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CONSUMING SCIENCE: A HISTORY OF SOFT DRINKS IN MODERN CHINA A Dissertation Presented to The Academic Faculty by Liang Yao In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the School of History and Sociology Georgia Institute of Technology May 2016 COPYRIGHT © 2015 BY LIANG YAO CONSUMING SCIENCE: A HISTORY OF SOFT DRINKS IN MODERN CHINA Approved by: Dr. Hanchao Lu, Advisor Dr. Laura Bier School of History and Sociology School of History and Sociology Georgia Institute of Technology Georgia Institute of Technology Dr. John Krige Dr. Kristin Stapleton chool of History and Sociology History Department Georgia Institute of Technology University at Buffalo Dr. Steven Usselman chool of History and Sociology Georgia Institute of Technology Date Approved: December 2, 2015 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would never have finished my dissertation without the guidance, help, and support from my committee members, friends, and family. Firstly, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my advisor Professor Hanchao Lu for his caring, continuous support, and excellent intellectual guidance in all the time of research and writing of this dissertation. During my graduate study at Georgia Tech, Professor Lu guided me where and how to find dissertation sources, taught me how to express ideas and write articles like a historian. He provided me opportunities to teach history courses on my own. He also encouraged me to participate in conferences and publish articles on journals in the field. His patience and endless support helped me overcome numerous difficulties and I could not have imagined having a better advisor and mentor for my doctorial study. I would like to thank my dissertation committee: Professor John Krige, Steve Usselman, Laura Bier, and Professor Kristin Stapleton for their constructive questions and comments. I am extremely grateful to Professor John Krige, who gave me continuous support both intellectually and financially in the past few years when he was the graduate director. Special thanks go to Professor Steve Usselman and Professor Laura Bier. Their courses make me get interested in business history and consumer culture, which finally led me to start the research on the topic of this dissertation. Particular thanks go to Professor Kristin Stapleton of University of Buffalo for taking time from her busy schedule to serve the external examiner of my dissertation. My sincere thanks also go to the rest of the HTS faculty, all my colleagues, and friends who offered generous support in these years. I am greatly indebted to Professor Kristie Macrakis, who brought us to the Coca-Cola Archive located in the Coca-Cola iii Company at Atlanta in her course, which greatly influenced my research. I would like to thank Professor Jenny Smith for her comments on my research. She was the scholar who for the first time introduced me to the field of food studies. Many thanks go to Professor Bill Winders and Ms. La Donna Bowen for all the help they had provided to me during my time at Georgia Tech. I want to particularly thank Dr. Song Zuanyou and Dr. Xiong Yuezhi at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and Dr. Dong Qian from Fudan University. They warmly hosted me when I did my archive research in Shanghai and provided extremely important help. Last but not the least, I would like to express my deepest appreciation to my family: my parents and my husband, Huang Jinghui. They were always supportive and cheering me up throughout my Ph.D. study and my life in general. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii LIST OF TABLES vi LIST OF FIGURES vii SUMMARY ix CHAPTER 1 Introduction 1 2 Encountering the Exotics 26 3 Cultivating Desire: Advertisement, Modernity, and Consumption 60 4 Ambitious State, Unruly People: State Regulations and Social Violations 121 5 Nationalism Revisited: The National Products Movement in the Soft Drink Industry 162 6 Coca-Cola versus Salty Soda, How Summer Became Cooler under Socialism, 1949-1978 214 7 When Coke Knocked on the Door: China’s Reform and the Return of Coca-Cola, 1979-1990 262 8 Conclusion 307 BIBILIOGRAPHY 321 v LIST OF TABLES Page Table 2.1: 53 Table 2.2: 53 Table 4.1: 151 Table 6.1: 249 Table 6.2: 254 Table 7.1: 297 vi LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 2.1: 34 Figure 2.2: 37 Figure 2.3: 41 Figure 2.4: 45 Figure 3.1: 73 Figure 3.2: 73 Figure 3.3: 76 Figure 3.4: 77 Figure 3.5: 90 Figure 3.6: 93 Figure 3.7: 98 Figure 3.8: 100 Figure 3.9: 100 Figure 3.10: 101 Figure 3.11: 101 Figure 3.12: 104 Figure 3.13: 104 Figure 3.14: 107 Figure 3.15: 111 Figure 4.1: 123 Figure 4.2: 125 Figure 4.3: 132 vii Figure 5.1: 171 Figure 5.2: 179 Figure 5.3: 179 Figure 5.4: 181 Figure 7.1: 281 Figure 7.2: 292 Figure 7.3: 294 Figure 7.4: 299 viii SUMMARY This dissertation investigates