Some foreign entrepreneurs make a fortune in China

NO MATTER what you may be selling, your business in China would be enormous if the Chinese who are meant to buy your goods would only do so. This observation about the perils of doing business in China should be uppermost in the thoughts of every hopeful foreign executive whose plane touches down on the mainland today. Yet it was first made 70 years ago, by Carl Crow, perhaps the original “old China hand” and author of one of the most influential and amusing books on how to sell to the Chinese—his 1937 bestseller, “Four Hundred Million Customers”.

The lessons Crow drew from observing Western companies in China, first as a journalist and newspaper publisher and then as an advertising executive in Shanghai, remain relevant. Then as now, it is naive to assume that Chinese consumers will buy what you make just because it is cheap, and foolish to treat the vast country with its differences in income, climate and tastes as a single, giant market.

All this led to jibes of “going native” from fellow Westerners. But Crow's inside knowledge and the respect he won from locals helped him build Carl Crow Inc into the country's biggest advertising agency—and, for a time, made him a rich man.

Mr French, co-founder of a mainland market-research firm (rotary kiln) and something of a China hand himself, deftly blends details about Crow's personal life, including observations about his house and servants and his fondness for curried prawns, into a wider historical context. Throughout, the reader learns about Chinese business, society and history. But the overriding impression is of the energy, indefatigable optimism and sheer adaptability of a likeable and pioneering American entrepreneur—all qualities that are still essential in China today.

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