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Dream of the Republic （6）
Industry and Commerce in the Early Days of the Republic |
| CCTV.COM 2002-08-19 14:08:49 |
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In the middle section of Henan Road in Shanghai, there is an interesting building. In old days, the sales department of Commercial Press was on the floor below while the editing department of Zhonghua Book Company was upstairs. They were two rivals though they stayed close to each other.
 Set up in 1897, Commercial Press started with printing name cards and account books. When the Qing government carried out a reform policy in 1902, the press lost no time in publishing new Chinese textbooks for school pupils. All schools were eager to buy. Commercial Press made big profits from a good sale of more than a million copies. Lu Feikui, former director of the publishing department of Commercial Press, realized that the content of the textbooks would inevitably be altered after the 1911 Revolution, but the press was not ready for that. He made arrangements for setting up Zhonghua Book Company and appointed himself manager. Zhonghua textbooks for primary schools soon came off the press. The five－colored national flag, consistent with the government system of the republic, was printed in the textbooks that were well accepted by readers. Facing the situation, Xia Ruifang, a co－founder of Commercial Press, organized editors to publish a whole set of textbooks for the republic before the autumn term began. In so doing, he contended with Zhonghua Book Company.
 Huang Huannan, an overseas Chinese residing in Australia, sold his property and brought his money back to China in 1912. He had made two investigations in Shanghai and found that most pedestrians gathered on the northern side of the crossing of Nanjing and Zhejiang Roads where street pedlars made a good deal. So he decided to build a big building there. A five－storeyed building, Xianshi Company, was completed that made a stir in Shanghai, because it was the first store building built by the Chinese. Huang thought his company should have a distinctive feature in management. He abandoned the popular practice of bargaining and gave all goods marked prices. He wrote down a phrase for advertising: Abandon bargaining and market goods from all over the world.
Fan Xudong had studied chemistry in Japan. In the spring of 1912, he left Kyoto Empire University for Beijing when he knew that the 1911 Revolution was successful. Two years later he resigned from office and went to Tianjin to set up Jiuda Salt Industry Company. Tanggu was then a fishing village and no machine worked on salt marsh. Fan stayed in the village and began his experiment. Snow－white refined salt was finally produced with his effort. He named his product for Neptune. Afterwards he set up Yongli Soda Factory. Its product—Red Triangle Soda Ash—soon became famous overseas.
 Zhang Bishi was an overseas Chinese businessman, living in Southeast Asia in the 1870s. He remembered, by chance, the remark of a French diplomat: The area around Yantai was good for growing grapes that could make top－grade wine. After 20 odd years he came to Yantai and set up Zhang Yu Grape Wine Company. In 1905 he carried out three successful renovations to the big wine cellar. Even the French were astonished at the company's scale and speed in production. Zhang Bishi took part in the Panama International Commodities Exhibition with his grape wine product and won a gold medal of award for the first time. Since then, the company took the gold medal as a packing design for brandy, and named it Gold Medal Brandy.
A hundred years have passed. China has seen many changes that remind us of the remark made by Sun Yat－sen in 1912, "China was on the eve of a large－scale development in industry. We'll have more Shanghai in a period of 50 years."
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