No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Marketing the Multinational in Shenbao, Shanghai, 1872–1889
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 October 2022
Abstract
Foreign multinational enterprises (MNEs) operating in China, especially during the nineteenth century, have attracted less interest from historians than Chinese firms and expatriate merchant houses. However, in this period, MNEs shaped advertising in Shenbao, China’s most vital modern Chinese-language newspaper. Through our examination of the advertisements they placed during the newspaper’s first phase of publication, 1872–1889, we argue that MNEs were more significant to the history of business in China than heretofore recognized. We contend that they influenced Chinese print media advertising by pioneering product differentiation and branding in this newspaper. They did so, we suggest, because this approach to marketing, which differed from those used by most other foreign and Chinese domestic advertisers, provided a competitive advantage to overcome their liability of foreignness, and was facilitated by their global reach in the form of knowledge flows from offshore bases to onshore branches.
Keywords
- Type
- Article
- Information
- Copyright
- © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.
References
Bibliography of Works Cited
Bickers, Robert. China Bound: John Swire & Sons and Its World, 1816–1980. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.Google Scholar
Boyce, Gordon, and Ville, Simon. The Development of Modern Business. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002.Google Scholar
Butterfield & Swire, 1867–1957
(A Short History Reprinted from the Blue Funnel Bulletin of Jan. 1957). London: Butterfield & Swire, 1957.Google Scholar
Chandler, Alfred DuPont Jr. and Hikino, Takashi. Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Cochran, Sherman. Big Business in China: Sino–Foreign Rivalry in the Cigarette Industry, 1890–1930. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.Google Scholar
Cochran, Sherman. Encountering Chinese Networks: Western, Japanese, and Chinese Corporations in China, 1880–1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Connell, Carol Matheson. A Business in Risk: Jardine Matheson and the Hong Kong Trading Industry. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004.Google Scholar
da Silva Lopes, Teresa. Global Brands: The Evolution of Multinationals in Alcoholic Beverages. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Dikötter, Frank. Things Modern: Material Culture and Everyday Life in China. London: Hurst & Company, 2007.Google Scholar
Fairbank, John King. Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports, 1842–1854. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953.Google Scholar
Fitzgerald, Robert. The Rise of the Global Company: Multinationals and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Fox, Stephen. The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1984.Google Scholar
Grace, Richard J. Opium and Empire: The Lives and Careers of William Jardine and James Matheson. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Michael. British Trade and the Opening of China. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1951.Google Scholar
Imperial Maritime Customs. Decennial Reports, 1892–1901. Southern Ports, vol. 2. Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs, 1906.Google Scholar
Jardine, Matheson & Company
… an Historical Sketch. Hong Kong: Jardine, Matheson & Co., 1960.Google Scholar
Jones, Geoffrey G. Merchants to Multinationals: British Trading Companies in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Laing, Ellen Johnston. Selling Happiness: Calendar Posters and Visual Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Le Pichon, Alain, ed. China Trade and Empire: Jardine, Matheson & Co. and the Origins of British Rule in Hong Kong, 1827–1843. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Liu, Kwang-Ching. Anglo-American Steamship Rivalry in China, 1862–1874. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962.Google Scholar
Lockwood, Stephen. C. Augustine Heard and Company, 1858–1862: American Merchants in China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.Google Scholar
