Vernacular Industrialism in China

Local Innovation and Translated Technologies in the Making of a Cosmetics Empire, 1900–1940

Eugenia Lean

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780231550338
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Business History
• Index: History

In early twentieth-century China, Chen Diexian (1879–1940) was a maverick entrepreneur—at once a prolific man of letters and captain of industry, a magazine editor and cosmetics magnate. He tinkered with chemistry in his private studio, used local cuttlefish to source magnesium carbonate, and published manufacturing tips in how-to columns. In a rapidly changing society, Chen copied foreign technologies and translated manufacturing processes from abroad to produce adaptations of global commodities that bested foreign brands. Engaging in the worlds of journalism, industry, and commerce, he drew on literati practices associated with late-imperial elites but deployed them in novel ways within a culture of educated tinkering that generated industrial innovation.

Through the lens of Chen's career, Eugenia Lean explores how unlikely individuals devised unconventional, homegrown approaches to industry and science in early twentieth-century China. She contends that Chen's activities exemplify "vernacular industrialism," the pursuit of industry and science outside of conventional venues, often involving ad hoc forms of knowledge and material work. Lean shows how vernacular industrialists accessed worldwide circuits of law and science and experimented with local and global processes of manufacturing to navigate, innovate, and compete in global capitalism. In doing so, they presaged the approach that has helped fuel China's economic ascent in the twenty-first century. Rather than conventional narratives that depict China as belatedly borrowing from Western technology, Vernacular Industrialism in China offers a new understanding of industrialization, going beyond material factors to show the central role of culture and knowledge production in technological and industrial change.

PART ONE

Gentlemanly Experimentation in Turn-of-the-Century Hangzhou

CHAPTER ONE

Utility of the Useless

Zhuangzi was walking on a mountain when he saw a great tree with huge branches and luxuriant foliage. A wood cutter was resting by its side, but he would not touch it and when asked the reason said that it was of no use for anything. Zhuangzi then said to his disciples, “This tree, because its wood is good for nothing, will succeed in living out its natural term of years.”

—Zhuangzi, “The Mountain Tree”

As a young man in turn-of-the-century Hangzhou, Chen Diexian started to turn to new kinds of endeavors—exploring imported technologies and new forms of media, promoting chemical and technical knowledge, openly pursuing money, and reckoning with the emergence of industrialization and mechanical reproduction at the level of daily life. The emergence of modernity in China (whether cultural, technological, industrial, or commercial) is often identified as taking place in treaty ports such as Shanghai. Although Chen eventually moved to Shanghai in the 1910s to pursue a range of cultural, industrial, and commercial activities, he did not begin those pursuits upon his arrival there. His formative experiences in exploring new practices and ideas took place in Hangzhou during his youth, where he adopted an array of strategies to domesticate the newfangled and to pursue profit. Even as he introduced and explored activities and new technologies in daily life in Hangzhou, he drew on familiar cultural practices to authenticate his endeavors. In an era when mass production was increasingly informing the everyday, his ability to evoke a sense of sincerity and genuineness by choosing appropriate pen names and sobriquets, writing poetry, and holding elegant gatherings was important for his lettered, industrial, and commercial work in Hangzhou and beyond. His exploration of new things and gadgets, alongside his experimentation in literary forms and endeavors, was part and parcel of a contemporary culture of play and whimsy in urban centers in Jiangnan that gained significance in a period when “serious” politics was mired in dysfunction, the Qing dynasty was waning, and the chaotic period of the early republic was beginning.¹

Chen’s biographical background and the local context in which he explored new technological delights are important in understanding his pursuits. Chen was born in 1879 in Qiantang, near Hangzhou.² He came from a well-to-do family. His father, Chen Fuyuan, practiced medicine, and his uncle served as an official.³ Chen’s father died in 1885 when Chen was only six, and his uncle died in 1897, setting off an inheritance dispute that split the family (Hanan 1999, 2). His mother, Ms. Dai, a concubine who had borne four children, was left to fend for the immediate family and saw that Chen Diexian was married to Zhu Shu, who had been selected for him years earlier. Chen and Zhu had three children (Wan 2001, 10). The eldest son, Chen Qu (1897–1989), whose sobriquets include “Xiaodie” and later “Dingshan,” became a writer and industrialist in his own right in Shanghai and then in Taiwan. Chen’s second son, Chen Cidie (1905–1948), became an artist.⁴ His daughter, Chen Xiaocui (1902–1968), became a famous artist and professor in Shanghai.

