Spring 2007, Volume 17, No. 2
Chinese Medicine Men: Consumer Culture in China and Southeast Asia
by Sherman Cochran. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2006. x, 242 pp. $45.00.
Chinese Medicine Men provides an elegant insight into the complex, interlaced process of cultural and commercial change in modern China. Sherman Cochran takes issue with several accepted interpretations of business history in modern China, including the primacy of western international corporations in developing China’s consumer culture, Skinnerian limitations on long-distance trade, and the inhibiting effect on native business of Nationalist exactions and Japanese oppression. He argues convincingly that local entrepreneurs engaged in the marketing of western pharmaceuticals during the first half of the twentieth century successfully developed a consumer culture for western medicine in China and Southeast Asia. He supports this argument with detailed case studies that demonstrate how native businessmen adeptly blended western marketing strategies (e.g., chain stores and mixed media advertising) with traditional management methods (e.g, family businesses and native-place ties) to effectively localize foreign medicine and homogenize consumer preferences. In the process, Cochran contends, these local entrepreneurs acted as “cultural mediators,” whose advertising, stores and products helped to bridge the gap between the foreign and the familiar.
For China business history scholars, the case studies of five native pharmaceutical companies are perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this book. They provide a wealth of information on key individuals and companies engaged in production and distribution of western medicine during the early twentieth century, but more importantly, they detail how these entrepreneurs integrated western business techniques into their marketing strategies. Most fascinating were the sales networks, and extent and variety of advertising employed by these companies. The first study centered on Tangren Tang, a company that had earned the right to supply medicines to the Imperial Pharmacy. By the 1920s, it had already developed a national reputation for traditional medicines sold through a network of “Olde Yue Family” drugstores. In the second study, a more pro-active entrepreneur, Huang Chujiu, promoted his products and company through full-page newspaper ads, his Great World amusement park, and company calendars and posters featuring provocative, semi-nude women. This new visual representation of Chinese women effectively localized (Sinicized) his products by associating them with distinctly modern images – in essence, conflating occidental and oriental values.
The final two studies examine the business histories of two successful drug companies during the Japanese occupation. The first focuses on Xu Guanqun, whose New Asia Pharmaceutical Company thrived in war-time Shanghai. Through political connections with both the Japanese and Nationalist governments, extensive advertising, free clinics, and publications that appealed directly to doctors and consumers, Xu’s company maintained near normal operations throughout its markets in China and Southeast Asia. The second war-era example examines the Tiger Balm empire of Aw Boon-hwa, who advertised his trademark leaping tiger across borders and cultures via his own amusement parks, schools, and newspapers. Similar to New Asia Pharmaceutical Company, Aw protected his distribution network for Tiger Balm products through judicial political contributions and supplications to both the Chinese and the Japanese governments.
For scholars of modern China, Chinese Medicine Men suggests new approaches to the historical interpretation of this period. In particular, it provides strong evidence that native pharmaceutical companies were not severely restricted by Nationalist exactions and Japanese oppression, but rather, successfully navigated treacherous and uncertain terrain to maintain their markets. Cochran’s work indicates the need for additional research focused on native companies in other trades, which may also have flourished despite the upheavals of this turbulent period.
By Daniel Meissner
Marquette University
