Business as a Vocation

Wu Ho-Su (1919-1986) pioneered business ventures ranging from cloth and synthetic fibre industries to department stores and life insurance. This son of a crippled former coolie began as a labourer for a Japanese cloth-importing company in the 1930s, but eventually became a manager and then an independent entrepreneur. Overcoming business obstacles in Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist-ruled Taiwan after 1945, Mr. Wu painstakingly built Shinkong into Taiwan's sixth-largest business enterprise by the 1980s. This account of Wu Ho-Su's life, developed by Mr. Wu working directly with Dr. Huang Chin-shing of the Academia Sinica, one of Taiwan's most distinguished historians, is instructive for the lessons it offers about both business practices in East Asia and their interplay with Confucian values. The book recounts with graphic examples the changing role of family and other networks in Taiwan's economic "miracle" and in the region more generally. The blend that Mr.
Wu evidenced of business acumen and concern for Confucianism, in turn, raises broader questions of the type that scholars and businesspeople have strenuously debated since the time of Max Weber about the compatibility of Confucian norms and modern business practices.