The Emergence of Early Modern Enterprises in China: A Case Study of Hanyeping Coal and Iron Company, Limited

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2009
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Haverford College. Department of History
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Award
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
This paper attempts to examine a number of themes of China's early industrialization through a case study of Hanyeping Coal and Iron Company, Limited. Hanyeping was the most ambitious industrial enterprise attempted in late Qing and early Republican China. Its hard birth as a government-owned mining factory, re-construction under Sheng Xuanhuai as a "official supervised and merchant managed" enterprise, then the conversion into a private-owned cooperate enterprise, and finally its ultimate failure offer us important insights to China's modern economic, social, and cultural history. Moreover, the history of Hanyeping revealed a critical transition in China's early industrialization which has been overlooked or misidentified in literature — the transformation from official-centered reforms to entrepreneur-centered reforms. This study argues that this transformation was accomplished by the emergence of entrepreneurs as a distinctive social group, the making of new business and political networks centered on prominent individual entrepreneur, and the confrontation of the entrepreneurs with political activists, working class, and foreign capitalists in the early years of Republican China. Certain important facts were overlooked in the past scholarly debate about the history of Hanyeping Company. The three existing monographs on the company exclusively focus on the failure of the company and attempts to apply certain analytical model to account for the difficulties and weakness of the company. One critical fact overlooked in this narrative is that after about fifteen years of institutional and technological reforms following its foundation, the company started to make profits in 1906, and continued to be profitable until the 1911 Revolution interrupted its production. During the First World War, despite the fact that Hanyeping was forced to sell its products in a price much lower than the market price to Japan, it was able to turn a profit totaled at 11,400,000 Mexican silver dollar in four years, as compared to the total capital of the company Tls. 11,000,000. This phenomenal gain for the company can not only be attributed by the sudden rise in the price of pig iron and steel during an international warfare but also resulted from the constant efforts of the manager of the company to raise new capital and install machines with improved productivity. Thus, the inglorious failure of Hanyeping was in fact preluded by its glorious success. This paper attempts to reveal and explain the tentative success of Hanyeping. A detailed investigation of the reforms which enabled Hanyeping to succeed shall expose to the readers an important dimension of the government-centered to entrepreneur-centered reform transition in China's early industrialization.
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