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The Yudahua Business Group in China's Early Industrialization

Juanjuan Peng

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.

Lexington Books

Pages: 206 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9

978-1-4985-0701-1 • Hardback • March 2020 • $111.00 • (£85.00)

978-1-4985-0702-8 • eBook • March 2020 • $45.00 • (£35.00)

Subjects: History / Asia / China, Business & Economics / Corporate & Business History

The Yudahua Business Group in China's Early Industrialization

Hardback

eBook

Summary

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.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 206 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9

978-1-4985-0701-1 • Hardback • March 2020 • $111.00 • (£85.00)

978-1-4985-0702-8 • eBook • March 2020 • $45.00 • (£35.00)

Subjects: History / Asia / China, Business & Economics / Corporate & Business History

Author

Juanjuan Peng is associate professor of history at Georgia Southern University.

Table of Contents

Chapter 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

Reviews

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

The Yudahua Business Group in China's Early Industrialization

Juanjuan Peng

The Yudahua Business Group in China's Early Industrialization

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