"No matter what you may be selling, your business in China should be enormous, if the Chinese who should buy your goods would only do so." But will they? Carl Crow opened the first western advertising agency in Shanghai and ran it for twenty-five years, promoting everything from American lipsticks and moisturizers to French brandy and pharmaceuticals, and nothing was straightforward. In this highly readable account of his work in Shanghai, illustrated with delightful line drawings, Crow uses anecdotes and examples to illustrate the particular challenges of doing business in China.
"No matter what you may be selling, your business in China should be enormous, if the Chinese who should buy your goods would only do so." But will they?. "400 Million Customers" is essential reading for all foreigners seeking to do business in the booming economies of Asia, and all analysts of globalization and cultural difference. Carl Crow opened the first western advertising agency in Shanghai and ran it for twenty-five years, promoting everything from American lipsticks and moisturizers to French brandy and pharmaceuticals, and nothing was straightforward. In this highly readable account of his work in Shanghai, illustrated with delightful line drawings, Crow uses anecdotes and examples to illustrate the particular challenges of doing business in China. In Crow's time, no foreigners managed to dominate the Chinese market, and today -- when the population of China has trebled - the question remains whether the country is a potential mass market for the west, or a golden illusion. Crow's book remains as apt now as when it was written in 1937, and leading business schools recommend it as one of the best accounts of Chinese business culture.
Carl Crow arrived in Shanghai in 1911 and made the city his home for the next quarter of a century, working there as a journalist, newspaper proprietor, and groundbreaking adman. He also did stints as a hostage negotiator, emergency police sergeant, gentleman farmer, go-between for the American government, and propagandist. As his career progressed, so did the fortunes of Shanghai. The city transformed itself from a dull colonial backwater when Crow arrived, to the thriving and ruthless cosmopolitan metropolis of the 1930s when Crow wrote his pioneering book – 400 Million Customers – that encouraged a flood of businesses into the China market in an intriguing foreshadowing of today's boom. Among Crow's exploits were attending the negotiations in Peking that led to the fall of the Qing Dynasty, getting a scoop on Japanese interference in China during the First World War, negotiating the release of a group of Western hostages from a mountain bandit lair, and being one of the first Westerners to journey up the Burma Road during the Second World War. He met most of the major figures of the time, including Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, the Soong sisters, and Mao's second-in-command Zhou En-lai. During the Second World War, he worked for American intelligence alongside Owen Lattimore, coordinating US policies to support China against Japan. The story of this one exceptional man gives us a rich view of Shanghai and China during those tempestuous years. This is a book for all with an interest in Shanghai and China of this period, and those with an interest in the development of journalism and business there.
Who gets to speak for China? During the interwar years, when American condescension toward “barbarous” China yielded to a fascination with all things Chinese, a circle of writers sparked an unprecedented public conversation about American-Chinese relations. Hua Hsu tells the story of how they became ensnared in bitter rivalries over which one could claim the title of America’s leading China expert. The rapturous reception that greeted The Good Earth—Pearl Buck’s novel about a Chinese peasant family—spawned a literary market for sympathetic writings about China. Stories of enterprising Americans making their way in a land with “four hundred million customers,” as Carl Crow said, found an eager audience as well. But on the margins—in Chinatowns, on Ellis Island, and inside FBI surveillance memos—a different conversation about the possibilities of a shared future was taking place. A Floating Chinaman takes its title from a lost manuscript by H. T. Tsiang, an eccentric Chinese immigrant writer who self-published a series of visionary novels during this time. Tsiang discovered the American literary market to be far less accommodating to his more skeptical view of U.S.-China relations. His “floating Chinaman,” unmoored and in-between, imagines a critical vantage point from which to understand the new ideas of China circulating between the world wars—and today, as well.
Madmen in Shanghai: A Social History of Advertising in Modern China (1914–1956) provides a novel perspective on the emergence of Chinese consumer society through an extensive historical investigation of the advertising industry in pre-Communist China. Utilizing a diverse array of previously unexplored primary sources, including professional literature, newspapers, photographs, and municipal archives, it charts the development and growing influence of the advertising profession, fostered by professional organizations, agencies, and prominent practitioners. It underscores the crucial role of this hybrid and transnational profession in introducing an expanding array of consumer products and in shaping the enduring narrative of the “four hundred million customers.” This book will be of interest to scholars specializing in modern Chinese history, urban and consumer studies, media and mass communication, and also for professionals engaged in the fields of advertising and marketing.
