During the past four decades of China’s rapid economic growth, the electrical and electronics industries have taken center stage.1) Chinese companies like Haier have become global leaders in the manufacturing of electrical goods and Shenzhen—once a small town of only around 30,000 inhabitants—is now home to the world’s largest market for electronic components (Tse 2015; Nylander 2017; Vogel 2017). China’s electrical and electronics industries have become a major part of the Chinese manufacturing sector, which in turn is a major contributor to China’s GDP. The two industries are not only the two largest industries in terms of exports, but the domestic market for electrical and electronic appliances has also been growing rapidly, and China has become a leading consumer market for electrical and electronic appliances (Kimura 2014, 38–42; Hong Kong Trade Development Council 2015). At the same time, the Chinese electrical and electronic industries are at the center of the current trade war between the United States and China and Chinese electronics companies, such as Huawei, have been accused of technology theft. (Wall Street Journal 2018; South China Morning Post 2019; The Times 2019).
However, despite the important role the Chinese electrical and electronics industries play in the Chinese economy and international economic relations and the growth of China as a market for electrical products, we still know very little about the historical development of these industries. As Simon Partner (1999) has shown in the case of Japanese electrical goods manufacturing and consumption, an understanding of the historical origins of industries and consumption patterns is crucial for comprehending their later development trajectory. The aim of the proposed study is thus to provide this crucial historical background for the Chinese electrical and electronics industries by reconstructing their history and intersection with the market for electrical goods in pre-WWII China. It will do so by investigating how first foreign multinational companies and then new Chinese electrical and electronics firms introduced, marketed and sold electrical and electronic products in China between the late 19th century and the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, the period in which electrical goods first entered China and were first sold by Chinese businesses and used by Chinese consumers. This investigation will not only entail exploring the business history of the Chinese electrical and electronics industries, but also studying how Chinese consumers began to use electrical goods and a consumer market for these products thus developed in China. More broadly, the study will also shed light on the role the two industries played in modern Chinese economic development and the country’s interaction with the global economy of the 19th and 20th centuries. Better comprehension of the historical development of the Chinese electrical and electronics industries will also improve our ability to understand the current development and future trajectory of those industries in China.
The primary subject of this study will be the business history of the electrical and electronics industries in modern China, building on my previous work on Chinese business history, the history of multinational enterprises in modern China, Sino-foreign business networks and interactions, and modern China’s connection to the global economy (Moazzin 2015, 2017 and 2019). Previous studies that have explored the electrification of modern China have done so mainly from the perspective of the supply of electrical power and the establishment of an electrical power grid (Wright 1991; Kanemura 1993; Kirby 2000; Huang 2006; Tajima 2008; Chen 2014; Yang 2014). Accordingly, when they have touched upon the role of business in electrification, they have focused primarily on the electrical power industry and power plants. This is also the case in the most recent study of electricity in modern China by Ying Jia Tan (2015). Although he discusses the manufacturing of electrical equipment in wartime Kunming between 1937 and 1943 in one of his chapters, he does not cover the electrical and electronics manufacturing industries before 1937, and overall also focuses on the electrical power industry and electrical power supply during the Sino-Japanese War and the early People’s Republic of China (PRC).
To date, only one major study has focused more broadly on the electrical and electronics industries and the production of electrical goods in modern China (Zhongguo dianqi gongye fazhan shi bianji weiyuanhui 1989a, 1989b, 1990a, 1990b, 1995). However, while this collaborative work of Chinese historians commissioned by the Chinese government provides useful basic information on the development of the two industries, it ultimately remains superficial, touching only in passing upon such issues as business strategy or adaptation, and it is also not based on archival research. For the period before 1949, it also focuses primarily on private enterprise and only briefly covers the role that multinationals and the Nationalist government’s state enterprises played in the development of the electrical and electronics industries. Finally, the study focuses on the post-1949 period and mainly uses its depiction of the two industries’ pre-1949 development as a foil for its investigation of the history of the electrical and electronics industries in the PRC. In contrast, the proposed research project will produce the first archival-based in-depth study of the electrical and electronics industries in preWWII China that takes into equal account the contributions that foreign multinationals, Chinese private companies and the state-run enterprises run by the Nationalist government made to the growth of those industries.
The proposed research project will provide the first in-depth, comprehensive examination of the history of the electrical and electronics industries in pre-WWII China by looking at the development and mutual interaction of the foreign businesses and private and state-run Chinese companies involved in the manufacture and sale of electrical goods. Thereby, it will make a crucial contribution to the business history of modern China: It will both specifically shed light on the hitherto largely neglected business history of these two industries and, more broadly, add an important new case study to our understanding of the development of modern Chinese business institutions and Chinese capitalism as previously explored by historians such as Elisabeth Köll (2003) and David Faure (2006). Furthermore, this study will also reveal the role the electrical and electronics industries played in China’s pre-WWII economic development, which has so far been understudied (e.g. Rawski 1989).
