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Reframing Chinese Business History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2021

Adam K. Frost Open the ORCID record for Adam K. Frost [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

Business history is expanding to include a greater plurality of contexts, with the study of Chinese business representing a key area of growth. However, despite efforts to bring China into the fold, much of Chinese business history remains stubbornly distal to the discipline. One reason is that business historians have not yet reconciled with the field's unique origins and intellectual tradition. This article develops a revisionist historiography of Chinese business history that retraces the field's development from its Cold War roots to the present day, showing how it has been shaped by the particular questions and concerns of “area studies.” It then goes on to explore five recent areas of novel inquiry, namely: the study of indigenous business institutions, business and semi-colonial context, business at the periphery of empire, business during socialist transition, and business under Chinese socialism. Through this mapping of past and present trajectories, the article aims to provide greater coherence to the burgeoning field and shows how, by taking Chinese business history seriously, we are afforded a unique opportunity to reimagine the future of business history as a whole.

Keywords

ChinaChinese Business HistoryArea StudiesHistoriographyContextTransitions
Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 96 , Issue 2: Business History around the World , Summer 2022 , pp. 245 - 287
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 The President and Fellows of Harvard College

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References

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8 A debate between China studies scholars, including William Skinner, Joseph Levenson, and Benjamin Schwartz, and classically trained Sinologists, such as William Mote, played out in the pages of the 1964 issue of the Journal of Asian Studies. The debate centered on the continued relevance of philological approaches to understanding China. The debate continues to this day, with renowned Sinologists such as Geremie Barmé advocating for a “New Sinology.” See Skinner, G. William, “What the Study of China Can Do for Social Science,” Journal of Asian Studies 23, no. 4 (1964): 517–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Barmé, Geremie R., “Towards a New Sinology,” Chinese Studies Association of Australia Newsletter, no. 31 (2005): 4–9Google Scholar.

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22 As Kwan has argued, in the titles of Chinese-language articles one can see how the phrase “sprouts of capitalism” was simply replaced with parallel concepts such as the “sprouts of modernization” and “sprouts of market economy.” Kwan, “Chinese Business History.”

23 As Li Huaiyin has argued, there was a paradigmatic shift with the “revolutionary historiography that bases its analyses on Marxist methodologies and highlights rebellions and revolutions as the overarching themes” being gradually displaced by a new generation of scholarship that applied modernization theory in a quest to identify those “‘modern’ elements in the Chinese economy, society, government, and culture that arguably contributed to China's modern progress and heralded capitalist developments in the post-Mao era.” See Li, “From Revolution to Modernization: The Paradigmatic Transition in Chinese Historiography in the Reform Era,” History and Theory 49, no. 3 (2010): 336, 359.

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37 In The Visible Hand, Alfred Chandler argued that the story of American capitalism is one of corporate managerial hierarchies gradually outcompeting personal business networks. According to Chandler, in cases where administrative coordination was more efficient than market coordination, modern enterprises internalized these functions through the creation of rationalized and impersonal “management hierarchies.” These managerial hierarchies enabled the firms to achieve new economies of scale and displace owner-operated enterprises. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA, 1977). See Chan, “Organizational Structure”; Mira Wilkins, “The Impacts of American Multinational Enterprise,” in America's China Trade in Historical Perspective: The Chinese and American Performance, ed. John King Fairbank and Ernest R. May (Cambridge, MA, 1986), 259–294; Amsden, Alice H., The Rise of “the Rest”: Challenges to the West from Late-Industrializing Economies (Oxford, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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41 For example, historian Bryna Goodman showed that networks based on native place association were modern, adaptive institutions that coordinated capital and labor, facilitated the resolution of disputes, and advanced the interests of their communities. The sociologist Gary Hamilton argued, in opposition to Alice Amsden, that Asian business networks operated at levels of efficiency that rivaled those of their hierarchical counterparts, and that the hierarchies-over-networks framework failed to explain the evolution of economic structures in Taiwan and South Korea. See Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937 (Berkeley, 1995); Hamilton, ed., Asian Business Networks (Berlin, 1996); Feenstra, Robert C. and Hamilton, Gary G., Emergent Economies, Divergent Paths: Economic Organization and International Trade in South Korea and Taiwan (Cambridge, U.K., 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Amsden, Alice H. and Chu, Wan-wen, Beyond Late Development: Taiwan's Upgrading Policies (Cambridge, MA, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Kwok-bun, Chan, Chinese Business Networks: State, Economy and Culture (Singapore, 2000)Google Scholar; and Menkhoff, Thomas and Solvay, Gerke, Chinese Entrepreneurship and Asian Business Networks (London, 2002)Google Scholar.

