Technology Transfer, Imitation and Local Production: The Soap Industry in Early Twentieth-Century Tianjin

Abstract

The first Chinese-owned modern soap factory was established in Tianjin in 1903, and by the 1930s Tianjin was home to more than 30 large and small soap factories that served markets all over North China. Soap was one of the most important of the new daily use commodities whose import in the late 19th–early 20th centuries triggered efforts by Chinese manufacturers to produce imitations. Frank Dikötter described the process by which factories and workshops in China came to produce such daily use items as “copy culture.” As many of the chapters in this book argue, copying often led to disputes over brand names, and Chinese and other Asian producers were accused of producing “fakes.” The Tianjin soap industry is an unusual example of an industry that developed out of a top-down government initiative to promote light industry in cooperation with a foreign competitor—i.e. Japan. The first part of the paper charts the rise of the Tianjin soap industry, beginning from a government training school that sent apprentices to work in Japanese soap making factories, through the founding of the first soap factory, and the creation over several decades of more than 30 smaller factories. The proliferation of manufacturers and the hyper-competition that resulted led to lower prices, which helped to spread the consumption of soap. The second part of the paper looks at the creation of the market for soap, describing the ways people washed clothes and washed their bodies. Finally it turns to the question of how soap was marketed in North China.