Chen’s upbringing had provided him with a classical literary education and the knowledge and skill set typical of a gentry doctor’s household.⁵ This background was helpful in enabling him to move with ease among different circles of society, including the official, literary, publishing, commercial, and industrial circles—many of which were new and evolving in the early twentieth century. Like many of his generation, he initially sought positions in officialdom, if rather reluctantly. He took the licentiate examination in Hangzhou and in 1893 became a xiucai-level candidate, successfully passing the county-level imperial examination.⁶ From 1909 to 1913, he served in lower-level offices or as an assistant to a ranking official in Zhejiang and Jiangsu Provinces, including at one point secretary to the commissioner of customs (Chen Xiaocui, Fan, and Zhou 1982, 210). However, he was always dabbling in alternative endeavors. Some of these endeavors—such as writing and publishing poetry—were typical of educated men at the time. Some were more unconventional. Many were entrepreneurial. He opened up a publishing house for poetry and founded an early newspaper in Hangzhou. Chen’s entrepreneurial efforts in the world of letters were furthermore paralleled by his efforts outside the literary arena. He bought a share in a tea and bamboo dealership in 1899 and then opened up Hangzhou’s first scientific-appliance shop. After these brief forays into commerce in Hangzhou, he proceeded to take advantage of new opportunities arising in Shanghai to become a professional writer and editor and eventually a captain of industry.

Chen’s life story provides an interesting case study with which to understand how an educated man started to experiment with new pursuits and to expand boundaries of convention in post-Taiping Uprising Hangzhou. In the twilight years of the Qing empire, the decline of orthodoxy resulted in shifting mores and opened up space so that novel opportunities could emerge. Ambitious young men started to blur the boundaries between the worlds of literati officialdom (wen, guan) and the realm of merchants (shang). To be sure, such blurring was hardly new. In the late Ming, the hybrid identity of the gentry merchant (shishang) had already brought together arenas of activity commonly associated with literati, merchants, and businessmen, thus shaping and animating trends in book publishing (Chow 2004). In nineteenth-century Shanghai, local gentry, such as the Gu family, acted as local entrepreneurs—purveyors of peaches, embroidery, inkstones, and preserved vegetables (Swislocki 2008).

Certain conditions shaping this blurring of identities were new. Fresh epistemological regimes and institutional spaces came to frame and radically reconfigure the intermingling of commerce and culture by the turn of the twentieth century. Educated elites increasingly disenchanted or alienated from officialdom and from traditional literati activities started to engage openly in the once taboo realm of commerce, many of them specifically turning to treaty-port publishing, commercial entertainment, and leisure.⁷ As noted in the introduction, the dismantling of the civil-service examination system had a profound impact on elite strategies of cultural, social, and political reproduction and levied a serious challenge to the values of examination-oriented literati culture. New paradigms included novel forms of knowledge and culture (e.g., science rather than statecraft), newfound institutions through which to legitimate such knowledge (e.g., mass media, modern schools), and an array of practices that urban elites developed to navigate these new forms of knowledge and the new media associated with them (e.g., entrepreneurism and the pursuit of profit, nation building, and social reform). The last decades of the Qing dynasty constituted a critical juncture in Chinese history when elites’ identity, paths of social mobility, and ways of knowing and navigating the world were up in the air. The institutions of empire that had once determined social mobility and direction were defunct, and new, unprecedented opportunities were emerging, often with little guarantee or certitude of success or promise.

