¹ For overviews of the Indian and Latin American business history literature, see Tumbe, Chinmay, “Recent Trends in the Business History of India,” Business History Review 93, no. 1 (2019): 153–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dávila, Carlos, “The Current State of Business History in Latin America,” Australian Economic History Review 53, no. 2 (2013): 109–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Austin, Gareth, Dávila, Carlos, & Jones, Geoffrey, “The Alternative Business History: Business in Emerging Markets,” Business History Review 91, no. 3 (2017): 537–569CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ For a reflection on the multinodal origins of business history and its implications for the development of the field see Matthias Kipping, Kurosawa Takafumi and R. Daniel Wadhwani, “A Revisionist Historiography of Business History: A Richer Past for a Richer Future,” in The Routledge Companion to Business History, ed. John F. Wilson, Steven Toms, Abe de Jong, and Emily Buchnea (Abingdon, 2017), 19–35.

⁴ Quote from speech delivered at the workshop on Chinese business held at the University of Akron, 27–29 Oct. 1995. Cited in McElderry, Andrea, “Time and Space: Periodizing Chinese Business,” Chinese Business History Newsletter 6, no. 1 (1996): 5–6Google Scholar. This article uses East Asian language naming conventions. For authors with phoneticized Korean, Japanese, and Chinese names, the family name is listed first, and the given name follows (e.g. Xi Jinping, Kim Jung-un, Abe Shinzo). For authors who have adopted Indo-European given names, the Western convention is used (e.g. Amy Tan, Sandra Oh, Marie Kondo).

⁵ The dataset was manually constructed using information collected from online journal databases. Specifically, for each online database, I conducted full-text and article-title searches of the terms “China,” “Chinese,” “Sino,” “Hong Kong,” “Canton,” Cantonese,” “Taiwan,” and “Taiwanese.” I then read the abstracts of each article to confirm whether or not Chinese business was included in the core subject matter or if one of the aforementioned terms was simply used in passing. In the cases where this was unclear from the abstract, I browsed the articles in full.

⁶ The list is as follows: Yen-p'ing, Hao, “Entrepreneurship and the West in East Asian Economic and Business History,” Business History Review 56, no. 2 (1982): 149–54Google Scholar; Rajeswary Ampalavanar Brown, ed., Chinese Business Enterprise in Asia (London, 1995); Coble, Parks M., “Comments and Reflections on Chinese Business History,” Chinese Studies in History 31, no. 3–4 (1998): 145–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Feuerwerker, Albert, “Doing Business in China over Three Centuries,” Chinese Studies in History 31, no. 3–4 (1998): 16–34Google Scholar; Yen-p'ing, Hao, “Themes and Issues in Chinese Business History,” Chinese Studies in History 31, no. 3–4 (1998): 106–26Google Scholar; Bun, Kwan Man, “Chinese Business History in the People's Republic of China,” Chinese Studies in History 31, no. 3–4 (1998): 35–64Google Scholar; Chi-Kong, Lai, “Enterprise History Studies and Archives,” Chinese Studies in History 31, no. 3 (1998): 169Google Scholar; Man-houng, Lin, “Interpretative Trends in Taiwan's Scholarship on Chinese Business History: 1600 to the Present,” Chinese Studies in History 31, no. 3–4 (1998): 65–94Google Scholar; Zelin, Madeleine, “Critique of Scholarship on Chinese Business History in the People's Republic of China and Taiwan,” Chinese Studies in History 31, no. 3–4 (1998): 95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chan, Wellington K. K., “Tradition and Change in the Chinese Business Enterprise,” Chinese Studies in History 31, no. 3–4 (1998): 127–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lai Chi-Kong, “Chinese Business History: Its Development, Present Situation, and Future Direction,” in Business History around the World, ed. Franco Amatori and Geoffrey Jones (Cambridge, U.K., 2003), 298–316; Zelin, Madeleine, “Guest Editor's Introduction,” Enterprise & Society 6, no. 3 (2005): 357–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wellington K. K. Chan, “Chinese Entrepreneurship since Its Late Imperial Period,” in The Invention of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times, ed. David S. Landes, Joel Mokyr, and William J. Baumol (Princeton, 2010), 469–500; Sherman Cochran, “Chinese And Overseas Chinese Business History: Three Challenges To The State Of The Field,” in Medha Malik Kudaisya and Ng Chin-keong, eds., Chinese and Indian Business (Leiden, 2009): 11–29; Bian, Morris L., “Interpreting Enterprise, State, and Society: A Critical Review of the Literature in Modern Chinese Business History, 1978–2008,” Frontiers of History in China 6, no. 3 (2011): 423–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zelin, Madeleine, “Chinese Business Practice in the Late Imperial Period,” Enterprise & Society 14, no. 4 (2013): 769–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yeh Wen-hsin, Klaus Mühlhahn, and Hajo Frölich, “Introduction to “Rethinking Business History in Modern China”,” Cross-currents no. 16 (2015): 1–12.