42 A more thorough discussion of this “networks versus hierarchies” debate is presented in Morris Bian's article, “Interpreting Enterprise, State, and Society.”

43 Participants in the 2021 Chinese Business History Workshop held in Inner Mongolia were invited to present their work at a special panel of the 2nd World Congress of Business History, a joint initiative between the European Business History Association and the Business History Society of Japan. See http://bhs.ssoj.info/WCBH2020/index.html.

44 As Andre Gunder Frank has argued, the first global economy was very much Sinocentric. It was only through the exploitation of silver from the Americas that Europeans were able to buy into the prosperous Asian trade and thus realize their own subsequent age of prosperity. See Frank, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley, 1998).

45 On the influence of the global silver trade on Chinese economic development, see Von Glahn, Richard, Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000–1700 (Berkeley, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Man-houng, Lin, China Upside Down: Currency, Society, and Ideologies, 1808–1856 (Leiden, 2006)Google Scholar; and So, Billy K. L., ed., The Economy of the Lower Yangzi Delta in Late Imperial China (London, 2013)Google Scholar. For a general introduction to the economic history of late imperial China, see Von Glahn, Richard, The Economic History of China: From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, U.K., 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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48 Kenneth Pomeranz argues that China experienced its own “industrious revolution” but that revolution did not follow the path that was forged in England because of differences in the distribution of energy resources, availability of land, and the extent of overseas trade. For Pomeranz the “discovery” and exploitation of the New World was a key factor in developmental divergence. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000).

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50 David Faure, “The Lineage as Business Company: Patronage versus Law in the Development of Chinese Business,” in Brown, Chinese Business Enterprise, 82–106.

51 Zelin, Madeleine, “The Rise and Fall of the Fu-Rong Salt-Yard Elite: Merchant Dominance in Late Qing China,” in Chinese Local Elites and Patterns of Dominance, ed. Esherick, Joseph W. and Rankin, Mary B. (Berkeley, 1990), 91Google Scholar. See also Wakefield, David, Fenjia: Household Division and Inheritance in Qing and Republican China (Honolulu, 1998)Google Scholar; Ruskola, Teemu, “Corporation Law in Late Imperial China,” in Research Handbook on the History of Corporate and Company Law, ed. Wells, Harwell (Cheltenham, 2018), 355–80Google Scholar.

52 As Zelin argued, the lineage trust “has often been pushed aside as Chinese familialism, when, in fact, within the context of a legal system in which the state did not promulgate regulations for the incorporation of business, this was an ingenious technique for protecting assets.” Quote from speech delivered at the 1995 workshop on Chinese business history at the University of Akron. Cited in McElderry, “Time and Space,” 5.

53 There did not, however, exist a free market for the exchange of these shares, and in many cases there were additional restrictions that limited their liquidity. For example, as Sherman Cochran notes in the case of the Shenxin cotton mill, the sale of company stock required the unanimous consent of the shareholders. See Zelin, Madeleine, “A Deep History of Chinese Shareholding,” Law and History Review 37, no. 2 (2019): 325–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Cochran, Encountering Chinese Networks, 120–22.

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56 Specifically, Faure argues that the lack of “a well-defined commercial law, or even a customary law in which the concerns of business were very clearly spelt out except in moralistic terms” meant that business people could not seek recourse through legal institutions. Here, Faure echoes the much older work of Morris and Bodde which held that the “overwhelmingly penal emphasis” of Chinese law, and its lack of concern with economic rights, meant that civil disputes were “either ignored entirely. . . or were given limited treatment within its penal format.” See Bodde, Derk and Morris, Clarence, Law in Imperial China: Exemplified by 190 Ch'ing Dynasty Cases (Cambridge, MA, 1973), 4Google Scholar; Faure, China and Capitalism, 3–4, 35; “Lineage as Business Company.”

57 Following Weber, Faure argues that while in Europe individualist ideology enabled business institutions to distance themselves from their ritual origins, in China adherence to a collective ideology meant that business continued to be structured by ritual institutions. Faure, China and Capitalism, 37.