In this context, Chen, along with fellow colleagues and family members, sought to push acceptable boundaries in multiple ways, including the appreciation of what had once been considered unorthodox, unconventional, or valueless. This push included expressing curiosity about imported objects, such as the gramophone, and establishing Hangzhou’s first newspaper with friends. Later, this same trait of searching for value in what might appear useless drove Chen to realize that the vast amount of discarded cuttlefish shells that washed onto China’s seashore could serve as an ingredient for toothpowder, the key commodity that would bring him industrial success. More broadly, we will see how Chen came to see the value in pursuing light industry and manufacturing, something that was still often deemed déclassé at the turn of the twentieth century.

Chen moreover sought to justify his tendency to play with and stretch convention and to find utility if not profit in what appeared frivolous. To this end, he employed an array of strategies that used the familiar to authenticate the new and the unconventional. He took advantage of Hangzhou’s literati networks and elegant gatherings and adopted the disinterested stance of the lettered connoisseur to promote new ideas, information, and pursuits. Through thoughtfully chosen sobriquets and pen names, he created the persona of an eccentric figure who could dabble in the somewhat unorthodox. He opened up a familiar cultural institution, the reading room, but at the same time founded a more controversial institution—a scientific-appliance shop. He employed familiar literary genres such as bamboo-branch poetry to domesticate and explore new technologies and institutions in the landscape of his hometown, Hangzhou. At the same time, he pushed literary boundaries by exploiting new genres, such as the serialized romance novel, to explore anxiety-provoking themes, including money. He established himself as a serial author who, although writing for profit, was nonetheless a sincere man of sentiment. All of these choices and actions were indicative of an entrepreneurial and enterprising personality. For Chen, this ability to recognize the utility of that which appears to have little value was to become the basis of innovation and eventually profit.

CHOICE NAMES

Like other men of his generation, Chen had multiple names over the course of his life. His original personal name was “Chen Shousong,” though he changed it to “Chen Xu” early on. He also had several zi, courtesy names, and hao, sobriquets.⁸ One of his best-known sobriquets was “Diexian,” or “Butterfly Immortal,” which he had already started using in Hangzhou by 1900. A related hao was “Taichangxiandie,” “Immortal Butterfly of Taichang” (Xu Shoudie 1948, 43).⁹ His courtesy names included “Xuyuan,” which can be translated literally as “Garden of Vitality” but evokes the meaning “dreamscape.”¹⁰ Multiple pen names included “Xihongsheng,” the “Master of Studio Xihong,” which he used when publishing poetry,¹¹ and “Chaoran,” the “One Who Transcends,” a pen name he used when writing a social exposé of officialdom (Chen Xiaocui, Fan, and Zhou 1982, 212).¹² He was best known in the literary world, however, as “Tianxuwosheng,” “Heaven Bore Me in Vain.”¹³ He had already adopted this name around 1900 when he was a young man in Hangzhou and used it when publishing his romance fiction and serving as an editor in Shanghai.

With several of these names, Chen sought to cultivate a particular and strategic reputation, which is conveyed in the chapter epigraph. The epigraph is from chapter 20, “The Mountain Tree,” in the basic writings of Zhuangzi, the early Chinese thinker (b. c. 369 BCE). Related to Daoism, Zhuangzi’s thought expressed skepticism for man-made norms and yet was highly idealistic in its promotion of an understanding of the spontaneity of the universe and thus freeing oneself from worldly expectations and demands. Daoism and Zhuangzi’s thought stood in contrast to schools of thought that centered on this-worldly social and political reform and prescription, such as Confucianism, Legalism, and Moism. This particular passage is representative. In it, Zhuangzi characteristically questions what we mean by utility with a parable involving a mountain tree. In the parable, Zhuangzi passes a huge tree with thick, lush branches and leaves and a wood cutter lying by the tree. When the wood cutter makes no move to cut down the big old tree, explaining that the tree is useless, Zhuangzi disagrees and argues for its value: “This tree, because its wood is good for nothing, will succeed in living out its natural term of years.” Herein lies its utility.

