Chinese Medicine Men: Consumer Culture in China and Southeast Asia (review)

Given the growing integration of economies and societies around the world, many scholars have turned their attention to the meaning and implications of globalization. What are the driving forces? Who are the agents? What are the consequences? According to Cochran, a key question that emerges in the debate is whether Western-based transnational corporations have been homogenizing the world's cultures or whether individual consumers in local cultures have been diversifying the world's cultures (2). Despite their differences, scholars on all sides of the debate have assumed that "Western-based corporations have been the sole initiators of the spread of consumer culture and that they have invariably introduced it from the West into non-Western markets" (3–4).

Adopting the case-study method, Cochran makes extensive use of Chinese-language archival materials concerning five Chinese medicine firms that developed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He contributes significantly to this debate by demonstrating that the widely held assumption of Western-based corporations and consumers residing in non-Western local cultures as the exclusive agents of consumer culture is invalid. Instead, Chinese-owned businesses in China and Southeast Asia also served as agents of consumer culture. In the case of Tongren Tang, China's most famous traditional medicine store, the owners widely distributed traditional Chinese medicines in the nineteenth century and introduced a nationwide network of new branch stores in the twentieth century. In the cases of Huang Chujiu (known as the "King of Advertising" in early twentieth-century China) and the Great Five Continents Drugstores, the Chinese owners made use of new print media to advertise nationwide and to control nationwide distribution through locally owned franchises as well as their own branch stores.

Even during the decade of the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), when Japan occupied parts of China and Southeast Asia, Chinese owners of Western-style drugstores built up businesses that not only survived but grew spectacularly both in China and Southeast Asia by integrating research and development and by using a variety of print media, such as popular magazines and newspapers, for advertising. In all of these cases, Cochran shows, "Chinese-owned businesses . . . also imposed capitalist institutions and reached from the top down in ways somewhat different from those employed by Western-owned businesses" (156). Moreover, Chinese-owned businesses played key roles in mediating the spread of consumer culture. They appropriated "Western" ideas, images, forms, and discourses from other Chinese and aggressively popularized them at all levels of China's urban hierarchy.

Cochran's fine study also sheds light on how Chinese entrepreneurs transformed their businesses into large national and transnational corporations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although confined to firms engaged in the manufacturing and marketing of medicine, the cases show that Chinese entrepreneurs not only relied on social networks; they also undertook organizational innovations that contributed to the expansion of their businesses. These innovations included the introduction of chain stores, the creation of advertising departments, the construction of laboratories for research and development, and the founding of newspapers for advertising purposes.

In short, Cochran's book points to the necessity of critically examining our assumptions, which could potentially determine the fate of our intellectual journey even before we embark on it. It is essential reading for scholars of consumer culture, globalization, as well as Chinese business history.