This article compares the ways in which two major textbook publishers in East Asia – namely Kinkōdō in Meiji Japan and the Commercial Press in early twentieth-century China – practised the Western model of corporations to build a new kind of publishing business in their respective societies, which were undergoing significant transformation. The study suggests that, although the use of the model could imply global business convergence, its transplantation process was largely shaped by entrepreneurs who negotiated the Western model as an alternative newly opened to them and brought to light variant forms of practice tailored to serve their own aspirations in corporate directions such as industrial integration and ownership structure. The two cases present two distinct patterns of developing a new textbook publishing business under the same corporation model.