58 More specifically, Faure argues that investment strategies and the division of profits were dictated by rule-of-thumb accounting practices that failed to account for capital, rather than by double-entry bookkeeping, which would have allowed for “the thought experiment that compares likely capital gains from different strategies of investment, making maximization not only an aspiration, but a reality.” Here Faure follows the heavily contested theories of Max Weber and Werner Sombart, who both credited the Venetian invention of double-entry bookkeeping with playing a pivotal role in laying the foundations for the Industrial Revolution. Faure, “Commercial Institutions and Practices in Imperial China as Seen by Weber and in Terms of More Recent Research,” Taiwan Dongya Wenming Yanjiu Xuekan 10, no. 2 (2013): 88; Weber, Max, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. Henderson, A. M. and Parsons, Talcott (1947; New York, 1964), 264Google Scholar; Weber, General Economic History, 275; Yamey, Basil S., “Accounting and the Rise of Capitalism: Further Notes on a Theme by Sombart,” Journal of Accounting Research 2, no. 2 (1964): 117–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Elsewhere, Faure contends that “no system of accounting was merged into production practices (Chinese accounts being used in household expenditures and in commerce) to permit the employment of managers beyond the immediate, watchful eyes of the owners of the businesses.” Faure, Emperor and Ancestor: State and Lineage in South China (Stanford, 2007), 6.

59 Faure, China and Capitalism, 42.

60 Madeleine Zelin, “A Critique of Property Rights in Prewar China,” in Zelin, Gardella, and Ocko, Contract and Property, 18–19. See also Chen Li and Madeleine Zelin, Chinese Law, vol. 3 (Leiden, 2015).

61 Huang, Philip C. C., Civil Justice in China: Representation and Practice in the Qing (Stanford, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thomas Buoye, “Litigation, Legitimacy, and Lethal Violence,” in Zelin, Gardella, and Ocko, Contract and Property, 94–119.

62 Qiu Pengsheng, “Mingqing Zhongguo yu Quanqiushi de Lianjie” [introduction to the special issue, “Patterns of historical change in Late Imperial China: A global and comparative perspective”], Wenhua Yanjiu (2014), 9–17; Dykstra, “Cross-Jurisdictional Trade.”

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64 Scholars such as Cao Shuji, Jiang Qin, and Li Jingzhang have woven together fragmentary sources to reconstruct the daily financial records of indigenous businesses; however, the incomplete nature of their archives made it difficult to build generalizable claims. See Cao and Jiang, “Southern Zhejiang Rural Industry and Markets during the Qing Dynasty: Evidence Derived from the Iron Smelting Industry in Shicang Village,” Zhongyang Yanjiuyuan Lishi Yuyan Yanjiusuo Jikan 81 (2010): 833–88; and Li, Jinshang Laozhang [Old account books of Shanxi merchants] (Beijing, 2012).

65 Weipeng, Yuan, Macve, Richard, and Debin, Ma, “The Development of Chinese Accounting and Bookkeeping before 1850: Insights from the Tŏng Tài Shēng Business Account Books (1798–1850),” Accounting and Business Research 47, no. 4 (2017): 401–30Google Scholar.

66 Cao Shuji and Matthew Lowenstein, “Double, Double, Debit and Credit: Double-Entry Bookkeeping in Late Imperial China,” Business History Review (forthcoming).

67 For a critical review of the literature on Chinese and European accounting practices and their connections with development, see Keith Hoskin, Ma Debin, and Richard H. Macve, “A Genealogy of Myths about the Rationality of Accounting in the West and in the East,” SSRN Electronic Journal (Jan. 2013); Hoskin and Macve, “Contesting the Indigenous Development of ‘Chinese Double-Entry Bookkeeping’ and Its Significance in China's Economic Institutions and Business Organization before C.1850,” SSRN Electronic Journal (Feb. 2012).

68 Zelin, Madeleine, The Merchants of Zigong: Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China (New York, 2005), xiiiGoogle Scholar. See also Zelin, “Capital Accumulation and Investment Strategies in Early Modern China: The Case of the Furong Salt Yard,” Late Imperial China 9, no. 1 (1988): 79–122; and Zelin, “Rise and Fall.”

69 Zelin further documents how new classes of shares were created to differentiate investments of capital, labor, and land and how futures markets developed to facilitate the exchange of said shares. For more detailed descriptions of these institutions, see Zelin, “The Firm in Early Modern China.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 71, no. 3 (2009): 623–37; and Zelin, “Deep History.”