⁷ John K. Fairbank, Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir (New York, 1982), 355. The United States Congress's National Defense Education Act of 1957 (later renamed the Higher Education Act) and the Fulbright-Hays Act of 1961 (officially titled the Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act) provided federal funding for the multidisciplinary study of societies, like China, that were considered to be of strategic importance to the United States. Congress also provided funds to the Ford Foundation, which began awarding individual grants for the study of Chinese language and culture, as well as institutional grants to the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies for area-studies conferences and workshops.

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 Geremie R. Barmé, “Towards a New Sinology,” Chinese Studies Association of Australia Newsletter, no. 31 (2005): 4–9.

⁹ Weber viewed the emergence of capitalism in Europe as the product of a unique configuration of institutional and cultural factors. In the case of China, Weber argued, it was the societal adherence of Confucian ethics— such as filial piety, social harmony, patrimonial bureaucracy— that precluded the development of rational law, rational accounting, rational enterprise, and the rational functioning of the apparatus of the state and caused the development of industrial capitalism having “gone backward in China, not forward.” See Max Weber, General Economic History, trans. Frank H. Knight (Glencoe, IL, 1950): 352.

¹⁰ In their later studies of guandu shangban enterprises, Wellington K. K. Chan and Lai Chi-Kong challenged Albert Feurwerker's characterization of traditional Confucian culture and state domination as the sole factors behind the “failure to establish modern enterprise in China.” Both Chan and Lai instead lay the blame at the feet of government officials who refused to relinquish control over enterprises to private actors and instituted systems of bureaucratic management that ultimately inhibited the growth of industry. See Chan, “Government, Merchants, and Industry to 1911,” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 11, Late Ch'ing, 1800–1911, ed. John K. Fairbank and Kwang-ching Liu (Cambridge, U.K., 1980), 460; Lai, “The Qing State and Merchant Enterprise: The China Merchants’ Company, 1872–1902,” in To Achieve Security and Wealth: The Qing Imperial State and the Economy, 1644–1911, ed. Jane Kate Leonard and John R. Watt (Ithaca, 1992), 139–55; and Feuerwerker, China's Early Industrialization: Sheng Hsuan-huai (1844–1916) and Mandarin Enterprise (Cambridge, MA, 1958).

¹¹ Marion J. Levy, The Rise of the Modern Chinese Business Class (New York, 1949).

¹² Building upon the theory of the “Asiatic mode of production,” Karl Wittfogel argued that China's development was held in thrall by despotic states that over-expropriated surplus from an economy of undifferentiated village communities. See Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, 1957); Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy (Berkeley, 1968); and Mary Wright, The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The T'ung-Chih Restoration, 1862–1874 (Stanford, 1957).

¹³ Huang, Ray and Needham, Joseph, “The Nature of Chinese Society,” East and West 24, no. 3 (1974): 381Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Albert Feuerwerker, remarks at the 1991 AAS roundtable, quoted in Robert Gardella, “Prospects for Research in Chinese Business History,” Chinese Business History Newsletter 2, no. 1 (1991), 3. Indeed, well into the 1980s scholars continued seeking to explain “why there were no revolutionary breakthroughs in the commercial and industrial history of China.” See Chan, Wellington K. K., “The Organizational Structure of the Traditional Chinese Firm and Its Modern Reform,” Business History Review 56, no. 2 (1982): 218–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ R. H. Tawney, Land and Labour in China (New York, N.Y., 1932), 110.