The proposed study will also engage with and contribute to the larger literature on the global history of business and the role of businesses in global electrification and the transfer and diffusion of technology. In a seminal article, Mira Wilkins (1974) pointed out the significance of private firms for the global spread of technology. She particularly stressed that a proper diffusion of technology only can be said to have occurred once indigenous firms can independently reproduce a certain technology. Thus “one must not only study the holders of technology as vehicles of diffusion but also the receivers of technology.” (Wilkins 1974, 188). Since then, the transfer and diffusion of technology have remained core issues in the field of business history. In particular, historians have stressed the need for detailed studies that reconstruct the role that firms and other actors played in the international transfer of electrical and other technologies (Nishimura and Donzé 2014). In recent years, scholars have also specifically begun to study and stress the important role played by multinational enterprises in the spread of electricity around the globe (Wilkins et al. 2008).
However, despite this interest of business historians in the global diffusion of electrical and other technology, the role that both foreign and Chinese firms played in spreading electrification in pre-1937 China is so far largely missing from the picture. With the exception of Baark’s (1997) study of the transfer of telegraph technology in 19th-century China, the few other studies that focus on technology transfer in prewar China have neglected electrical goods (Brown 1979; Chang 1993). Moreover, the limited number of studies that have traced the history of foreign electrical companies in China (Mielmann 1984; Voigt 2010; Mutz 2011) have done so mainly from the internal perspective of the multinational firms and their internationalization, largely neglecting—in part due to their lack of use of Chinese primary sources—the Chinese perspective on the role of these foreign electrical companies and their interaction with Chinese actors, as well as the larger role played by these multinationals in the development of the electrical and electronics industries in modern China. In-depth studies of private and state-run Chinese electrical businesses are so far absent from the literature. Accordingly, we particularly lack an understanding of how electrical technology was initially received by Chinese companies. The proposed study will address these gaps in the broader business history literature by providing a comprehensive analysis of the historical development of the electrical and electronics industries in modern China that accords equal weight to foreign and indigenous businesses and adds the important case and perspective of modern China to our understanding of the role of business in technology transfer and diffusion and the global business history of electrification more generally.
Besides its contributions to the field of business history, the project will also make important contributions to the history of technology and consumption in modern China. Scholars of the history of technology and technology studies have emphasized the importance of shifting our focus from innovation and production of technology to the interaction between society and technology and the use and consumption of technology (Edgerton 1999; Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003). Those studying the history of technology in China have more recently also advocated for a similar emphasis on the use of technology (Schäfer 2012; Bray 2017). Although this new trend in the literature has produced several important studies on the use and consumption of electricity in the West (Schivelbusch 1988; Nye 1990; Gooday 2008), no similar study exists so far for modern China. Studies of the history of telecommunications in modern China have mainly adopted the perspective of politics and Sino-foreign relations and have also largely focused on the telegraph (Ahvenainen 1981; Youdianshi bianjishi 1984; Baark 1997, Chiba 2006; Wei 2019). Studies on the history of Chinese consumption (Cochran 1999, Gerth 2003, Cochran 2009) have if at all only touched upon the consumption of electrical goods in passing. A notable exception is Frank Dikötter’s (2007) pioneering study of material culture in modern China, which covers the use of newly introduced electrical goods in modern China to a certain extent, though only among many other topics. More recently, Jiang Hong (2013) has specifically studied the radio in Republican-era Shanghai from the perspective of material culture. However, she provides only a brief overview of the manufacture and sale of radios, and her analysis of the radio’s impact on daily life is largely limited to the perspective of the radio broadcasters. More generally, her study lacks depth, as it is only based on a very limited number of sources made up primarily of newspaper articles. Thus, in sum, we still lack a thorough, more comprehensive understanding of how electrical goods were first perceived, used and consumed by Chinese consumers.
By not only studying the business history of the modern Chinese electrical and electronics industries, but also their intersection with the Chinese market for and Chinese consumers of these products, the proposed study will seek to fill this gap in the scholarly literature. It will use several case studies of electrical goods to examine how Chinese consumers used those goods and how the specific uses of the goods in turn shaped the marketing and sales strategies of Chinese electrical companies. First, the study will investigate how electrical lighting was used to produce artificial light for public spaces such as the Shanghai Bund, commercial establishments such as department stores or night clubs, and the private home. Second, it will examine how foreign and Chinese businesses contributed to the electrification of urban transport, particularly through the establishment of electric trams, and how such new forms of transport changed urban life. Third, the study will investigate how telephones and radios were marketed to customers in China and how these new forms of communication changed the daily life of Chinese consumers. Finally, given that Chinese electrical imports included significant amounts of electrical medical equipment (Miehlmann 1984), the study will shed light on how new electrical tools and machinery changed medical treatment in modern China. Taken together, my examination of the reception and use and consumption of different forms of electrical technology will greatly improve our understanding of the role that electricity has played in the history of technology and consumption in modern China.
- Electrical equipment manufactured by the electrical industry is equipment that converts electrical energy into other forms of energy, such as heat, light or movement. Electronic equipment manufactured by the electronics industry uses electricity to communicate information (Kohama 2007). Examples of electrical equipment that this research project will discuss are electric heaters, fans and electric lighting, whereas examples of electronic equipment that will be discussed are the telephone and radio. I use the terms “electrical goods” and “electrical products” to refer to electrical and electronic products in general (Simon Partner [1999] also uses the term “electrical goods” as a somewhat similar umbrella term). Although the electrical industry is sometimes taken to include the electrical power industry and electricity supply (e.g. Byatt 1979; Tan 2015), the proposed study does not follow this inclusion and refers separately to the electrical power industry.