70 As Zelin shows, there was a complex distribution of rights and obligations among partners, including landowners, investors, and middlemen. Moreover, this distribution evolved in tandem with shifts in the relative importance of capital, technology, and land. Zelin, “Rise and Fall.”

71 “Semi-colonialism” has been used in recent scholarship as both a term and a theoretical framework that highlights the “incomplete and fragmentary nature of China's colonial structure.” Shu-mei, Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley, 2001), 34Google Scholar. See also Barlow, Tani E., “Colonialism's Career in Postwar China Studies,” in Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia, ed. Barlow, Tani E. (Durham, 1997): 373–412CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goodman, Bryna, “Improvisations on a Semicolonial Theme, or, How to Read a Celebration of Transnational Urban Community,” The Journal of Asian Studies 59, no. 4, (2000): 889–926CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Frost, Shuang and Frost, Adam, “Taxi Shanghai: Entrepreneurship and Semi-Colonial Context,” Business History, ahead of print, (2021): 1–30Google Scholar.

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100 As Mark Selden and Wu Jieh-min argue, the “genius” of the PRC's developmental strategy “lay precisely in maintaining the vast majority of rural producers on the land during the period of socialist transition while using a combination of collective organization and the price scissors to transfer the surplus to industry and the state.” Selden, and Wu, , “The Chinese State, Incomplete Proletarianization and Structures of Inequality in Two Epochs,” Asia-Pacific Journal 9, no. 5 (2011): 5Google Scholar.

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109 As Antonia Finnane shows, under socialist rule the tailoring business initially boomed as people sought to remake their old clothing in appropriate new styles and waves of sewing school graduates entered the “socially useful” trade. However, tailors also faced unprecedented challenges in a political environment increasingly hostile to bourgeois culture. By 1956 the industry had entered into an inexorable decline, as private firms were reorganized into co-ops, and formerly independent entrepreneurs became rank-and-file workers in the new socialist economy. Finnane, “Tailors in 1950s Beijing: Private Enterprise, Career Trajectories, and Historical Turning Points in the Early PRC,” Frontiers of History in China 6, no. 1 (2011): 117–37.

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114 The abolition of private plots and closure of markets encountered fierce resistance at the local level. See Thaxton, Ralph, Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China: Mao's Great Leap Forward Famine and the Origins of Righteous Resistance in Da Fo Village (Cambridge, U.K., 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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118 Faure, China and Capitalism, 8. For early theorizations of the “cellular” socialist economy, see Donnithorne, Audrey, “China's Cellular Economy: Some Economic Trends since the Cultural Revolution,” China Quarterly 52 (1972): 605CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Eckstein, China's Economic Revolution. See also Nicholas Lardy's challenge to the “cellular economy” framework in Economic Growth and Distribution in China (Cambridge, U.K., 1978).

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120 Early scholarship tended to follow Andrew Walder's client-patron model of state-worker relations, which depicted industrial laborers as beneficiaries of socialism whose privileged status was dependent upon the patronage of the CCP. However, successive work revealed that workers were highly agentic actors who expressed divergent interests and frequently exercised autonomy vis-à-vis the state. For example, as Jackie Sheehan has shown, when economic grievances were left unaddressed, workers engaged in political protests against the party-state that were serious enough to be perceived by leaders as a threat to the CCP's legitimacy. Joel Andreas challenges the client-patron model even more explicitly, arguing that permanent job tenure protected political resistance and encouraged loyal dissent. Walder, Communist Neo-traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Berkeley, 1986); Sheehan, Chinese Workers: A New History (London, 1998); Andreas, Disenfranchised: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Citizenship in China (New York, 2019).

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129 Madeleine Zelin, “Critique of Scholarship on Chinese Business History in the People's Republic of China and Taiwan,” in Gardella, Leonard, and McElderry, Chinese Business History, 95–105.

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136 In this regard, this article complements the work of Matthias Kipping, Kurosawa Takafumi, and R. Daniel Wadhwani, who have retraced the divergent evolution of the business histories of the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan. See Kipping, Takafumi, and Wadhwani, “Revisionist Historiography,” 33–49.

137 Hao, “Themes and Issues,” 106.

138 This was the rather prescient argument presented by Sherman Cochran in two issues of the Chinese Business History Newsletter. See Cochran, “Prospects for Research in Chinese Business History,” Chinese Business History Newsletter 1, no. 1 (1990): 4–5; and Cochran, “To the Editors,” Chinese Business History Newsletter 6, no. 1 (1996): 1–2.

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