This panel examines two centuries of collaboration and conflict between businesses and businesspeople in China and the United States. By examining their financial, commercial, political and intellectual interactions across shifting political eras, this panel highlights the importance of business collaboration and the impact of uncollaborative moments in the making of China-U.S. relations.
Dan Du, Dael Norwood, and Zhaojin Zeng place business cooperation within the wider political environment. Du examines how the engagement of Chinese and American merchants in Asia’s secondary monetary market aggravated the silver drain of China and prompted the Qing government’s crackdown on opium smuggling, conflicts which eventually led to the British-Chinese Opium War in 1839. Norwood investigates the impact of an attempted cooperation between the U.S. government and U.S. merchants on their collaboration with China. In the late 1870s, the American firm of Olyphant & Co. worked with the U.S. government to reestablished a traffic in Chinese laborers to Peru. Chinese officials’ opposition brought the scheme (and the firm) to ruin and ended Americans’ cooperation with Asian authorities in the passenger business. Zeng explores ground-level business collaboration in one of the most politically dynamic environments. Despite the U.S.-China political split during the 1980s, individual businesspeople’s interactions helped to not only rehabilitate the diplomatic collaborations between the two countries but also reshape the post-Cold-War global economy. Shifting the focus from the political to intellectual contexts, Peter Hamilton investigates an indirect collaboration in the form of cross-pollination between Chinese and U.S. business cultures in the early twentieth century. After graduating from the University of Illinois and Texas A&M University, the industrialist Mu Xiangyue introduced Taylorism to China and implemented these ideas in his cotton spinning mills. Mu’s case shows how American higher education and the Progressive-era vision of an industrial utopia helped to shape Republican-era Chinese capitalism.