¹⁶ Harold Kahn and Albert Feuerwerker, “The Ideology of Scholarship: China's New Historiography,” in History in Communist China, ed. Albert Feuerwerker (Cambridge, MA, 1968), 13.

¹⁷ The theoretical basis of the “sprouts of capitalism” literature can be traced back to Mao Zedong's claim that “as China's feudal society developed its commodity economy and so carried within itself the embryo of capitalism, China would of herself have developed slowly into a capitalist society even if there had been no influence of foreign imperialism.” Cited in Feuerwerker, Albert, “China's History in Marxian Dress,” American Historical Review 66, no. 2 (1961): 327CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ This type of ideology-centered scholarship is now being reborn under the banner of the “New Left.” For example, in his three-volume series The Political and Economic History of China, Hu Angang, an influential professor of economics at Tsinghua University, argues that the relative decline of late imperial China was attributable to “the absence of strong, modern-minded leadership” and the failure of traditional institutions to cope with a rapidly changing world. The inability of the Qing dynasty and the Nationalist state to meet the challenges posed by a rapidly industrializing West, Hu contends, necessitated the Chinese Communist Party's rise and provided legitimacy for a “government-enforced, fast, and dramatic socioeconomic transition.” Hu Angang, The Political and Economic History of China, 1949–1976, vol. 3, trans. Hu Guangyu, Glenn Griffith, and Vivian Hui (Hong Kong, 2013), 48–49.

¹⁹ For an excellent review and analysis of this Mainland Chinese literature, see Zelin, Madeleine, “Critique of Scholarship on Chinese Business in the People's Republic of China and Taiwan,” Chinese Studies in History 31, no. 3–4 (1998): 95–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ See Li Bozhong, Agricultural Development in Jiangnan, 1620–1850 (London, 1998); for English translations of Xu and Wu, see Xu Dixin and Wu Chengming, eds., Chinese Capitalism, 1522–1840 (Basingstoke, 2000). See also Robert Allen, “Agricultural Productivity and Rural Incomes in England and the Yangtze Delta, c.1620–c.1820,” Economic History Review 62, no. 3 (2009): 525; Ramon Myers, The Chinese Economy, Past and Present (Belmont, CA, 1980); and Wong Bin, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, 1997).

²¹ See Li Shiyue and Hu Bin, “Yangwupai yu Jindai Gongye” [The self-strengtheners and modem industries], Bulletin of Shandong Normal University 3 (1979): 33–41.; Li Shiyue and Hu Bin, “Li Hongzhang yu Lunchuan Zhaoshangju” [Li Hongzhang and the China Merchants’ Steamship Navigation Company], LS 2 (1982): 44–60.

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.

²⁴ R. Daniel Wadhwani and Christina Lubinski, “Reinventing Entrepreneurial History,” Business History Review 91, no. 4 (2017): 767–99.

²⁵ Hao, “Entrepreneurship.”

²⁶ Paul Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York, NY, 1984).

²⁷ Paul Cohen, China Unbound: Evolving Perspectives on the Chinese Past (London, 2003).

²⁸ Myers, Chinese Economy; Wong, China Transformed; Li, Agricultural Development.

²⁹ See Jing Junjian, “Legislation Related to the Civil Economy in the Qing Dynasty,” in Civil Law in Qing and Republican China, ed. Katherine Bernhardt and Philip Huang (Stanford, 1994), 42–84; Liang Zhiping, Qingdai Xiguanfa: Shehui yu Guojia [Qing customary law: Society and the state] (Beijing, 1996); and Zelin, “Chinese Business Practice,” 772. Moreover, as Helen Dunstan argues, even in cases where the officials did intervene, they generally did so not on the basis of Confucian principles but from a sophisticated understanding of political economy. Dunstan, State or Merchant? Political Economy and Political Process in 1740s China (Cambridge, MA, 2006).

