China Studies35 Patriots' Game

Patriots’ Games offers a microhistory of Fan Xudong’s Yongli Chemical Industries from its founding in 1917 to nationalization in 1953, revealing hitherto hidden processes and dilemmas confronting private capital in modern China. “When thinking about modern China’s chemical industry, forget not Fan Xudong,” so declared Mao Zedong publicly after 1949. Although Mao might have united front politics in mind when invoking Fan as a paragon of the national bourgeoisie, why would the chairman praise a champion of private enterprise? How did Fan Xudong and his colleagues build Yongli from scratch into one of the largest industrial conglomerates in modern China amid predatory foreign competition and domestic strife? What were his secrets of success? Drawing from company documents, government archives, and personal correspondences, this book traces Yongli’s birth, growth, nationalization, and how Fan and his colleagues pursued a third path of national development between for-profit private enterprise and state ownership.