The Yudahua Business Group in China's Early Industrialization
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published:4th Mar '20
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
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.
Peng’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
Juanjuan Peng’s study of the Yudahua textile firms adds an important new chapter to our understanding of the development of China’s cotton textile industry. Unlike earlier studies which focused on family firms located in coastal regions, Peng’s study of Yudahua explores the development of an early business conglomerate, organized as a Chinese style business partnership, with factories in the interior in Wuhan, Shijiazhuang, and Xi’an. Her mastery of company archives gives us an inside picture of the operations of the firm and the management techniques it develops to deal with very different regional economic environments. Anyone interested in how Chinese business firms operate and the legacies they have left to contemporary business practices should read this book. -- Linda Grove, Sophia University
ISBN: 9781498507011
Dimensions: 229mm x 161mm x 22mm
Weight: 476g
206 pages