A tough Old China Hand

...Paul French ... was in Beijing to promote his latest book, Carl Crow: A Tough Old China Hand.

Who to talk about first?

Paul is a Londoner, with many years experience in China, who runs a marketing consultancy and is one of the best-informed people about what really happens in business here there is. He also writes books.

Crow was an American, who lived in Shanghai on and off from 1911 to 1937, ran an advertising agency and was extremely well-connected throughout the city. He also wrote books.

His most famous was "400 million customers", a riveting account of the pratfalls experienced by those who thought that China's population was so huge they could hardly fail to make a profit here. If you think it's familiar, well.... actually, it's partly familiar because the title has been semi-ripped off on more than one occasion in recent times...

...He did, however, work at the forefront of business trends that would also be recognised today. He was one of the handful of ad execs who introduced the "sexy modern ladies" who you will see on all those (copies of) old advertising posters for sale in the Shanghai bric-a-brac shops, wearing qipaos, western hairdos and various brands of cigarettes. It seems to have been Crow's genius to infuriate the then socially conservative political bosses by lifting the slit on the qipao bit by bit each year till it reached the thigh.

The book does not seem to available on Amazon yet, but here is the Hong Kong University Press page about it. The image above is the cover of Carl Crow's Four Hundred Million Customers: The Experiences--Some Happy, Some Sad of an American in China and What They Taught Him, which you can buy on Amazon.