Carl Crow

Carl Crow (1884–1945) was a Highland, Missouri-born newspaperman, businessman, and writer who managed several newspapers and then opened the first Western advertising agency in Shanghai, China. He ran the agency for 19 years, creating calendar advertisements. He was also the founding editor of the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury.

Carl Crow arrived in Shanghai in 1911 and for a quarter of a century worked there as a journalist, newspaper proprietor, and ad-man. He also did stints as a hostage negotiator, emergency police sergeant, gentleman farmer, go-between for the American government, and propagandist. As his career progressed, so did the fortunes of Shanghai. The city transformed itself from a colonial backwater when Crow arrived, to the cosmopolitan metropolis of the 1930s when Crow wrote his pioneering book 400 Million Customers, which encouraged a flood of business into China.

In 1935, the Shanghai Municipal Council published a map for visitors to the city which they commissioned Crow to produce. A reproduction of the map was printed in 2005 to help fund the copying of the archive of Crow's unpublished works, diaries and correspondence held at the University of Missouri.

Among Crow's exploits were attending the negotiations in Peking which led to the fall of the Qing Dynasty, getting a scoop on the Japanese interference in China during the First World War, negotiating the release of a group of western hostages from mountain bandits, and being one of the first westerners to journey up the Burma Road during the Second World War. He met and interviewed most of the major figures of the time, including Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, the Soong sisters, and Mao Zedong's second-in-command Zhou Enlai. During the Second World War he worked for American intelligence alongside Owen Lattimore, co-ordinating US policies to support China against Japan.

He was very anti-Japanese, and fearing retribution he left Shanghai for good in 1937, just days after the Japanese attacked as part of the Second Sino-Japanese War's Battle of Shanghai.

He returned to Chongqing in 1939, entering China via the Burma Road from Rangoon to Kunming. He wrote a diary of this time which has been edited by Shanghai-based English writer Paul French, and published as Carl Crow: The Long Road Back to China.

He died in Manhattan in 1945.

With A.R. Burt and J.B. Powell, Crow published the bilingual Biographies of Prominent Chinese (c. 1925). In the 1930s and 1940s, Crow wrote 13 books. Master Kung: The Story of Confucius (1937), Time magazine wrote that to "orthodox Confucians Author Crow's Confucius may sometimes seem confusing. But they will have to admit that he succeeds in peeling off a lot of the 24-century coating of official lacquer. In fact, as Author Crow portrays him, the huge, ugly wise man emerges with a look as human as Benjamin Franklin's." This was followed by the anecdotal The Chinese are Like That (1938), titled My Friends the Chinese in England.

Crow's most popular book, 400 Million Customers (1937), won one of the early National Book Awards: the Most Original Book of 1937, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association. The book argued that foreign businessmen had to listen to their Chinese customers to meet their surprising but ultimately comprehensible requests. Chinese were customers, not bosses. The book has been reprinted at least twice in the new millennium. The historian Jerry Israel, however, wrote that “Crow’s China had no misery, wretchedness, poverty or . . . revolution. He looked for ‘Four Hundred Million Customers,’ but perhaps found ‘Four Hundred Million Number One Boys.’”