Mittler, Barbara. A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity, and Change in Shanghai’s News Media, 1872–1912. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Pelcovits, Nathan Albert. Old China Hands and the Foreign Office. New York: King’s Crown Press, 1948.Google Scholar
Sassoon, Joseph. The Global Merchants: The Enterprise and Extravagance of the Sassoon Dynasty. London: Penguin Books, 2022.Google Scholar
Sivulka, Juliann. Soap, Sex, and Cigarettes: A Cultural History of American Advertising. Boston: Wadsworth, 2012.Google Scholar
Tsai, Weipin. Reading Shenbao: Nationalism, Consumerism and Individuality in China, 1919–37. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.Google Scholar
Wilkins, Mira. The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from the Colonial Era to 1914. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970.Google Scholar
Alfaro, Laura, Bao, Cathy Ge, Chen, Maggie X., Hong, Junjie, and Steinwender, Claudia. “Omnia Juncta in Uno: Foreign Powers and Trademark Protection in Shanghai’s Concession Era.” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series, 29721, February 2022. http://www.nber.org/papers/w29721.Google Scholar
Armand, Cécile. “The Grapes of Happiness: Selling Sun-Maid Raisins to the Chinese in the 1920s–1930s.” Asia Pacific Perspectives (Fall–Winter 2015): 49–82.Google Scholar
Bonin, Hubert. “A Leading French Trade House in China: Olivier (1900s–1930s).” Business History (June 2020). doi: 10.1080/00076791.2020.1772760.Google Scholar
Cochran, Sherman. “Marketing Medicine and Advertising Dreams in China, 1900–1950.” In Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond, 1900–1950, edited by Yeh, Wen-hsin, 62–97. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Cox, Howard. “Learning to Do Business in China: The Evolution of BAT’s Cigarette Distribution Network, 1902–41.” Business History 39, no. 3 (1997): 30–64.Google Scholar
Cox, Howard, Biao, Huang, and Metcalfe, Stuart. “Compradors, Firm Architecture and the ‘Reinvention’ of British Trading Companies: John Swire & Sons’ Operations in Early Twentieth-Century China.” Business History 45, no. 2 (April 2003): 15–34.Google Scholar
da Silva Lopes, Teresa, and Casson, Mark. “Brand Protection and the Globalization of British Business.” Business History Review 86 (Summer 2012): 287–310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Donzé, Pierre-Yves. “Multinational Enterprises and the Globalization of Medicine: Siemens and the Business of X-ray Equipment in Non-Western Markets, 1900–1939.” Enterprise & Society 15, no. 4 (December 2014): 820–848.Google Scholar
DuBois, Thomas David. “Branding and Retail Strategy in the Condensed Milk Trade: Borden and Nestlé in East Asia, 1870–1929.” Business History (November 2019). doi: 10.1080/00076791.2019.1688302.Google Scholar
Hang, Haiming, and Godley, Andrew. “Revisiting the Psychic Distance Paradox: International Retailing in China in the Long Run (1840–2005).” Business History 51, no. 3 (May 2009): 383–400.Google Scholar
Lan, Xu. “Shenbao guanggao yanjiu chengguo de zai yanjiu” [A review of research on Shenbao advertising]. Xibuguangbodianshi 42, no. 7 (June 2021): 53–56.Google Scholar
Lean, Eugenia. “Making the Chinese Copycat: Trademarks and Recipes in Early Twentieth-Century Global Science and Capitalism.” Osiris 33, no. 1 (2018): 271–293.Google Scholar
Lin, Shengdong, van den Hoven, Paul, and Zhang, Yiqiong. “Global Advertising Adaptation for Chinese Consumers in the Early 20th Century: A Semiotic Approach.” Signs & Media 16 (Spring 2018): 84–107.Google Scholar
Mittler, Barbara. “Gendered Advertising in China: What History Do Images Tell?” European Journal of East Asian Studies 6, no. 1 (June 2007): 13–41.Google Scholar
Mittler, Barbara. “Imagined Communities Divided: Reading Visual Regimes in Shanghai’s Newspaper Advertising (1860s–1910s).” In Visualising China, 1845–1965: Moving and Still Images in Historical Narratives, edited by Henriot, Christian and Yeh, Wen-hsin, 267–378. Leiden, NL: Brill, 2013.Google Scholar
Mizuno, Hiromi, and Prodöhl, Ines. “Mitsui Bussan and the Manchurian Soybean Trade: Geopolitics and Economic Strategies in China’s Northeast, ca. 1870s–1920s.” Business History (December 2019). doi: 10.1080/00076791.2019.1687688.Google Scholar
Moazzin, Ghassan. “Networks of Capital: German Bankers and the Financial Internationalisation of China (1885–1919).” Enterprise & Society 20, no. 4 (December 2019): 796–808.Google Scholar
