The Yudahua Business Group In China S Early Industrialization

By 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 and 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 pattern—five leading families shared its ownership and management—made 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, which differed noticeably from the loose alliances normally found in other early twentieth-century Chinese business conglomerates.

Ground-breaking new interpretation of the collapse of Chiang Kai-shek's government addressing why the Nationalists lost China's civil war in 1949.

Considers the 'late industrialisation' of China, showing how government policies have encouraged the development of 120 'national champions', and how these compete with multinational enterprises.

This study focuses on China's state and agricultural economy, in the basic time range of the Opium War of the 1840s through 1948, the eve of the Communist government.

Winner, 2024 Geiss-Hsu Book Prize for Best First Book, Society for Ming Studies The goddess Guanyin began in India as the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, originally a male deity. He gradually became indigenized as a female deity in China over the span of nearly a millennium. By the Ming (1358–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) periods, Guanyin had become the most popular female deity in China. In Becoming Guanyin, Yuhang Li examines how lay Buddhist women in late imperial China forged a connection with the subject of their devotion, arguing that women used their own bodies to echo that of Guanyin. Li focuses on the power of material things to enable women to access religious experience and transcendence. In particular, she examines how secular Buddhist women expressed mimetic devotion and pursued religious salvation through creative depictions of Guanyin in different media such as painting and embroidery and through bodily portrayals of the deity using jewelry and dance. These material displays expressed a worldview that differed from yet fit within the Confucian patriarchal system. Attending to the fabrication and use of “women’s things” by secular women, Li offers new insight into the relationships between worshipped and worshipper in Buddhist practice. Combining empirical research with theoretical insights from both art history and Buddhist studies, Becoming Guanyin is a field-changing analysis that reveals the interplay between material culture, religion, and their gendered transformations.

The modern histories of China and Japan are inexorably intertwined. Their relationship is perhaps most obvious in the fields of political, economic, and military history, but it is no less true in cultural and art history. Yet the traffic in artistic practices and practitioners between China and Japan remains an understudied field. In this volume, an international group of scholars investigates Japan’s impact on Chinese art from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1930s. Individual essays address a range of perspectives, including the work of individual Chinese and Japanese painters, calligraphers, and sculptors, as well as artistic associations, international exhibitions, the collotype production or artwork, and the emergence of a modern canon.