³⁰ William Rowe, Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796–1889 (Stanford, 1984), 341.

³¹ Du Xuncheng, Zhongguo Chuantong Lunli yu Jindai Zibenzhuyi [Traditional Chinese ethics and modern capitalism] (Shanghai, 1993); Tang Lixing, “Mingqing Huishang Xinli Yanjiu” [Research on the psychology of Huizhou merchants in the Ming and Qing], in Jinnian Liung Fangzhong jiaoshou xueshu tuolunhui wenji [Commemorative essays in honor of Liang Fangzhong], ed. Tang Mingsui and Wang Qichen (Guangzhou, 1990), 268–91; Richard John Lufrano, Honorable Merchants: Commerce and Self-Cultivation in Late Imperial China (Honolulu, 1997).

³² Prasenjit Duara, Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942 (Stanford, 1988).

³³ Huang Shaolun, ed., Zhongguo Zongjiao Lunli yu Xiandaihua [Chinese religious ethics and modernization] (Hong Kong, 1991); Gordon Redding, The Spirit of Chinese Capitalism (Berlin, 1990).

³⁴ Paul Cohen, China Unbound, 2; Robert Gardella, “Prospects for Research in Chinese Business History.”

³⁵ A full run of the Chinese Business History (中国商业历史) newsletter has been digitized and made available online by scholars at the University of Hong Kong: https://www.hkihss.hku.hk/en/researchs/chinese-business-history-resources/.

³⁶ These essays were compiled as an edited volume and later published as a stand-alone book. See Robert Gardella, Jane Leonard, and Andrea McElderry, eds., Chinese Business History: Interpretive Trends and Priorities for the Future (Armonk, NY, 1998).

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; Alice H. Amsden, The Rise of “the Rest”: Challenges to the West from Late-Industrializing Economies (Oxford, 2001).

³⁸ Sherman Cochran, Encountering Chinese Networks: Western, Japanese and Chinese Corporations in China, 1880–1937 (Berkeley, 2000), 182.

³⁹ Elisabeth Köll, From Cotton Mill to Business Empire: The Emergence of Regional Enterprises in Modern China (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 282.

⁴⁰ Kwan Man Bun, “Managing Market, Hierarchy, and Network: The Jiuda Salt Industries, Ltd., 1917–1937,” Enterprise & Society 6, no. 3 (2005): 395–418; Peng Juanjuan, The Yudahua Business Group in China's Early Industrialization (Lanham, MD, 2020).

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); Robert C. Feenstra and Gary G. Hamilton, Emergent Economies, Divergent Paths: Economic Organization and International Trade in South Korea and Taiwan (Cambridge, U.K., 2006); and Alice H. Amsden and Wan-wen Chu, Beyond Late Development: Taiwan's Upgrading Policies (Cambridge, MA, 2003). See also Chan Kwok-bun, Chinese Business Networks: State, Economy and Culture (Singapore, 2000); and Thomas Menkhoff and Gerke Solvay, Chinese Entrepreneurship and Asian Business Networks (London, 2002).

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

⁴⁶ Zelin, “Chinese Business Practice,” 772.

⁴⁷ Angus Maddison, Chinese Economic Performance in the Long Run (Paris, 2007), 44.

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).

⁴⁹ See Madeleine Zelin, Jonathan K. Ocko, and Robert Gardella, eds., Contract and Property in Early Modern China (Stanford, 2004); Su Yigong, “Discovering the Chinese Common Law: The Formation of the Loan Contract in Qing China,” Frontiers of Law in China 10, no. 2 (2015): 365–98; Maura Dykstra, “Cross-Jurisdictional Trade and Contract Enforcement in Qing China,” International Journal of Asian Studies 16, no. 2 (2019): 99–115; Qu Jian, Social Order through Contracts (Singapore, 2021).

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 Madeleine Zelin, “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. Joseph W. Esherick and Mary B. Rankin (Berkeley, 1990), 91. See also David Wakefield, Fenjia: Household Division and Inheritance in Qing and Republican China (Honolulu, 1998); Teemu Ruskola, “Corporation Law in Late Imperial China,” in Research Handbook on the History of Corporate and Company Law, ed. Harwell Wells (Cheltenham, 2018), 355–80.

