Tradition and Change in the Chinese Business Enterprise

Abstract

Until the recent emergence of a thriving economy along the China coast and among communities of Chinese diaspora all over the Pacific Rim, the history of Chinese business and entrepreneurship had received scant scholarly attention. The new interest, however, has also generated a great deal of confusing interpretations because so many of the successful Chinese business organizations and practices in contemporary East Asia do not seem to conform to Western or Japanese models. Moreover, Chinese traditional business ideology and institutions are often considered unprogressively clannish, lacking in the transformative power of entrepreneurship as well as in the spirit of communal trust. This contrasts rather sharply with the state of the field of business history in the United States, where it is far more developed and recognized. Thus, the history of the rise of large-scale, multi-unit, and professionally managed corporations from modest beginnings, as well as their crucial impact on the American economy, are justly celebrated through the influential works of Alfred D. Chandler and others. And, in 1993, the Nobel Prize in economics went to two other senior practitioners in the field, Douglass C. North and Robert W. Fogel.1