Made in China
For centuries, the vastness of the Chinese market tempted foreign companies in search of customers. But in the 1970s, when the United States and China ended two decades of Cold War isolation, China’s trade relations veered in a very different direction. Elizabeth Ingleson shows how the interests of US business and the Chinese state aligned to reframe the China market: the old dream of plentiful customers gave way to a new vision of low-cost workers by the hundreds of millions. In the process, the world’s largest communist state became an indispensable component of global capitalism.
Drawing on Chinese- and English-language sources, including previously unexplored corporate papers, Ingleson traces this transformation to the actions of Chinese policymakers, US diplomats, maverick entrepreneurs, Chinese American traders, and executives from major US corporations including Boeing, Westinghouse, J. C. Penney, and Chase Manhattan Bank. Long before Walmart and Apple came to China, businesspeople such as Veronica Yhap, Han Fanyu, Susanne Reynolds, and David Rockefeller instigated a trade revolution with lasting consequences. And while China’s economic reorganization was essential to these connections, Ingleson also highlights an underappreciated but crucial element of the convergence: the US corporate push for deindustrialization and its embrace by politicians.
Reexamining two of the most significant transformations of the 1970s—US–China rapprochement and deindustrialization in the United States—Made in China takes bilateral trade back to its faltering, uncertain beginnings, identifying the tectonic shifts in diplomacy, labor, business, and politics in both countries that laid the foundations of today’s globalized economy.
Available from Harvard University Press here. Alternatively available here, or here.
Reviews and media
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How “Made in China” became American Gospel
Excerpt from Made in China
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Excerpt from Made in China, in French
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Author interview with Shannon Tiezzi
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Conversation with Chinese Whispers podcast host, Cindy Yu.
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Dan Banik and Elizabeth Ingleson explore the historical transformation of the "Made in China" label, how the neoliberal shift in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s was pivotal for China's integration into the global capitalist system, and the geopolitical implications of China's rise as a manufacturing powerhouse.
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“Meticulously researched” and “rife with interestin and fresh anecdotes”, Made in China “reminds us of the roots of the complexities still present in the China-US and global trade overall.”
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“The story that Ingleson paints reminds us that the ubiquity of ‘Made in China’ labels on products sold in the US was not inevitable.”
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Made in China “makes a spirited contribution” to debates on US-China trade &“brings fresh insight.”
“The book is far from a collection of humdrum statistics, being rich in anecdotes and personality sketches.”
U.S. businessman Charles Abrams (second from right) and Don King (second from left) promote sporting goods from China in 1978. KEYSTONE PICTURES ARCHIVE. Read full excerpt here