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 Madeleine Zelin, “A Deep History of Chinese Shareholding,” Law and History Review 37, no. 2 (2019): 325–51; and Cochran, Encountering Chinese Networks, 120–22.

⁵⁴ Zelin, “Deep History,” 327.

⁵⁵ David Faure, China and Capitalism: A History of Business Enterprise in Modern China (Hong Kong, 2006), 43.

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 Derk Bodde and Clarence Morris, Law in Imperial China: Exemplified by 190 Ch'ing Dynasty Cases (Cambridge, MA, 1973), 4; 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; Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (1947; New York, 1964), 264; Weber, General Economic History, 275; Basil S. Yamey, “Accounting and the Rise of Capitalism: Further Notes on a Theme by Sombart,” Journal of Accounting Research 2, no. 2 (1964): 117–36. 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 Philip C. C. Huang, Civil Justice in China: Representation and Practice in the Qing (Stanford, 1996); 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.”

⁶³ Robert Gardella, “Commercial Bookkeeping in Ch'ing China and the West: A Preliminary Assessment,” Late Imperial China 4, no. 7 (1982): 56–72; Gardella, “Squaring Accounts: Commercial Bookkeeping Methods and Capitalist Rationalism in Late Qing and Republican China,” Journal of Asian Studies, 51, no. 2 (1992): 317–39; Pak Auyeung, Lei Fu, and Liu Zhixiang, “Double-Entry Bookkeeping in Early-Twentieth-Century China,” Business History Review 79, no. 1 (2005): 73–96.

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 Yuan Weipeng, Richard Macve, and Ma Debin, “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): 401–30.

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 Madeleine Zelin, The Merchants of Zigong: Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China (New York, 2005), xiii. 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.” Shih Shu-mei, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley, 2001), 34. See also Tani E. Barlow, “Colonialism's Career in Postwar China Studies,” in Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia, ed. Tani E. Barlow (Durham, 1997): 373–412; Bryna Goodman, “Improvisations on a Semicolonial Theme, or, How to Read a Celebration of Transnational Urban Community,” The Journal of Asian Studies 59, no. 4, (2000): 889–926; Shuang Frost and Adam Frost, “Taxi Shanghai: Entrepreneurship and Semi-Colonial Context,” Business History, ahead of print, (2021): 1–30.

⁷² Quoted in Parks Coble, The Shanghai Capitalists and the Nationalist Government, 1927–1937 (Cambridge, MA, 1980), 27.

⁷³ Shellen Xiao Wu, Empires of Coal: Fueling China's Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860–1920 (Stanford, 2015).

⁷⁴ Wu, Empires of Coal, 31, 186.

⁷⁵ Anne Reinhardt, Navigating Semi-Colonialism: Shipping, Sovereignty, and Nation-Building in China, 1860–1937 (Cambridge, MA, 2018), 43.

⁷⁶ For another study that further elaborates on how conflicts between colonialism and nationalism shaped the building of infrastructure, see Xia Chenxiao, “Foreign Direct Investment in China's Electrification: Between Colonialism and Nationalism, 1882–1952,” Enterprise & Society 22, no. 1 (2021): 1–43.

⁷⁷ Elisabeth Köll, Railroads and the Transformation of China (Cambridge, MA, 2019), 38.

⁷⁸ Tawney, Land and Labour, 13.

⁷⁹ In China's Republican Economy: An Introduction, Thomas Rawski set out to advance the general proposition that in spite of the Nationalist government's failure to promote growth in the period from 1911 to 1949, China's economy and industrial capacity expanded rapidly, albeit in a highly localized fashion. However, as Susan Mann Jones emphasized, the concentrated efforts of the Nationalist government to develop a central bank, build railways, and achieve tariff autonomy deprived the Nationalists of the necessary resources to develop a meaningful political and economic infrastructure outside of the productive core. See Rawski, “China's Republican Economy: An Introduction” (Discussion paper, Joint Centre on Modern East Asia, Toronto, 1978); Mann Jones, “Misunderstanding the Chinese Economy—A Review Article,” Journal of Asian Studies 40, no. 3 (1981): 539–57.

