The Chinese Business History cluster explores the historical development of Chinese business. The cluster’s goal is to build a global network of collaborators from academia and beyond to strengthen and develop the field of Chinese business history and, in the long term, bring it up to par with the study of business history in the West in terms of breadth and depth. The cluster is running the Chinese Business History Webinar series, which has become the premier global platform for the presentation and discussion of cutting-edge research in Chinese business history. It is also planning and organising several other workshops and other academic and public events.
Chinese Business History
Team
Convenors
Core members
MAIN THEMES
The cluster primarily works across four different sub-groups. The first sub-group, Chinese Business Institutions and Economic Growth, traces the historical development of Chinese business enterprise with a focus on the period since 1800 and explores the role of these enterprises in Chinese economic development. The second sub-group, Multinational Companies, China and the Global Economy, investigates the role foreign companies have played in Chinese economic development and China’s connections to the global economy. The third sub-group, Legal Frameworks, traces the historical development of the legal environment Chinese business enterprises developed in over the past two centuries. Finally, the fourth sub-group, Family Business History and the Historical Development of Chinese Enterprise, explores the central role family businesses have played and are still playing in the development of Chinese business enterprise and the Chinese economy more broadly.
Recent Publications
Modern Chinese Enterprise and the Global Economy: A Historiographical Essay
Ghassan Moazzin, John D. Wong and Jin-A Kang / Business History 67, no. 7 (2025): 1733-1750.
Pollution and Business: Case Studies from Modern Chinese Business History
Ghassan Moazzin / In Climate Change and Business: Historical Perspectives, edited by Teresa da Silva Lopes, Paul Duguid, and Robert Fredona, 53-70. New York: Routledge, 2025.
Wardrobe Dynamics: Cathay Pacific Female Flight Attendants’ Changing Uniform for a City in Flux
John D. Wong / Postcolonial Aeromobilities: Branding, Cultural Heritage and Tourism Imageries, edited by Bart Paul Vanspauwen & Iñigo Sánchez-Fuarros, 219–232. New York, NY: Routledge, 2025
Incomplete Infrastructure: State-Building and the Early History of China’s Long-Distance Telephone Network, 1900–1937
Ghassan Moazzin / Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, First View (2025): 1-27.
Banking on Distant Shores: A Comparison of the Development of Foreign Banks in pre-World War I China and Japan
Ghassan Moazzin / International Journal of Asian Studies, First View (2024): 1-19.
Made in Hong Kong: Deriving value from the place-of-origin label, 1950s and now
John D. Wong / Modern Asian Studies 57:3 (2023): 895–917
The Ongoing Business of Chinese Language Reform: A View from the Periphery of Hong Kong in the Last Half Century
John D. Wong / Modern China 49:4 (2023): 448–479 (with co-author Andrew D. Wong)
Hong Kong Breaking into the International League: Cathay Pacific’s Extension to Long-Haul Routes
John D. Wong / International Journal of Asian Studies 20:1 (2023): 137–156
Electric Pioneers: Nationalist Lobbying, Technology Transfer, and the Origins of the Chinese Electric Lamp Industry, 1921 – 1937
Ghassan Moazzin / Enterprise & Society (First View, 12 December 2022), pp. 1-35
Hong Kong Takes Flight: Commercial Aviation and the Making of a Global Hub, 1930s – 1998
John D. Wong / Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2022
Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870-1919
Ghassan Moazzin / Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022
Flexible Corporate Nationality: Transforming Cathay Pacific for the Shifting Geopolitics of Hong Kong in the Closing Decades of British Colonial Rule
John D. Wong / Enterprise & Society 23:2 (2022):445–77
Song China: The First Modern Economy?
Billy So and Sufumi So / In Scott C. Levi ed. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.04
Making Vitasoy ‘Local’ in Post-WWII Hong Kong: Traditionalizing Modernity, Engineering Progress, Nurturing Aspirations
John D. Wong / Business History Review 95:2 (2021): 275–300
Law and the Market Economy
Billy So and Sufumi So / In Ma Debin and Richard von Glenn eds., Cambridge Economic History of China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp.419-447
Investing in the New Republic: Multinational Banks, Political Risk, and the Chinese Revolution of 1911
Ghassan Moazzin / Business History Review 94, No. 3 (2020), pp. 507-534
Sino-Foreign Business Networks: Foreign and Chinese Banks in the Chinese Banking Sector, 1890 – 1911
Ghassan Moazzin / Modern Asian Studies 54, No. 3 (2020), pp. 970-1004
The Chinese Business History cluster has recently completed a special issue in Business History titled “The Global Economy and the Origins of Modern Chinese Business”. Co-edited with Jin-A Kang (Hanyang University), the special issue was published as volume 67, issue 7 of Business History:
Modern Chinese enterprise and the global economy: A historiographical essay
Ghassan Moazzin, John D. Wong and Jin-A Kang. / Business History 67, No. 7 (2025): 1733-1750.
Governance structure, organizational form, and business performance: A study of the Shanxi piaohao (banks), 1820s–1930s
Meng Wu / Business History 67, No. 7 (2025): 1751-1777.
Manias, Panics, & Land: The Property Bubbles of the Great Chinese Crash of the 1880s
Bill Kelson / Business History 67, No. 7 (2025): 1778-1803.
Mining the informal empire: Sino-Japanese relations and ironmaking in Manchuria, 1909–1931
Koji Hirata / Business History 67, No. 7 (2025): 1804-1821.
Management Thought and Practice in 1920s China
Peter E. Hamilton / Business History 67, No. 7 (2025): 1822-1842.
The Rise of Hong Kong’s Textile Industry, 1945–1974: The Role of the Hong Kong Spinners Association (HKSA)
Carles Brasó / Business History 67, No. 7 (2025): 1843-1861.
Beyond Revolutions: Mao-Era China’s Market Entry Strategies in Latin America
Ren Jian / Business History 67, No. 7 (2025): 1862-1876.
Events and Activities
Conferences and Workshops
Webinars
(selected talks are available on our Youtube page)
Spring Programme 2026:
- February 6, 2026: Prof. Yiying Pan (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) – Understanding Global Connectivity through Grassroots Mobility: The Reorganization of Techno-Social Networks among the Upper Yangzi Shipping Groups, 1850-1937
- March 13, 2026: Prof. Huangfu Qiushi (Fudan University) – American Dreams of Chinese Businessmen: U.S. Capital and China’s Post-war Economic Reconstruction（1944-1949）
- April 10, 2026: Prof. Jian Ren (Stanford University) – Pioneers in a Distant Land: The Overseas Chinese Business Community in South America, 1960-2000
- May 15, 2026: Prof. Yujie Li (University of Florida) – Mule Carts in Beijing: Knowledge and Ignorance in Transportation Planning in the 1950s
