FOUR HUNDRED MILLION CUSTOMERS:
The Experiences—Some Happy, Some Sad of an American in China and What They Taught Him
Carl Crow
Introduction to 2003 edition by Ezra F. Vogel,
Harvard University
Four Hundred Million
Customers (1937) is a collection of humorous essays and piquant anecdotes underpinned by
well-informed insight and highlighted by witty drawings by G. Sapojnikoff. Like a bowl of salted peanuts, these
vignettes make you want “more.” The book was welcomed on its publication as the most entertaining
and instructive introduction to the rapidly modernizing people of the new China
and their resilient customs. While it
has been taught in recent years at the Harvard Business School, the book — or
at least its title — has been cited much more than read, usually to illustrate
American illusions about the China market. Yet the book has lost none of its
still perceptive insights into China, which is now more than triple “four
hundred million.”
“Crow, living in Shanghai
[in the early twentieth century], wrote in a bemused manner about city
dwellers. [While] Crow’s book was of little value to the China watcher of the
1950s and 1960s . . . once Chinese reform and opening took off after 1978, the
clever city dwellers that Crow described in the 1930s are a far better guide to
the China of today than [Edgar] Snow’s revolutionaries or [Pearl] Buck’s
peasants.
“I have a former student, a successful businessman,
who opened a factory in Shanghai a few months ago. On his reading stand he
keeps a copy of Four Hundred Million
Customers. ‘No other book,’ he said, ‘including many more contemporary
works on the Chinese economy, provides as much insight into the business
environment I face. And it helps me keep my sense of humor as I face the
frustrations of doing business in China.’ No need to repeat the wonderful
stories and phrases found in the book. Enjoy.”
— from the Introduction by
Ezra F. Vogel
On the original edition . . .
“Superlatively entertaining” —New York Times Book Review
“No one who wants to do business in China can
safely neglect it” — The
Times (London)
“A feast of human nature
for almost any reader.” — Carl
Van Doren, Boston Herald
"One of the most
convincing and lifelike descriptions of Chinese life we have ever had” — Dorothy
Canfield, Book of the Month Club News
Carl Crow
(1883–1945), attended the Missouri
School of Journalism, went to China just before World War I and stayed on to
found the first American advertising agency in Shanghai. Crow became one of the
key American interpreters of Asia for the reading public back home. Among his
popular books were biographies of Confucius and Townsend Harris, the first
American envoy to Japan; Handbook for
China (1933), a tourist guidebook reprinted in 1983; I Speak for the Chinese (1937), which advocated American defense of
China against Japanese military encroachment; and Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom (1940), a history of
foreigners in China.
EastBridgeD’Asia Vu Reprint Library 2003 318 pp illustrations
ISBN 1-891936-07-7 (pb) $29.95