⁸⁰ Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 3.

⁸¹ Parks Coble, Chinese Capitalists in Japan's New Order: The Occupied Lower Yangzi, 1937–1945 (Berkeley, 2003).

⁸² Frost and Frost, “Taxi Shanghai.”

⁸³ Liang Yao, “Nationalism on Their Own Terms: The National Products Movement and the Coca-Cola Protest in Shanghai, 1945–1949,” Modern Asian Studies 51, no. 5 (2017): 1439–68.

⁸⁴ Christopher Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Honolulu, 2004); Robert Culp, The Power of Print in Modern China: Intellectuals and Industrial Publishing from the End of Empire to Maoist State Socialism (New York, 2019).

⁸⁵ Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai, 4.

⁸⁶ Culp, Power of Print, 259.

⁸⁷ See Friederike Welter, Entrepreneurship and Context (Northampton, MA, 2019).

⁸⁸ Richard White argues that America's “transcontinentals”—regional railroads networks that were never truly transcontinental—were “transformative failures” that shaped American modernity as much by their shortcomings as by their successes. Though transcontinentals ranked among the largest American corporations, they were social, political, and business failures that remained dependent on the state for survival. See White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York, 2011).

⁸⁹ On China's transition from empire to nation-state, see Joseph Esherick, “How the Qing became China,” in Empire to Nation: Historical Perspectives on the Making of the Modern World, ed. Joseph Esherick, Hasan Kayali, and Eric Van Young (Boulder, CO, 2006), 229–59; and Wang Hui, China from Empire to Nation-State (Cambridge, MA, 2014).

⁹⁰ For an in-depth history of this conquest, see Peter Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA, 2005).

⁹¹ Prasenjit Duara, “The Multi-national State in Modern World History: The Chinese Experiment,” Frontiers of History in China 6, no. 2 (2011): 285–95.

⁹² James Millward, Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759–1864 (Stanford, 1998).

⁹³ Judd C. Kinzley, Natural Resources and the New Frontier (Chicago, 2018).

⁹⁴ Patterson Giersch, “Borderlands Business: Merchant Firms and Modernity in Southwest China, 1800–1920,” Late Imperial China 35, no. 1 (2014): 38–76.

⁹⁵ C. Patterson Giersch, Corporate Conquests: Business, the State, and the Origins of Ethnic Inequality in Southwest China (Stanford, CA, 2020).

⁹⁶ William C. Kirby, Germany and Republican China (Stanford, 1984); Kirby, “Continuity and Change in Modern China: Economic Planning on the Mainland and on Taiwan, 1943–1958,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 24 (1990): 121–41; Kirby, “The Chinese War Economy,” in China's Bitter Victory: The War with Japan, 1937–1945, ed. James Chieh Hsiung and Steven I. Levine (Armonk, NY, 1992), 185−212.

⁹⁷ Cohen, China Unbound.

⁹⁸ Mark Selden, The Political Economy of Chinese Development (Armonk, NY, 1993).

⁹⁹ Chinese land reform, which began in 1946 and lasted until 1953, radically altered the political and economic structure of the countryside. Land, property, farming tools, and draft animals were violently expropriated from “landlords” and “rich peasant” households and were transferred to poorer families. See John K. Fairbank, China: A New History (Cambridge, MA, 1992); and Victor D. Lippit, Land Reform and Economic Development in China (White Plains, NY, 1974).

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): 5.

¹⁰¹ See Alexander Eckstein, China's Economic Revolution (Cambridge, U.K., 1977).

¹⁰² Jeremy Brown argues that although the CCP rose to power on the back of the claim that it would eliminate the “three differences” in Chinese society—inequality between workers and peasants, cities and the countryside, and mental and manual labor—the party's subsequent actions increased the urban-rural divide. Rural Chinese became second-class citizens who were locked into their “agricultural” classifications; they could “resist in small ways that tweaked the system” but lacked the requisite power to actually threaten it. Brown, City versus Countryside in Mao's China: Negotiating the Divide (Cambridge, U.K., 2012), 6.