the development of the soft drink market in China from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century, with particular attention to the rise of Coca-Cola. It examines how soft drinks competed with traditional Chinese summer food and beverage such as watermelons, herbal tea, plum juice, and nutriments which were believed to have medical properties for people’s summer health, and eventually became one of the most popular types of beverages in the country. Over one hundred years in the Chinese minds, soft drinks changed from an exotic but unsavory beverage to a popular drink and a symbol of modernity. This dissertation argues that western science competing with traditional Chinese medicine has been a driving force in shaping beverage consumption in modern China. There were constant politics played by the state, businesses, and consumers on production, marketing, and consumption of soft drinks, making a bottle of drink not merely a commodity but one that embodied science, modernity, and identity in Chinese society. Following the introduction chapter, chapter 2 of the dissertation delineates the clash between Chinese and western food culture in the late nineteenth century. It shows how traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) including the yin-yang theory and the concept of medicine-food homology played a role in shaping Chinese food culture for centuries. By analyzing advertisement, chapter 3 examines how soft drinks, which were considered by Chinese people as an unpleasant and unhealthy drink according to TCM, were marketed and gradually accepted as a hygienic and healthy drink under the rhetoric of modernization. Since foreign-brands such as Coca-Cola were luxuries, cheap imitations provided ordinary Chinese people, especially urbanites, opportunities to experience ix “modernity.” Chapter 4 discusses the culture of imitation in modern China in regard of soft drinks. In the first half of the twentieth century, consumption were politicized in National Products Movements, in which soft drink brands were categorized into either Chinese or foreign and people’s loyalty to the nation was, to some extent, judged by their brand choice. However, there was something far more than nationalism that played a role in the picture. Taking the Shanghai Coca-Cola protest of 1947 as a case study, chapter 5 reveals that Chinese nationalism in National Products Movements in the late forties was used by Chinese businessmen to advance themselves in business competition. When political conflicts became a major theme in Maoist China, Coca-Cola was criticized as a symbol of imperialism and driven out of China. Nevertheless, science-driven consumption did not fade away. Chapter 6 shows that instead of promoting Coca-Cola, the People’s Republic of China “invented” salty soda as a prevention and treatment of heat stroke and widely distributed it among workers as a socialist welfare in summer. The final chapter discusses the return of Coca-Cola in the post-Mao era. It shows that science and modernity was a consistent subject in production and consumption in China, where the state promoted it cautiously due to political sensibility while ordinary Chinese people embraced it enthusiastically with little resistance. x CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION When I was a child in China (in the 1980s), my happiest moment in summer was following my father to the roadside fruit stall watching him picking watermelons. Each summer, my father bought watermelons in lots of hundredweights and stored them in our living room. Every day, I patrolled in my “melon field,” imitating my father in thumping each melon to pick the ripest one. Father told me that there is a proverb, “have watermelons in summer, keep the doctor away.”1 If there were no ripe melons, my mother would force me to drink mung bean and lily soup, which tasted a little bit bitter. Although I disliked it and refused to drink every time, my mother once and again told me that it was good for health and it was known as “an elixir in summer” in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). These summer foods are not special in my family diets. For centuries, watermelons, mung bean soups, herbal tea, and sour plum juice, foods and drinks that were believed to contain certain medical properties, were favorite summer refreshments in China. Many of them even became summer necessities for Chinese families. Food and food-related proverbs derived from TCM were passed down from one generation to the next. Adages such as “having mung bean soup in sanfu (hot summer) days, you will be 1 “Re tian liang kuai gua, yao wu bu yong zhua.” (热天两块瓜，药物不用抓) Shui, Thousands of Proverbs about Health, 45. fine even if you were in the oven;”2 and “having radishes in winter and ginger in summer, you don’t need doctors anymore”3 were widely spread in the Chinese society.