Motono, Eiichi. “Anglo-Japanese Trademark Conflict in China and the Birth of the Chinese Trademark Law (1923), 1906–26.” East Asian History 37 (December 2011): 9–26.Google Scholar
Nachum, Lilach. “The Liability of Foreignness.” In The Wiley Encyclopedia of Management. Vol 6, International Management, edited by Vodosek, Markus and den Hartog, Deanne. Hoboken. NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2015. doi: 10.1002/9781118785317.weom060134.Google Scholar
Shang, Zixiang. “Shenbao guanggao zhan zhong de zhishi chanquan jiufen: Hukaiwen neibu ‘xiu tun zhi zheng’” [Intellectual property disputes in Shenbao advertising: Hukaiwen’s internal dispute over Xiutun]. Huangshanxueyuanxuebao 23, no. 1 (February 2021): 1–8.Google Scholar
Smith, Carl. T. “The German Speaking Community in Hong Kong, 1846–1918.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch 34 (1994): 1–55.Google Scholar
Tsay, Alice. “From Schenectady to Shanghai: Dr Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People and the Hybrid Pathways of Chinese Modernity.” In Progress and Pathology: Medicine and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Dickson, Melissa, Taylor-Brown, Emilie, Shuttleworth, Sally, 247–268. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2020.Google Scholar
Wagner, Rudolf G. “The Free Flow of Communication between High and Low: The Shenbao as Platform for Yangwu Discussions on Political Reform, 1872–1895.” T’oung Pao 104, no. 1-3 (2018): 116–188.Google Scholar
Wang, Jian. “From Four Hundred Million to More than One Billion Consumers: A Brief History of the Foreign Advertising Industry in China.” International Journal of Advertising 16, no. 4 (1997): 241–260.Google Scholar
Wilkins, Mira. “Impacts of American Multinational Enterprise.” In America’s China Trade in Historical Perspective: The Chinese and American Performance, edited by May, Ernest R. and Fairbank, John K., 259–292. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Wong, Hoi-to. “Interport Printing Enterprise: Macanese Printing Networks in Chinese Treaty Ports.” In Treaty Ports in Modern China: Law, Land and Power, edited by Bickers, Robert and Jackson, Isabella, 139–157. London: Routledge, 2016.Google Scholar
Xia, Chenxiao. “Foreign Direct Investment in China’s Electrification: Between Colonialism and Nationalism, 1882–1952.” Enterprise & Society 22, no. 1 (March 2021): 1–43.Google Scholar
Zelin, Madeleine. “Chinese Business Practice in the Late Imperial Period.” Enterprise & Society 14, no. 4 (December 2013): 769–793.Google Scholar
Zhao, Xin, and Belk, Russell W.. “Advertising Consumer Culture in 1930s Shanghai: Globalization and Localization in Yuefenpai.” Journal of Advertising 37, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 45–56.Google Scholar
Shenbao [Shanghai], 1872–1889.Google Scholar
Bickers, Robert. China Bound: John Swire & Sons and Its World, 1816–1980. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.Google Scholar
Boyce, Gordon, and Ville, Simon. The Development of Modern Business. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002.Google Scholar
Butterfield & Swire, 1867–1957
(A Short History Reprinted from the Blue Funnel Bulletin of Jan. 1957). London: Butterfield & Swire, 1957.Google Scholar
Chandler, Alfred DuPont Jr. and Hikino, Takashi. Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Cochran, Sherman. Big Business in China: Sino–Foreign Rivalry in the Cigarette Industry, 1890–1930. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.Google Scholar
Cochran, Sherman. Encountering Chinese Networks: Western, Japanese, and Chinese Corporations in China, 1880–1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Connell, Carol Matheson. A Business in Risk: Jardine Matheson and the Hong Kong Trading Industry. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004.Google Scholar
da Silva Lopes, Teresa. Global Brands: The Evolution of Multinationals in Alcoholic Beverages. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Dikötter, Frank. Things Modern: Material Culture and Everyday Life in China. London: Hurst & Company, 2007.Google Scholar
Fairbank, John King. Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports, 1842–1854. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953.Google Scholar