¹⁰³ Charles Patterson Giersch, Corporate Conquests: Business, the State, and the Origins of Ethnic Inequality in Southwest China (Stanford, CA, 2020), 10.

¹⁰⁴ Morris L. Bian, The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China: The Dynamics of Institutional Change (Cambridge, MA, 2005).

¹⁰⁵ For related studies on the evolution of state-owned industries, see Kirby, Germany and Republican China; “Chinese War Economy”; and Joshua H. Howard, Workers at War: Labor in China's Arsenals, 1937–1953 (Stanford, 2004), 185−212.

¹⁰⁶ Philip Thai, China's War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making of the Modern State, 1842–1965 (New York, 2018), 242. See also Thai, “Old Menace in New China: Coastal Smuggling, Illicit Markets, and Symbiotic Economies in the Early People's Republic,” Modern Asian Studies 51, no. 5 (2017), 1561–97.

¹⁰⁷ See Li Huayu, Mao and the Economic Stalinization of China, 1948–1953 (New York, 2006).

¹⁰⁸ See Robert K. Cliver, “Surviving Socialism: Private Industry and the Transition to Socialism in China, 1945–1958,” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 16 (2015): 139–64.

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.

¹¹⁰ Robert K. Cliver, Red Silk: Class, Gender, and Revolution in China's Yangzi Delta Silk Industry (Cambridge, MA, 2020).

¹¹¹ Sherman Cochran, “Capitalists Choosing Communist China: The Liu Family of Shanghai, 1948–56,” in Dilemmas of Victory: The Early Years of the People's Republic of China, ed. Jeremy Brown and Paul G. Pickowicz (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 359–85.

¹¹² Christopher R. Leighton, “Capitalists, Cadres, and Culture in 1950s China” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2010).

¹¹³ Cliver, “Surviving Socialism,” 139–64.

¹¹⁴ The abolition of private plots and closure of markets encountered fierce resistance at the local level. See Ralph Thaxton, 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).

¹¹⁵ See Martin King Whyte and William L. Parish, Urban Life in Contemporary China (Chicago, 1984).

¹¹⁶ Matthew Lowenstein, “Return to the Cage: Monetary Policy in China's First Five-Year Plan,” Twentieth-Century China 44, no. 1 (2019): 53–74.

¹¹⁷ Lin Yifu, Fang Cai, and Zhou Li, State-Owned Enterprise Reform in China (Hong Kong, 2001), 140; Faure, China and Capitalism, 8.

¹¹⁸ Faure, China and Capitalism, 8. For early theorizations of the “cellular” socialist economy, see Audrey Donnithorne, “China's Cellular Economy: Some Economic Trends since the Cultural Revolution,” China Quarterly 52 (1972): 605; 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).

¹¹⁹ For authoritative accounts of the institutional causes of, and the human and economic devastation wrought by, the Great Famine, see Frank Dikötter, Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 (New York, 2010); Felix Wemheuer and Kimberley Ens Manning, Eating Bitterness: New Perspectives on China's Great Leap Forward and Famine (Vancouver, 2011); and Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962, ed. Edward Friedman, Guo Jian, and Stacy Mosher (New York, 2012).

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).

¹²¹ See Lu Xiaobo and Elizabeth J. Perry, eds., Danwei: The Changing Chinese Workplace in Historical and Comparative Perspective (Armonk, NY, 1997); and David Bray, Social Space and Governance in Urban China: The Danwei System from Origins to Reform (Stanford, 2005).

