Taxi Shanghai: Entrepreneurship and semi-colonial context
研究民国上海半殖民背景下，中国企业家周祥生如何通过出租车业务重塑城市连接、技术网络和政治身份，揭示创业与背景的互动机制。
Scholars of entrepreneurship can agree that ‘context matters.’ However, there is little consensus regarding the processes through which context and entrepreneurship are mutually constructive. While the influence of top-down forces on entrepreneurial action is well-studied, the ways in which ‘bottom-up’ entrepreneurial processes reshape context remain undertheorized. To help fill this void, this article explores the dynamic interplay between entrepreneurship and semi-colonial context in Republican Shanghai (1911–1949), by retracing the history of Shanghai’s ‘Taxi King’, Zhou Xiangsheng, and his enterprise, Johnson Taxi. Through context theorising, the article explicates mechanisms by which Chinese entrepreneurs reshaped semi-colonial Shanghai: how they launched informal taxi services that filled critical gaps in urban connectivity; combined heterogenous technologies to build city-wide taxi networks that traversed Shanghai’s many divides; and harnessed rising nationalistic sentiments to link the consumption of transportation services with political identity. We argue that through such mechanisms, Chinese entrepreneurs not only navigated their situated context, but actively re-imagined and transformed it.