Fitzgerald, Robert. The Rise of the Global Company: Multinationals and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Fox, Stephen. The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1984.Google Scholar
Grace, Richard J. Opium and Empire: The Lives and Careers of William Jardine and James Matheson. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Michael. British Trade and the Opening of China. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1951.Google Scholar
Imperial Maritime Customs. Decennial Reports, 1892–1901. Southern Ports, vol. 2. Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs, 1906.Google Scholar
Jardine, Matheson & Company
… an Historical Sketch. Hong Kong: Jardine, Matheson & Co., 1960.Google Scholar
Jones, Geoffrey G. Merchants to Multinationals: British Trading Companies in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Laing, Ellen Johnston. Selling Happiness: Calendar Posters and Visual Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Le Pichon, Alain, ed. China Trade and Empire: Jardine, Matheson & Co. and the Origins of British Rule in Hong Kong, 1827–1843. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Liu, Kwang-Ching. Anglo-American Steamship Rivalry in China, 1862–1874. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962.Google Scholar
Lockwood, Stephen. C. Augustine Heard and Company, 1858–1862: American Merchants in China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.Google Scholar
Mittler, Barbara. A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity, and Change in Shanghai’s News Media, 1872–1912. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Pelcovits, Nathan Albert. Old China Hands and the Foreign Office. New York: King’s Crown Press, 1948.Google Scholar
Sassoon, Joseph. The Global Merchants: The Enterprise and Extravagance of the Sassoon Dynasty. London: Penguin Books, 2022.Google Scholar
Sivulka, Juliann. Soap, Sex, and Cigarettes: A Cultural History of American Advertising. Boston: Wadsworth, 2012.Google Scholar
Tsai, Weipin. Reading Shenbao: Nationalism, Consumerism and Individuality in China, 1919–37. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.Google Scholar
Wilkins, Mira. The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from the Colonial Era to 1914. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970.Google Scholar
Alfaro, Laura, Bao, Cathy Ge, Chen, Maggie X., Hong, Junjie, and Steinwender, Claudia. “Omnia Juncta in Uno: Foreign Powers and Trademark Protection in Shanghai’s Concession Era.” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series, 29721, February 2022. http://www.nber.org/papers/w29721.Google Scholar
Armand, Cécile. “The Grapes of Happiness: Selling Sun-Maid Raisins to the Chinese in the 1920s–1930s.” Asia Pacific Perspectives (Fall–Winter 2015): 49–82.Google Scholar
Bonin, Hubert. “A Leading French Trade House in China: Olivier (1900s–1930s).” Business History (June 2020). doi: 10.1080/00076791.2020.1772760.Google Scholar
Cochran, Sherman. “Marketing Medicine and Advertising Dreams in China, 1900–1950.” In Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond, 1900–1950, edited by Yeh, Wen-hsin, 62–97. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Cox, Howard. “Learning to Do Business in China: The Evolution of BAT’s Cigarette Distribution Network, 1902–41.” Business History 39, no. 3 (1997): 30–64.Google Scholar
Cox, Howard, Biao, Huang, and Metcalfe, Stuart. “Compradors, Firm Architecture and the ‘Reinvention’ of British Trading Companies: John Swire & Sons’ Operations in Early Twentieth-Century China.” Business History 45, no. 2 (April 2003): 15–34.Google Scholar
da Silva Lopes, Teresa, and Casson, Mark. “Brand Protection and the Globalization of British Business.” Business History Review 86 (Summer 2012): 287–310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Donzé, Pierre-Yves. “Multinational Enterprises and the Globalization of Medicine: Siemens and the Business of X-ray Equipment in Non-Western Markets, 1900–1939.” Enterprise & Society 15, no. 4 (December 2014): 820–848.Google Scholar
DuBois, Thomas David. “Branding and Retail Strategy in the Condensed Milk Trade: Borden and Nestlé in East Asia, 1870–1929.” Business History (November 2019). doi: 10.1080/00076791.2019.1688302.Google Scholar
Hang, Haiming, and Godley, Andrew. “Revisiting the Psychic Distance Paradox: International Retailing in China in the Long Run (1840–2005).” Business History 51, no. 3 (May 2009): 383–400.Google Scholar
