Brett Sheehan's Industrial Eden is a well-researched life history of the Songs: how Chuandian the father and Feiqing the son built iconic enterprises (including Dechang, “the world's largest hairnet manufacturer” and Dongya Corporation of Butting Ram fame) during the treacherous times of modern China. In the hands of lesser historians and script writers, their saga became modern China's version of a Horatio Alger story—how the Songs pulled themselves up from rags to riches through hard work, patriotism, and Christian values while promoting private enterprise and liberal democracy. However, Sheehan's magisterial analysis of a wealth of archival sources, memoirs, and interviews reveals a more nuanced process of self-fashioning, and of how the vision of an industrial Eden became a carefully constructed narrative, a fable, and ultimately a mythology. Along the way, he argues that economic imperialism offered both challenges and opportunities. To overcome fierce competition, both foreign and domestic, as well...

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