C Patterson Giersch

Corporate Conquests

Business, the State, and the Origins of Ethnic Inequality in Southwest China

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

A history of China's desperately unequal modern economic landscape that begins in the nation's remote Southwest but ends by providing new understandings of ethnic inequality and the origins of China's unique corporate organizations.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 304
• Erscheinungstermin: 7. April 2020
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 231mm x 152mm x 25mm
• Gewicht: 612g
• ISBN-13: 9781503611641
• ISBN-10: 1503611647
• Artikelnr.: 57173154

Autorenporträt

C. Patterson Giersch is Professor of History at Wellesley College. He is the author of Asian Borderlands (2006).

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
1The Muleteers
chapter abstract
Chapter 1 explains the nineteenth-century origins of private corporations
created in key merchant communities in Yunnan Province, China. It focuses
on corporate governance, including profit-sharing and bookkeeping practices
that allowed Yunnanese entrepreneurs to transform intrafirm kinship and
friendship relations into incentive-based ownership-employee relations,
thereby centralizing corporate power in the general manager's headquarters.
This allowed the firms to expand their reach over vast distances and into
Southeast Asia while maintaining relatively disciplined corporate
governance. Since Chinese businesses are treated here as historical
institutions rather than timeless entities based on idealized Confucian
family values, the chapter demonstrates why successful firms were formed by
Han Chinese entrepreneurs as well as certain minority ethnic groups.
2Families
chapter abstract
Chapter 2 reveals how merchant communities in Yunnan, China, adapted to the
stresses and opportunities of modern corporate life by preparing children
for a world in which men and boys spent most of their time away from home.
The chapter uses local sources to reveal how, even as kinship was
deemphasized within the corporations, merchant communities relied on
reconfigured gender norms and kinship institutions to hold together
dispersed, mobile families through the writing of genealogies and the
erection of lineage temples. Created with corporate profits, the
genealogies and temples represented the construction of a new culture of
obligations that would ideally force men to return home. Pressure was
applied to wives, moreover, to be disciplined household managers, which was
difficult because increasing wealth brought the desire to project prestige
by building grand houses and consuming conspicuously.
3The Revolutionaries
chapter abstract
Chapter 3 focuses on twentieth-century international businessmen from
Yunnan, China, who, though they worked abroad, sought revolutionary change
in their hometowns. The chapter begins with Burma-based merchants who
participated in the 1911 revolution against the last Chinese dynasty. It
then examines merchants who were active in promoting educational change for
Chinese children in Burma and used that experience to promote rural reform,
especially educational reform, at home. The chapter argues that the
reformers were influenced by Chinese nationalism, which fueled their
opposition to the British colonial education system because it led their
children to assimilate. Concerned that their children were "falling into
another race," the reformers developed a curriculum promoting learning in
modern academic subjects as well as in Chinese language and nationalism.
4The Excluded
chapter abstract
Chapter 4 examines the expansion of Yunnan trade corporations into the
eastern Tibet region known as Kham. Drawing from the idea of translocality,
the chapter explains how outside firms came to dominate much of Kham's
regional trade, effectively excluding indigenous people from enjoying the
benefits of commercialization. To fully understand this history, the trade
corporations are placed in a larger political context, revealing how Han
nationalists increasingly depicted borderlands minorities as backward and
how radical officials such as "the butcher" Zhao Erfeng studied
international colonialism as a guide for eradicating indigenous political
and economic leadership, to be replaced by state and private corporations.
These trends originated the process of modern patterns of ethnic inequality
that still plague China today.
5Mining
chapter abstract
Chapter 5 introduces the powerful vision, first articulated in 1876, of
mechanizing Yunnan's mining industry by creating state-led corporations. In
the 1880s, when the first modern mining corporation was created in Yunnan,
it was part of an array of state initiatives to industrialize and modernize
China, a story that is familiar. By retelling this story from a borderlands
perspective, the chapter demonstrates for the first time how the concerns
with industrial development were influenced by changing ideas about
ethnicity as well as schemes to transform territorial governance from
pluralistic practices of empire, in which indigenous elites were legitimate
leaders, to the direct rule of the nation-state in which cultural and
ethnic difference were no longer tolerated. In this first fifty years of
modern industrialization, the concepts of Chinese development came to be
linked to hierarchies of ethnic and racial difference.
6The Technocrat
chapter abstract
Chapter 6 focuses on Miao Yuntai, an official who built pioneering
financial and industrial institutions designed to develop Yunnan, China,
during the 1930s. Miao started with Gejiu Tin, first incorporated in 1905,
making it a successful exporter of refined tin, and then established other
successful corporations. Miao's approach to economic development was based
on his experiences in the United States and his perception of Yunnan as
backward and ethnically diverse, leading him to create innovative state-run
corporations that emphasized managerial autonomy, responsiveness to
ownership, and the creation of competitive products. Miao was ahead of the
national government in both rationalizing and implementing state-run
industry in China, as well as in removing control over local resources from
local people, making him one of the most important figures in China's
developmental history.
7Corporations, the State, and Ethnic Difference
chapter abstract
Chapter 7 examines China's wartime and civil war periods (19371949), and
it brings together the book's major stories about private corporations,
state-run corporations, and the development of borderlands regions. After
the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, it was the Yunnan provincial
government that first harnessed private firms for the wartime effort. After
the arrival of the National Government in the Southwest, the Yunnanese
economic and corporate institutions, built in the 1930s, would be joined by
central institutions in complex partnerships that sought greater state
control. These were the first efforts by a Chinese state to enhance its
power by taking business from private firms. The efforts were part of
broader development plans that sought to impose state power over private
firms and over borderlands' resources and communities, including the Tai of
western Yunnan. The efforts anticipated the extraordinary growth of state
power under the Communist regime.
Epilogue: Conquest of Corporations
chapter abstract
The Epilogue follows the book's main narratives into the 1950s. It explains
how the Tai of western Yunnan would gain "autonomy" as they had hoped, only
to discover that autonomy under the Communist state meant disempowerment
and inequality enforced by government institutions, including state
corporations. It further explains how private corporations would first
contribute to postwar economic recovery, only to decline as the new state
closed markets and then purposefully dismantled the transprovincial
networks of communication and organization that had nurtured the
corporations for several generations. They were replaced by the
bureaucratic management systems of the new government and Communist Party,
which were designed for a planned economy that operated largely without
markets. The innovative Yunnan state-run firms would become the foundations
of the province's planned economy-the foundation of the province's
supposedly new era that had actually been poured in the old era.