Abstract

"Funny Business: Toys as Trans-Pacific Business History"

Connor Ka Hei Au Yeung, Purdue University (cauyeun@purdue.edu)

This paper intends to articulate a part of a standing research project on the material culture of toys in postwar East Asia, from the Cold War until now. Traditionally viewed as objects intended for entertainment, East Asian intellectuals embarked upon utilising toys as a tool to instil political, scientific and physical strength within its youth across different regimes since the late 19th Century. Japanese dominance of light industry in East Asian trade, coupled with Sino-Japanese political rivalry, made toys a contentious material object of economic, political and ideological competition.

The end of the Second World War signalled a radical shift in East Asian business landscape. Outbound refugees from mainland China escaping civil war, market vacuum created due to wartime destruction wrought on Japanese manufacturing capacity, and a surge of American capital and demand for light industrial goods, created the perfect conditions for building light industry, such as manufacture of toys in Hong Kong. While extant studies have studied Hong Kong toys through lenses of cultural and social history, Hong Kong toy manufacturers’ relationships with American toy companies remain less studied. This paper intends to examine the relationship of American and southbound Chinese capital in establishing Hong Kong’s toy manufacturing capacity during the Cold War, and the significance of Hong Kong-manufactured toys in North American markets, introduced through American toy importation.