ABSTRACT
Reviewing historiographical development in China, Harold Kahn and Albert Feuerwerker observed in 1964 how Chinese historians moved from the classroom to the platform in "a genuine attempt to find legitimization in China's past for the domestic and external developments of her most recent present". State sponsorship and financial support continue to loom large in the compilation of sources for business history. Class analysis and struggle continue to influence business history in post-Cultural Revolution historiography, and the compradors invite special condemnation because of their close association with the "feudal" state as well as with foreign imperialists. Increasingly, historians are responding to the market reform to the extent that some of them might have shifted their theoretical perspective. "Sprouts of capitalism" has been declared dead, to be replaced by either "sprouts of modernization", or "sprouts of market economy". The highest stage of capitalistic development in modern China is reserved for comprador-bureaucratic capitalism whereby compradors and bureaucrats converged after 1927.
