who worked in the late-nineteenth century as a comprador of the trading conglomerate Jardine, Matheson & Co., allegedly became the richest man in Hong Kong by the age of 35.^{[4][page needed]} The Hong Kong firm of Li & Fung, founded in 1906, partly functioned as a Canton comprador in its early stages.^{[citation needed]}

Marxist theoreticians in the 20th century applied the term comprador bourgeoisie to similar trading-classes in regions outside East Asia.^[5][6][7][8]

With the emergence or the re-emergence of globalization, the term "comprador" has reentered the lexicon to denote trading groups and classes in the developing world in subordinate but mutually-advantageous relationships with metropolitan capital. The Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin (1931–2018) discussed the role of compradors in the contemporary global economy in his work.^[9] In addition, the Indian economist Ashok Mitra (1928–2018) labelled the owners and managers of firms attached to the Indian software industry as compradors.^[10] Growing identification of the software industry in India with comprador "qualities" has led to the labeling of certain persons associated with the industry as "dot.compradors".^{[11][12][failed verification]}

Marxist terminology counterposes a comprador bourgeoisie, perceived as the serving the interests of foreign imperial powers, to a national bourgeoisie, which is considered as opposing foreign imperialism and promoting the independence of its own country and, as such, could be, under some circumstances, a short-term ally of socialist revolutionaries.

Mikhail Delyagin has characterised the 21st-century Russian state as in itself a comprador in a system of comprador capitalism.^[13]

Notable compradors

China

• Chang Kia-ngau (Shanghai)
• Zheng Guanying
• Liu Hongsheng
• Tong King-sing (Guangdong)
• Ho Tung (Hong Kong)

See also

• Companies portal

• Factor (agent)
• List of trading companies
• Social structure of China
• Protégé system
• Capitulations of the Ottoman Empire

References

1. "comprador". oxforddictionaries.com. OXford University Press. Archived from the original on February 2, 2017. Retrieved 28 January 2017.
2. Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Comprador" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 6 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 813.
3. Bergere, Marie-Clarie (1989). The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie 1911-1937. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 38–39. ISBN 978-0521320542. 0521320542.
4. Tsang, Steve (2007). A Modern History of Hong Kong. I. B. Taurus & Company. ISBN 978-1-84511-419-0.
5. Mao Zedong; Michael Y. M. Kau, John K. Leung (eds.) The Writings of Mao Zedong - Volume II 1949–1976: January 1956-December 1957. M.E. Sharpe, 1992, p. 136
6. Mao Zedong. "Analysis if the classes in Chinese Society". Marxists.org.
7. Slobodan Antonić: Компрадори 10 April 2010
8. Trotsky, Leon (2008). History of the Russian Revolution (PDF). Haymarket Books. pp. 13–14. ISBN 978-1931859-45-5.
9. Amin, Samir (2011). Maldevelopment: Anatomy of a Global Failure Archived 2021-09-10 at the Wayback Machine, Pambazuka Press, Oxford. ISBN 1906387796.
10. Mitra, Ashok. "Hour of the Comprador". The Telegraph, Kolkata, 27 April 2007– "The tribe who were boot-lickers of the British — compradors par excellence — had got totally eclipsed in India amidst the fervour and frenzy of the freedom movement. Circumstances are however forcing a re-recognition of Arnold Toynbee: history is a victim of the virus of circularity. The country is creeping back to a comprador climate. The new generation of information technology barons, spawned by the surge of outsourcing, is determined to transform the land into impeccable comprador territory."
11. Saraswati, Jyoti (2012). Dot.compradors: Power and Policy in the Development of the Indian Software Industry, Pluto Press, London. ISBN 9780745332659.
12. Carl Smith (2005). The Emergence Of A Chinese Elite In Hong Kong (PDF). Hong Kong University Press. p. 1. ISBN 978-962-209-688-2. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2018-09-11. Retrieved 2018-09-11.
13. Delyagin, Mikhail Gennadyevich (2013-02-18). "В России установился компрадорский капитализм" [Compador capitalism has established itself in Russia]. Archived from the original on 2017-04-27. Retrieved 2023-09-04. У нас парадокс в том, что компрадорскую политику проводит само государство. [We have a paradox in that the state itself operates comprador politics.]

Further reading

• Chan, Kai Yiu (2001). "A Turning Point in China's Comprador System: KMA's Changing Marketing Structure in the Lower Yangzi Region, 1912-25". Business History. 43 (2): 51–72. doi:10.1080/713999222. S2CID 154838376.
• Chan, Wellington K. K. "Government, merchants and industry to 1911." The Cambridge History of China: 1800-1911 vol 11. Part 2 (1980) pp: 416–462.
• Faure, David. China and Capitalism: A History of Business Enterprise in Modern China (Hong Kong UP, 2006), covers 1500 to 1999; 136pp
• Faure, David. The rural economy of pre-liberation China: trade expansion and peasant livelihood in Jiangsu and Guangdong, 1870 to 1937 (Oxford UP, 1989).
• Hao, Yen-p'ing. The comprador in nineteenth century China: bridge between East and West (Harvard UP. 1970) online.
• Hung, Ho-fung. "Agricultural Revolution and Elite Reproduction in Qing China: The Transition to Capitalism Debate Revisited" American Sociological Review (2008) 73#4 pp. 569–588 online
• Po-Keung, Hui. "Comprador politics and middleman capitalism." in Hong Kong's History, ed by Ngo Tak-wing (Routledge, 1999) pp: 30–45.
• Zelin, Madeleine. The Merchants of Zigong: Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China (Columbia UP, 2005).

External links