Description
Book SynopsisBy tracing the history of Yudahua from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, this study analyzes a successful inland business model among textile companies in modern China. The steady growth of this enterprise relied primarily on its strategy to focus on low-end markets to locate new mills in underdeveloped interior regions. This strategy further allowed the enterprise to pioneer industrialization in its host localities, demonstrating a major social and economic impact on the local societies. At the same time, Yudahua's unique team leadership patternfive leading families shared its ownership and managementmade the business an atypical family firm and allowed relatively easy institutional departure from Chinese social networks and adoption of Western corporate hierarchy. Therefore, by the late 1940s, Yudahua had gradually developed into a fairly integrated business group with a unified management structure and routinized connections between its member mills
Trade ReviewPeng’s study of Yudahua extends recent work on Chinese business history by focusing on entrepreneurs whose business structure foreshadows reform-era corporate groups, and who—like Huawei’s current leaders—honed their commercial and technical skills by developing markets in China’s inland regions. -- Thomas G. Rawski, University of Pittsburgh
Table of ContentsChapter 1: From the Hubei Textile Bureau to the Chuxing Company: The Self-Strengthening Legacy of China’s Early Industrialization Chapter 2: Managers and Technocrats: The Top Management Team Chapter 3: Daxing and Yuhua: One Business in Two Localities, 1921-1931 Chapter 4: Yudahua: The Rise of a Business Group during the 1930s and 1940s Chapter 5: From the Japanese Occupation to the Communist Liberation: The Transformation in the Late 1940s and Early 1950s Chapter 6: Revisit the Wartime Legacy: Workers’ Welfare before and after 1949
