'We Should Learn to Trade in Chinese': Marketing Hungarian Products in China 1972-1988

• In Event: Revisiting "Socialist Integration": Transnational Cooperation and Its Challenges under State Socialism

Abstract

Hungarian institutional knowledge about marketing in China was born over a decade of growing Chinese-Hungarian trade deals and industrial and cultural expos, first in Budapest and Tianjin in 1972 and then in Beijing in 1984. Before financial reforms in both countries undermined the value system on which Hungarian-Chinese trade functioned, in 1988, the Hungarian Chamber of Commerce’s Chinese Division celebrated the successful marketing of Hungarian goods in the “Hungarian Week” expo in Shanghai. This paper examines how Hungarian civil servants and enterprise managers envisioned and planned to integrate market relationships with another socialist country in East Asia and how they considered cultural sensitivity a serious aspect of building socialist trade markets.

Author

• Isaac Bershady, Rutgers, The State U of New Jersey