The Business of Culture

Cultural Entrepreneurs in China and Southeast Asia, 1900-65

Edited by Christopher Rea & Nicolai Volland
Categories: History, World History, Regional & Cultural Studies, Asian Studies, Social Sciences, Popular Culture, Communication Studies, Media Studies, Popular Culture, Communication & Media Studies, Diaspora Studies
Series: Contemporary Chinese Studies
Publisher: UBC Press
Hardcover : 9780774827805, 348 pages, December 2014
Paperback : 9780774827812, 348 pages, July 2015
Ebook (PDF) : 9780774827829, 348 pages, December 2014
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Table of contents

Foreword by Wang Gungwu

Introduction / Christopher Rea and Nicolai Volland

1 Enter the Cultural Entrepreneur / Christopher Rea

Part 1: Cultural Personalities

2 Between the Literata and the New Woman: Lü Bicheng as Cultural Entrepreneur / Grace Fong

3The Butterfly Mark: Chen Diexian, His Brand, and Cultural Entrepreneurism in Republican China / Eugenia Lean

4 Culture by Post: Correspondence Schools in Early Republican China / Michael Gibbs Hill

Part 2: Tycoons

5 Aw Boon Haw, the Tiger from Nanyang: Social Entrepreneurship, Transregional Journalism, and Public Culture / Sin Yee Theng and Nicolai Volland

6 One Chicken, Three Dishes: The Cultural Enterprises of Law Bun / Sai-Shing Yung and Christopher Rea

Part 3: Collective Enterprises

7 Local Entrepreneurs, Transnational Networks: Publishing Markets and Cantonese Communities within and across National Borders / Robert Culp

8 Cultural Consumption and Cosmopolitan Connections: Chinese Cinema Entrepreneurs in 1920s and 1930s Singapore / Chua Ai Lin

9 Cultural Entrepreneurship in the Twilight: The Shanghai Book Trade Association, 1945-57 / Nicolai Volland

Epilogue: Beyond the Age of Cultural Entrepreneurship, 1949-Present / Christopher A. Reed and Nicolai Volland

Glossary; Bibliography; List of Contributors; Index

How did “cultural entrepreneurs” transform the business of culture in modern China and Southeast Asia?

Description

The Business of Culture examines the rise of Chinese “cultural entrepreneurs,” businesspeople who risked financial well-being and reputation by investing in multiple cultural enterprises in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rich in biographical detail, the interlinked case studies featured in this volume introduce three distinct archetypes: the cultural personality, the tycoon, and the collective enterprise. These portraits reveal how rapidly evolving technologies and growing transregional ties created fertile conditions for business success in the cultural sphere. They also highlight strategies used by cultural entrepreneurs around the world today.

Reviews

This collection of essays represents a new period in the historiography of China, and the vantage point, that of capitalist China revived and flourishing, fits well with the analyses presented in the volume. Indeed, as Rea’s theoretical chapter on the concept of cultural entrepreneurship notes, this offers a new approach to "pluralism and mobility in the cultural sphere" (27) beyond the categories imposed by a political analysis.

- Anna Belogurova, Georg-August Universitat Gottingen, Germany