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Chinese Capitalists in Japan's New Order: The Occupied Lower Yangzi, 1937-1945. By Parks M. Coble. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xvi + 296 pp. Index, notes, bibliography, maps, tables. Cloth, $60.00. ISBN 0-520-23268-2.
This is an original and pioneering study of the wartime experience of Chinese capitalists. Using extensive archival materials on individual enterprises, Coble recaptures the spirit of Chinese capitalism in an age of great turmoil and uncertainty, shedding new light on the rationale governing the activities of Chinese businessmen during the war.
The book is largely composed of case studies of individual entrepreneurs. The selection encompasses an impressive number of capitalists across a wide range of industries and trades: the Rong family, known as the "Rockefellers of China," renowned for their enormous investments in cotton textile and flour-milling industries that extended from their native Wuxi to Shanghai and beyond; the Guo brothers and the Yong'an group, famous for establishing China's first modern department stores and for their investment in textiles; Liu Guojun and other prominent entrepreneurs in the cotton textile industry in lower Yangzi delta cities, such as Nantong, Changzhou, and Wuxi; the "MSG King," Wu Yunchu, a powerhouse in the chemical industry; the "Match King," Liu Hongsheng, one of the greatest of China's "patriotic industrialists"; and, finally, a group of rubber industrialists whose companies produced items, from rubber shoes to rickshaw tires, whose brand names in some cases became household bywords in Republican China.
In his detailed profiles of these enterprises, Coble...