Chen Diexian was drawn to the twin impulses of idealism and skepticism in Zhuangzi’s thought. With his pen names, he sought to evoke Zhuangzi’s tradition as he emerged as a new-style entrepreneur and dabbler in new things in late-Qing Hangzhou. His pen name “Tianxuwosheng,” “Heaven Bore Me in Vain,” was a self-effacing pun and allusion to the seventh line of the poem “Bring on the Wine” (“Jiang jin jiu”) by one of China’s most famous Tang dynasty (618–907) poets, Li Bai (701–762):¹⁴ “Since heaven has given me life, it must be put to use (tian sheng wo cai bi you yong).” In a biographical account of her father, Chen’s daughter confirmed the genealogy of the pen name, noting that her father had stated that his name “is that which is said by Li Bai, namely, if heaven has given birth to my talent, it must have use; if this is true, then I was born in vain; therefore, I call myself Tianxuwosheng, as I have no use” (quoted in Chen Xiaocui, Fan, and Zhou 1982, 210). The self-effacing modesty evoked by the pen name was not simply typical of the virtues valued by the literati at the time but also useful in allowing Chen to present himself in as humble a manner as possible and to conjure Zhuangzi through Li Bai. Li Bai had held office during his lifetime but nonetheless cultivated a reputation of being an eccentric immortal. Chen sought to present himself in a similar manner. He was “the one whom Heaven produced in vain” (a different rendering of the pen name), who dabbled in endeavors not seen as immediately useful or perceived as unconventional and yet still with potential value.

Chen also fostered a reputation of eccentric curiosity with the sobriquet “Diexian.” “Diexian” can be translated as “Butterfly Immortal.” As with the name “Tianxuwosheng,” Zhuangzi was the direct source of inspiration for the name “Diexian.” According to Chen’s daughter, Chen stated that this name referred to a classical Zhuangzi parable titled “Zhuangzi Dreamed He Was a Butterfly” (“Zhuang Zhou meng die”) (Chen Xiaocui, Fan, and Zhou 1982, 210). In this parable, Zhuangzi first dreams that he is a butterfly and then, when he awakes, starts to wonder whether he, the man, was dreaming or the butterfly is now dreaming he is Zhuangzi. This passage quintessentially captures the romanticism and the skepticism regarding knowledge and reality in Zhuangzi’s thought. Chen’s choice of the name “Diexian,” “Butterfly Immortal,” was hardly accidental. For Chen, the name suggested that he was unencumbered and could engage in a romantic dalliance with all forms of knowledge and activity—whether they were orthodox or not. Whereas Zhuangzi was still dreaming within a dream, Chen, by adopting the persona of an immortal, sought to achieve transcendence from the corruptions of the real world (Chen Xiaocui, Fan, and Zhou 1982, 210). The romantic impermanence evoked by Chen’s butterfly-themed names could be juxtaposed to what had once been certain but by the late Qing had become hollow—mainly Qing officialdom and its Confucian orthodoxy.

In a period when attributes, titles, and careers that once had seem so useful became increasingly useless, Chen employed Daoist-inspired names to render the opposite effect: to mark opportunity in areas that had previously seemed uselessly peripheral. From an early age, Chen sought to mark himself as someone able to recognize the value in what others failed to appreciate during a period when values were in flux. Through the savvy choice of a string of public and pen names, he relished in challenging convention and orthodoxy and consistently displayed an appreciation for the seemingly worthless, often turning it into something with value. He established a persona of virtuous eccentricity that would allow him to cloak, or rather to present ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Statement
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One. Gentlemanly Experimentation in Turn-of-the-Century Hangzhou
• Part Two. Manufacturing Knowledge, 1914–1927
• Part Three. Manufacturing Objects, 1913–1942
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Series List