This panel examines two centuries of collaborations and clashes between businesses and businesspeople in China and the United States. By examining their financial, commercial, political, and intellectual connections across shifting political eras, this panel elaborates not only the importance of business collaboration throughout China-U.S. relations, but also the impact of uncollaborative moments on both countries.
The research of Dan Du, Dael Norwood, and Zhaojin Zeng places the business cooperation and conflicts within broader political contexts in China and the United States. Du examines how the collaboration between Chinese and American merchants in Asia’s secondary monetary market aggravated the silver drain on China and prompted the Qing government’s crackdown on opium, conflicts which provided another stepping stone for the First British-Chinese Opium War in 1839. Norwood examines why a proposed collaboration between American merchants in China as well as Peruvian and U.S. governments failed. The venture of the Olyphant & Co. in reestablishing a traffic in migrant laborers to South America, with the U.S.’s diplomatic support,
collapsed in the face of united opposition from Chinese and British officials, illustrating the changing business conditions U.S. firms faced abroad and the American government’s changing calculation of its global interests. Zhaojin Zeng examines individual collaborations in one of the most uncollaborative political environments during the 1980s. Individual Chinese and American businesspeople’s collaboration on local level helped to rehabilitate the diplomatic engagement between China and the United States and reshape the post-Cold-War global economy. Focusing on the intersection of intellectual and business history in the early twentieth century, Hamilton examines an example of a problematic intellectual collaboration: how a Chinese intellectual and businessman, Mu Xiangyue, transplanted a utopian idea, Taylorism, into China after graduating from the United States. Chinese reception of this idea reveals a fresh perspective of Chinese capitalism during the early twentieth century.