Lan, Xu. “Shenbao guanggao yanjiu chengguo de zai yanjiu” [A review of research on Shenbao advertising]. Xibuguangbodianshi 42, no. 7 (June 2021): 53–56.Google Scholar
Lean, Eugenia. “Making the Chinese Copycat: Trademarks and Recipes in Early Twentieth-Century Global Science and Capitalism.” Osiris 33, no. 1 (2018): 271–293.Google Scholar
Lin, Shengdong, van den Hoven, Paul, and Zhang, Yiqiong. “Global Advertising Adaptation for Chinese Consumers in the Early 20th Century: A Semiotic Approach.” Signs & Media 16 (Spring 2018): 84–107.Google Scholar
Mittler, Barbara. “Gendered Advertising in China: What History Do Images Tell?” European Journal of East Asian Studies 6, no. 1 (June 2007): 13–41.Google Scholar
Mittler, Barbara. “Imagined Communities Divided: Reading Visual Regimes in Shanghai’s Newspaper Advertising (1860s–1910s).” In Visualising China, 1845–1965: Moving and Still Images in Historical Narratives, edited by Henriot, Christian and Yeh, Wen-hsin, 267–378. Leiden, NL: Brill, 2013.Google Scholar
Mizuno, Hiromi, and Prodöhl, Ines. “Mitsui Bussan and the Manchurian Soybean Trade: Geopolitics and Economic Strategies in China’s Northeast, ca. 1870s–1920s.” Business History (December 2019). doi: 10.1080/00076791.2019.1687688.Google Scholar
Moazzin, Ghassan. “Networks of Capital: German Bankers and the Financial Internationalisation of China (1885–1919).” Enterprise & Society 20, no. 4 (December 2019): 796–808.Google Scholar
Motono, Eiichi. “Anglo-Japanese Trademark Conflict in China and the Birth of the Chinese Trademark Law (1923), 1906–26.” East Asian History 37 (December 2011): 9–26.Google Scholar
Nachum, Lilach. “The Liability of Foreignness.” In The Wiley Encyclopedia of Management. Vol 6, International Management, edited by Vodosek, Markus and den Hartog, Deanne. Hoboken. NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2015. doi: 10.1002/9781118785317.weom060134.Google Scholar
Shang, Zixiang. “Shenbao guanggao zhan zhong de zhishi chanquan jiufen: Hukaiwen neibu ‘xiu tun zhi zheng’” [Intellectual property disputes in Shenbao advertising: Hukaiwen’s internal dispute over Xiutun]. Huangshanxueyuanxuebao 23, no. 1 (February 2021): 1–8.Google Scholar
Smith, Carl. T. “The German Speaking Community in Hong Kong, 1846–1918.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch 34 (1994): 1–55.Google Scholar
Tsay, Alice. “From Schenectady to Shanghai: Dr Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People and the Hybrid Pathways of Chinese Modernity.” In Progress and Pathology: Medicine and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Dickson, Melissa, Taylor-Brown, Emilie, Shuttleworth, Sally, 247–268. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2020.Google Scholar
Wagner, Rudolf G. “The Free Flow of Communication between High and Low: The Shenbao as Platform for Yangwu Discussions on Political Reform, 1872–1895.” T’oung Pao 104, no. 1-3 (2018): 116–188.Google Scholar
Wang, Jian. “From Four Hundred Million to More than One Billion Consumers: A Brief History of the Foreign Advertising Industry in China.” International Journal of Advertising 16, no. 4 (1997): 241–260.Google Scholar
Wilkins, Mira. “Impacts of American Multinational Enterprise.” In America’s China Trade in Historical Perspective: The Chinese and American Performance, edited by May, Ernest R. and Fairbank, John K., 259–292. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Wong, Hoi-to. “Interport Printing Enterprise: Macanese Printing Networks in Chinese Treaty Ports.” In Treaty Ports in Modern China: Law, Land and Power, edited by Bickers, Robert and Jackson, Isabella, 139–157. London: Routledge, 2016.Google Scholar
Xia, Chenxiao. “Foreign Direct Investment in China’s Electrification: Between Colonialism and Nationalism, 1882–1952.” Enterprise & Society 22, no. 1 (March 2021): 1–43.Google Scholar
Zelin, Madeleine. “Chinese Business Practice in the Late Imperial Period.” Enterprise & Society 14, no. 4 (December 2013): 769–793.Google Scholar
Zhao, Xin, and Belk, Russell W.. “Advertising Consumer Culture in 1930s Shanghai: Globalization and Localization in Yuefenpai.” Journal of Advertising 37, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 45–56.Google Scholar
Shenbao [Shanghai], 1872–1889.Google Scholar