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 as regime changes, rent-seeking politicians, warlords, and an increasingly intrusive state, the Songs pursued business strategies often identified as synonymous with Chinese capitalism—bribery, networking, and cronyism—while cultivating the vision of a transformative corporation—production of goods for public good, scientific management, and benevolent labor practices. Such eclecticism and pragmatism suggest that no single culturally defined “Chinese” business practice existed then.

It is a story of ironies. Economists since Adam Smith have argued that, for a rational capitalist, intentionality (except profit maximization) matter not. To survive the political chaos and intense foreign and domestic competition, the Songs did draw on their “Christian network,” carefully nurtured relationships with warlords and officials, and lobby for policies that favored their interests. Dongya, located in the safety of the British concession in Tianjin, manufactured wool yarn made with imported raw material and machinery and marketed it as part of the patriotic “Buy Chinese” (Guohuo) movement, under suggestive labels such as Butting Ram (with homophones meaning “opposing the foreign”). Surely, what is good for the company is also good for the country. After the Japanese occupied the city, Dongya continued to flourish. As wool imports dwindled, the company expanded and prospered as a contractor producing gunnysack for the Japanese military. Even the Communists added another layer to Dongya's narrative. In his visit to Tianjin in 1949, Liu Shaoqi courted Song to fashion the company into a paragon of the national bourgeoisie. Famously he encouraged Song to exploit more workers, the more the better, a declaration that alarmed officials in attendance. The capitalist responded by resurrecting his plan to expand Dongya into a conglomerate of ten companies. Endorsing this dream, Song was appointed to the Central Finance and Economics Committee under Chen Yun, in addition to the National Political Consultative Conference. The Communist's vision of New Democracy seemed to include a future for private capitalism.

But then, can a Smithian capitalist be a patriot, a Christian, and a socialist? The Songs' pragmatism, or flexibility, had its limits, which were perhaps even fatal to their vision. Requiring guarantors from employees might be a sound traditional practice for their otherwise modern enterprises, while the use of child labor, working in silence, and one bathroom pass per worktable were matters of cost, productivity, and discipline. For a company banking on its vision of recovering national sovereignty, supplying gunnysacks to the Japanese military was merely a business decision for the company's survival, and Song Feiqing used associates and employees to collaborate with the invaders so that he could retain control of Dongya and remain a patriot. While being courted by the Communists, he also continued to divert the company's assets to Hong Kong as his own (under various names and nominees). In May 1950, he received permission to visit the city, and left China for good. Perhaps he, like his father, could not tolerate losing control. Perhaps he did not want to be used as an instrument to exploit more workers under the Communists. Perhaps he feared that the new regime might embarrass him by exposing his dealings with Nationalist officials and his wartime profiteering under the Japanese (although he could not have foreseen that, as the Three-Anti campaign raged, the Communist Party would declare as inviolable three Tianjin capitalists who held high offices in Beijing).Footnote ⁷ Denied a visa by the United States, allegedly because of his association with the Communists, Song emigrated to Argentina and died in 1955 a broken man, his vision dashed. So, too, died Liu Shaoqi's Tianjin “model” of transforming China's remaining capitalists from serpents into trustworthy national bourgeoisie.