Abstract
Reviewing his work three decades later, Fan Xudong (1883–1945) declared that Jiuda, as the first-born of his industrial group, is truly a “Chinese-style” elder brother.1 Indeed, from 1914 until 1953 when it became a part of the joint state-private Yongli-Jiuda Chemical Industries, Jiuda Salt Refinery Co., Ltd. was synonymous with modern China’s refined salt industry. Building this private enterprise from scratch to national prominence, Fan and his colleagues promoted the country’s health championing the consumption of hygienic refined salt, self-sufficiency in various chemicals, and industrialization with an “almost religious … fervour.” 2 Beginning with a nominal capital of 50,000 yuan, by 1924 the company boasted a paid-up capital of 2.1 million yuan. With plants at Tanggu (Hebei), Dapu (Zhejiang), and the Yongyu Salt Refinery Co., Ltd. in Qingdao, Shandong, Jiuda controlled nearly half of the country’s refined salt production capacity by 1937. Through Hengfengtang, its holding corporation, the company owned over 100,000 mu (one mu approximately one-sixth acre) of salt ponds, Tanggu’s central mart and wharf, as well as partnerships distributing both refined and crude salt. Jiuda’s employees were socialized, whether as a family or a corporate unit (danwei) through a variety of institutions and measures.
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Notes
Fan Xudong, “Jiuda diyige sanshi’nian,” [The First Thirty Years of Jiuda] Haiwang [Neptune] 17.3 (1944), 18.
Patrick Brodie, Crescent over Cathay (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1990), 132.
On Fan’s career, see Zhang Tongyi, Fan Xudong zhuan [A Biography of Fan Xudong] (Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1987); and Chen Xinwen, Fan Xudong (N.p., 2002).
Bian Jintao, “Jiuda jingyan gongchang fangwenji,” [A Visit to the Jiuda Salt Refinery] Wenhua jianshe [Cultural construction] 2.6 (1936), 81–86.
William C. Kirby, “Engineering China: Birth of the Developmental State, 1928–1937” in Yeh Wen-hsin ed., Becoming Chinese (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 137–160;
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S. A. M. Adshead, The Modernization of the Chinese Salt Administration (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1970), passim;
Julia Strauss, Strong Institutions in Weak Polities: State Building in Republican China, 1927–1940 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), chapters 3 and 4.
Zhang Lijie, Nanjing guominzhengfu de yanzheng gaige yanjiu [A Study of Salt Administration Reforms under the Nanjing Nationalist Government] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 2011), 17–22.
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Kenneth Pomeranz, “‘Traditional’Chinese Business Forms Revisited: Family, Firm and Financing in the History of the Yutang Company of Ji’ning,” Late Imperial China 18.1 (1997), 1–38;
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Pamela Walker Laird, Pull (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), passim. For a critique of the scholarship on Chinese networks as a form of orientalism, see Arif Dirlik, “Critical Reflections on “Chinese Capitalism as Paradigm,” Identities 3.3 (1997), 303–330. The literature on Asian business network is far too big to be cited in full here.
See Mark Fruin, ed., Networks, Markets, and the Pacific Rim (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), passim;
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Hilton L. Root, Capital and Collusion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 246;
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Charles Perrow, “Market, Hierarchies, and Hegemony: A Critique of Chandler and Williamson,” in Andrew H. Van de Ven and William F. Joyce, eds., Perspectives on Organizational Design and Behavior (New York: Wiley, 1981), 371–86;
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Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Random House Modern Library ed., 1937), 423.
On this debate, see Rogers Brubaker, “In the Name of the Nation: Reflections on Nationalism and Patriotism,” in Philip Abbott, ed., The Many Faces of Patriotism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 37–52;
Mary G. Dietz, “Patriotism: A Brief History of the Term,” in Igor Primoratz, ed., Patriotism (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2002), 201–217.
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© 2014 Kwan Man Bun
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Bun, K.M. (2014). Introduction. In: Beyond Market and Hierarchy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137331946_1
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