Six major marketing mistakes are responsible for most product or business failures. This book explains hwo entrepreneurs and executives can increase their chances of success by ridding their companies of such errors as the better mousetrap philosophy. This entertaining guide also contains checklists to help marketers stay on safe ground.
In this path-breaking book, Tong Lam examines the emergence of the "culture of fact" in modern China, showing how elites and intellectuals sought to transform the dynastic empire into a nation-state, thereby ensuring its survival. Lam argues that an epistemological break away from traditional modes of understanding the observable world began around the turn of the twentieth century. Tracing the Neo-Confucian school of evidentiary research and the modern departure from it, Lam shows how, through the rise of the social survey, "the fact" became a basic conceptual medium and source of truth. In focusing on China’s social survey movement, A Passion for Facts analyzes how information generated by a range of research practices—census, sociological investigation, and ethnography—was mobilized by competing political factions to imagine, manage, and remake the nation.
Americans look to China with fascination and fear, unsure whether the rising Asian power is friend or foe but certain it will play a crucial role in America’s future. This is nothing new, Gordon Chang says. For centuries, Americans have been convinced of China’s importance to their own national destiny. Fateful Ties draws on literature, art, biography, popular culture, and politics to trace America’s long and varied preoccupation with China. China has held a special place in the American imagination from colonial times, when Jamestown settlers pursued a passage to the Pacific and Asia. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Americans plied a profitable trade in Chinese wares, sought Chinese laborers to build the West, and prized China’s art and decor. China was revered for its ancient culture but also drew Christian missionaries intent on saving souls in a heathen land. Its vast markets beckoned expansionists, even as its migrants were seen as a “yellow peril” that prompted the earliest immigration restrictions. A staunch ally during World War II, China was a dangerous adversary in the Cold War that followed. In the post-Mao era, Americans again embraced China as a land of inexhaustible opportunity, playing a central role in its economic rise. Through portraits of entrepreneurs, missionaries, academics, artists, diplomats, and activists, Chang demonstrates how ideas about China have long been embedded in America’s conception of itself and its own fate. Fateful Ties provides valuable perspective on this complex international and intercultural relationship as America navigates an uncertain new era.
Elizabeth Ingleson explores the roots of bilateral trade between the United States and China. Telling the story of the 1970s US activists and entrepreneurs who pressed for access to China's vast labor market, Ingleson shows how not just Chinese reform but also US deindustrialization fueled a dramatic, unanticipated shift in global capitalism.
Annotation Like its predecessor, this important new work is focused on the connection between trade and investment on the one hand and U.S. foreign policy on the other. David Pletcher describes the trade of the United States with the Far East, the islands of the Pacific, and the northwest coast of North America from 1784 (the year of the first American trading expedition to China) to 1844 (the year of the first trade treaty with China, followed immediately by the U.S. acquisition of Oregon and California). He then traces the growth of trade and investment in Alaska, Hawaii, and the South Pacific from 1844 to 1890 and proceeds to do the same for China, Japan, and Korea. In the ensuing chapters, Pletcher covers the 1890s, including the annexation of Hawaii, the Sino-Japanese War, the acquisition of the Philippines, and the Open Door policy in China. He concludes that the American expansion across the Pacific and into the Far East was not a deliberate, consistent drive for economic hegemony but a halting, experimental, improvised movement, carried out against determined opposition and indifference and dotted with setbacks and failures. Providing his own judgments about the wisdom and effectiveness of America's new endeavors, Pletcher summarizes the problems and handicaps involved, demonstrating that errors of the twentieth century were at least partly the result of poor preparation in the 1880s and 1890s. Touching on every place where Americans undertook significant economic activity, The Diplomacy of Involvementwill be an important aid for seasoned scholars, as well as an excellent introduction for the novice
