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  • Les grands entrepreneurs privés à Taiwan: La main visible de la prospérité
  • Vincent Kelly Pollard (bio)
Gilles Guiheux . Les grands entrepreneurs privés à Taiwan: La main visible de la prospérité (The great private entrepreneurs of Taiwan: Prosperity's visible hand). Asie Orientale (series), Christian Henriot, editor. Paris: Brochage Imprimerie Chirat for CNRS Éditions, 2002. 255pp. Paperback €25.00 / U.S. $24.00, ISBN 2-271-05971-2.

Vibrant institutionally sponsored China scholarship persists in virtually all countries that engaged China with missionaries, merchants, or military forces from the late Qing dynasty until the Sino-American War in Korea (the "Korean War"). With Les grands entrepreneurs privés à Taiwan: La main visible de la prospérité 1Gilles Guiheux continues the trend. 2While revising a 1996 dissertation for this book 3Dr. Guiheux also published French- and English-language articles in Enterprises et histoire, Dongfang, and Économie internationale. Affiliated with the Centre d'études français sur la Chine contemporaine (Center of French studies on contemporary China) in Hong Kong, Guiheux seeks to explain the post-1949 business leadership in the capitalist development of the small, isolated island polity of Taiwan.

Constrained by a heritage of Japanese colonialism and recently arrived Kuomintangauthoritarianism, Taiwan's prospects of breaking from what writers cited by Guiheux call "bureaucratic capitalism" (p. 11), but which is better understood internationally as "state capitalism," 4and of achieving a market economy looked bleak in 1949. Yet within fifty years, Taiwan went from being an exporter of fruits and vegetables to becoming "the world's 19th-largest economy and its 15th-largest trading country," 5investing in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas while maintaining its international standing as a key manufacturing link in information and communications technologies. Thus, for example, Taiwan surprised observers by becoming the first foreign investor in Vietnam (p. 235). Sociologists and other [End Page 173]modern Taiwan specialists will be interested in Guiheux's densely detailed account in this book of the captains of Taiwan's private industry and commerce and their families. Documented with four figures, six photographs, eleven tables, and 468 footnotes from primary and secondary materials in Chinese, French, and English, Les grands entrepreneurs privés à Taiwanwill attract business-history specialists and generalists proficient in French.

Guiheux's subtitle, La main visible de la prospérité, plays off Adam Smith's classic trope, the "invisible hand" of capitalism. 6Pro-industrialization yet risk-aversive, a Taiwanese "patronat" (or body of employers) emerged after World War II and gradually become more prominent and independent, particularly after the late 1950s. Family ties were important but not sufficient. The pathway to entrepreneurial success was not a free ride: business initiative and acumen mattered. Although government intervention played a lesser role than in Japan or South Korea, neither were the Taiwanese entrepreneurs studied by Guiheux "Shumpeterian innovators" (p. 230) nor did they exemplify the stereoptyped Homo economicus(economic man) celebrated by Milton Friedman. 7Indeed, "until the 1970s the system of relations between the big entrepreneurs and the KMT is characterized by clientelistic networks where reciprocal interests are [were] satisfied" (p. 231). Guiheux's fifty-year time frame (1949-1999) allows him to delineate socio-grams and economic pathways in such detail as to remind this reviewer of the development of capitalism elsewhere. 8

In his "Introduction" (pp. 9-15), Guiheux locates his analysis of Taiwanese business leadership in the context of two key historiographical debates (pp. 11-15). For Guiheux, Marxian interpretations that see the state simply as an agent of capital are overdetermined; he finds more value in examining and emphasizing the process of business initiative.

Chapter 1, "Unité des pratiques, diversité des trajectoires" (Unity of practices, diversity of trajectories), quickly introduces the reader to a variety of basic themes (pp. 17-50). Guiheux discusses how the founders of Taiwanese industry attained publicity and notoriety (pp. 18-22) and describes their religious beliefs and practices (pp. 22-25), their self-image, public image, and tensions over the most appropriate leisure practices and lifestyle (pp. 25-30). A detailed demographic series of statistical group portraits follows (pp. 31-38). The remainder of the chapter distinguishes between...

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