Thirty Years of Turbulence - Chinese Enterprises

作者：admin  点击次数：18  发布时间：2025-05-04

    In 1945, General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, came to Japan from the Philippines. He refused to go to the Imperial Palace to meet Emperor Hirohito, but asked the latter to go to the American Embassy to pay his respects to him. Holding his pipe, he said to the reporter of the Chicago Tribune, "Japan has become a fourth-rate country. It will never be possible for it to make a comeback and become a world power." In 1955, China's national income accounted for 6.5% of the world's total, while Japan's was only 2.5%. By 1960, Japan was on par with China.A symbolic event of Japan's revival occurred in March 1970, when the World Expo was held in Osaka. The Japanese government unprecedentedly spent $2 billion to host this unprecedented trade fair, and 77 countries around the world flocked to the event. Herman Kahn, one of the founders of the Futurist School, first predicted in the Chicago Tribune, where MacArthur had made his speech 25 years ago: "Japan has entered the ranks of the world's economic powers, and the 21st century will be Japan's century." Throughout the 1970s, Japan was the fastest growing economy in the world.In July 1979, Harvard University professor Ezra F. Vogel published his famous book, Japan, Number One in the World. This book made the world continue to talk about Japan throughout the 1980s. In the international market, Japanese products - from home appliances, watches, cameras, cars to semiconductors - were almost all the rage and invincible. The management experience of Japanese companies became a model for entrepreneurs and politicians around the world to learn from. Larry Ellison, an American who later founded the famous Oracle Corporation, often mentioned a sentence he heard when he listened to a speech by a Japanese entrepreneur in 1979. The Japanese said: "In Japan, we believe that a market share below 100% is not enough.