China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation

Harvard East Asian Monographs #224

by Karl Gerth

“Chinese people should consume Chinese products!” This slogan was the catchphrase of a movement in early twentieth-century China that sought to link consumption and nationalism by instilling a concept of China as a modern “nation” with its own “national products.” From fashions in clothing to food additives, from museums to department stores, from product fairs to advertising, this movement influenced all aspects of China’s burgeoning consumer culture. Anti-imperialist boycotts, commemorations of national humiliations, exhibitions of Chinese products, the vilification of treasonous consumers, and the promotion of Chinese captains of industry helped enforce nationalistic consumption and spread the message―patriotic Chinese bought goods made of Chinese materials by Chinese workers in factories owned and run by Chinese.

In China Made , Karl Gerth argues that two key forces shaping the modern world―nationalism and consumerism―developed in tandem in China. Early in the twentieth century, nationalism branded every commodity as either “Chinese” or “foreign,” and consumer culture became the place where the notion of nationality was articulated, institutionalized, and practiced. Based on Chinese, Japanese, and English-language archives, magazines, newspapers, and books, this first exploration of the historical ties between nationalism and consumerism reinterprets fundamental aspects of modern Chinese history and suggests ways of discerning such ties in all modern nations.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, China

474 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2003

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting review of the activities of the national bourgeoisie and consumers in China from the 1900s to the 1930s in resisting imperialism through the "National Products Movement," by buying and encouraging domestic industries rather than foreign alternatives,

Gerth's work is important, especially in pinpointing the NPM as a forebear of state-controlled industry and laying superstructural groundwork for the development of socialism in the People's Republic of China. The use of the historical NPM as compared to the modern national bourgeoisie in the PRC and the fight against Westernization is a topic that could be its own book, and something Gerth should've devoted a bit more time to.

The fatal flaw of Gerth's book is his contention that the home market was the key to the creation of China as a nation. While, of course, the home market is noted by Lenin in his The Right of Nations to Self-Determination as the ultimate economic basis for the formation of national movements, Gerth makes no mention of historical territory, language, or culture as Stalin elaborates on in Marxism and the National Question. China has been a nation of more or less the same territory since the Han 2000 years ago, aside from Tibet and Manchuria; Gerth makes no mention of these historical ties being the basis of the National Products Movement in opposing imperialism. There could be no "national products" if the national bourgeoisie did not see a definitive territory of a "nation" to defend against foreign products.

However, Gerth does not purport to be a Marxist or to use a Marxist analysis, despite making some use of Marx and Marxist-adjacent intellectuals like Bourdieu, so perhaps using this against him is somewhat harsh. I do think it would have done him well to at least address the Marxist-Leninist conception of nationhood, especially in relation to the areas where he speaks on the CCP's involvement with the NPM.