¹²² For example, Zeng Zhaojin and Joshua Eisenman estimate the intensity of political repression in three major mass campaigns during the Maoist period and demonstrate a negative correlation with economic outcomes after 1982. Bai Liang and Wu Lingwei similarly use surveys to show that the intensity of political violence during the Cultural Revolution was associated with an erosion of interpersonal trust and an enduring loss of human capital, the effects of which could still be observed in local economies four decades later. Zeng and Eisenman, “The Price of Persecution: The Long-Term Effects of the Anti-rightist Campaign on Economic Performance in Post-Mao China,” World Development 110 (2018): 249–60; Bai and Wu, “Political Movement and Trust Formation: Evidence from the Cultural Revolution (1966–76),” European Economic Review 122 (2020): art. 103331; Bai and Wu, “Political Conflict and Development Dynamics: Economic Legacies of the Cultural Revolution” (unpublished draft, 2020).

¹²³ On the productivity of agricultural collectives see Lin Yifu, Institutions, Technology, and China's Agricultural Development (Shanghai, 2008); Huaiyin, Li, “Institutions and Work Incentives in Collective Farming in Maoist China,” Journal of Agrarian Change 18, no. 1 (2018): 67–86Google Scholar; and Eisenman, Joshua, “Commune Kabuki: Development and Productivity Growth under Maoist China's Rural Collectives,” Development and Change 49, no. 6 (2018): 1553–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On worker performance in state-owned enterprises, see Peter N. S. Lee, Industrial Management and Economic Reform in China, 1949–1984 (Hong Kong, 1987); John Hassard, China's State Enterprise Reform: From Marx to the Market (London, 2007); and Huaiyin, Li, “Worker Performance in State-Owned Factories in Maoist China: A Reinterpretation,” Modern China 42, no. 4 (2016): 377–414Google Scholar.

¹²⁴ Dorothy Solinger, Chinese Business under Socialism: The Politics of Domestic Commerce, 1949–1980 (Berkeley, 1987).

¹²⁵ Karl Gerth, Unending Capitalism: How Consumerism Negated China's Communist Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2020), 2.

¹²⁶ For example, European historian Peter Caldwell offers a favorable review of Gerth's work, arguing that it both illustrates the specificities of the Chinese socialist experience and traces lines of comparison with Eastern European socialism. See Caldwell, “Capital and Consumerism: Reflections on Karl Gerth's New Book,” PRC History Review 5, no. 1 (2020): 1–25.

¹²⁷ Karl, Rebecca, “Engaging with Gerth's Sleights (of Hand),” PRC History Review 5, no. 1 (2020): 8–11Google Scholar.

¹²⁸ Laurence Coderre, “Erasing Socialism,” PRC History Review 5, no. 1 (2020): 12–13; Gerth, Unending Capitalism, 232. As Coderre notes in her own work, CCP leaders, including Mao Zedong, did not advocate for the complete elimination of commodities from the socialist economy but rather for “developing commodity production in service of socialist construction.” Recognizing both the importance and threat of commodities to socialist development, the CCP sought to simultaneously “restrict commodity production under the dictatorship of the proletariat and promote commodity consumption in the name of teleological progress.” Coderre, “A Necessary Evil: Conceptualizing the Socialist Commodity under Mao,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 61, no. 1 (2019): 40.

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.

¹³⁰ Philip Scranton, Enterprise, Organization, and Technology in China: A Socialist Experiment, 1950−1971 (Cham, Switzerland, 2019), vi.

¹³¹ Scranton, 5.

¹³² Specifically, Scranton draws on US government reports and translations of Chinese sources that were produced by the US Joint Publications Research Service.

¹³³ Qiliang, He, “Between Business and Bureaucrats: Pingtan Storytelling in Maoist and Post-Maoist China,” Modern China 36, no. 3 (2010): 243–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³⁴ Feng Junqi, “Xinhua fuyin changyede shengmingshi,” Beijing Daxue, Doctoral Dissertation, 2013.

¹³⁵ Adam Frost, “‘Speculation and Profiteering’: The Entrepreneurial Transformation of Socialist China” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2021).

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.

¹³⁹ Reed, Christopher, “Reaching New Audiences: One Purpose of Revision and Discover,” Chinese Business History Newsletter 9, no. 2 (1999) : 1–3Google Scholar.

¹⁴⁰ Friedman, Walter and Jones, Geoffrey, “Business History: Time for Debate,” Business History Review 85, no. 1 (2011): 1–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.