Writing the history of industrial enterprises in modern China. Analysing the role of local and foreign models.

This project will focus on the emergence of China’s modern industrial enterprises. It will do so by studying the role of China’s governmental and business actors as recipients of knowledge in a number of case-studies during China’s modernization (1912-1993). The research will study the introduction of external knowledge into domestic contexts and explore the interaction between local and foreign elements. The main research question will be: How did industrial enterprises develop in the first 40 years of Reform? Which models did they implement? Which legacy (of the pre-Mao industrial experiments under Republican, Soviet, Japanese or Western influence)? Which local Chinese elements did exert an important role? The project will also study how these changes stimulated the formation of a modern Chinese business culture, analysing how reliance on technology, capitalism and market economics assimilated, integrated or marginalised traditional Chinese culture.