On 25 October 1976, US businessman Charles Abrams travelled to New York City’s South Street Seaport to welcome a ship loaded with Chinese vodka. This was, according to Abrams, the first time the liquor had been commercially imported from China since 1949.
Abrams turned this moment into an elaborate marketing event. The port was festooned with a vinyl balloon replica of a bottle of vodka, the height of a three-story building. Swaying on the windy dock, the vodka-shaped balloon towered over a group of around 80 people, including New York’s ports and terminals commissioner, Louis F. Mastriani, who had gathered to celebrate the imports. Once the cases of vodka had been unloaded, the group convened at a Chinese restaurant where, the China Business Review reported with a wink, “the vodka and viands quickly warmed up the guests.”
Abrams was part of a new generation of US businesspeople who began to trade with China after more than 20 years of Cold War isolation. Fascination, hope, excitement, frustration: Emotions guided their decisions as much as hardheaded economics—often more so. Working alongside businesspeople in China, they began to see something new in the China market.
For centuries, foreigners had seen in China a vast landmass teeming with potential customers. To them, trade meant expanding their exports. But new traders in the 1970s looked to China as a potential labour source. Together, they set in motion a fundamental transformation in the very meaning of the China market: from a place to sell US goods to a site of cheap labour.
Abrams and other US importers assisted this shift by fostering a culture of excitement about the unfolding trade relationship. Through advertisements, department store displays, and vodka-shaped balloons, the China traders of the 1970s changed the ways Americans understood Chinese communism: as apolitical and unthreatening. For US consumers, Chinese imports instead quickly became “exotic,” and US businesspeople succeeded in promoting a cultural acceptance of the words “Made in China” on the labels of everyday consumer goods.
Like many of the new generation of China traders in the United States, Abrams had long been interested in the country. In 1974, he told the New York Times that he had been “a student of China for 15 years.” Recalling a trip to Asia when travel to China was closed off to US businesspeople, he mused: “I still remember standing there in Hong Kong and saying to myself, ‘What lies beyond that great wall?’” He began trading with China the first moment he could. In 1972, he founded a company, the China Trade Corp., and began importing a handful of documentary films that he sold to US television distributors.
Abrams continued to import a range of consumer goods from China. When he started bringing in Chinese vodka in 1976, he imported it under a brand name exclusive to the US market: “Great Wall Vodka.” This wasn’t baijiu, the traditional white spirit of China itself, but Russian-style vodka from a manufacturer originally started by émigrés in the 1920s who had fled the Russian Civil War.
In China, the liquor was sold as “Sunflower Vodka.” Abrams had negotiated the name change to make it, as he put it, “sound more Chinese and less like vinegar oil.” Of course, it was Abrams, a white American businessman, and not the Chinese with whom he dealt, who chose the “more Chinese” name.
For their part, Chinese traders certainly emphasised Sunflower Vodka’s Chinese origins in their own advertisements. Abrams’s push for a name change revealed that he wanted to emphasise not just the Chinese origins but also a certain idea of China—offering both ancient culture and a traveller’s adventure—that would appeal most to US consumers.
It took three years for Abrams to conclude his vodka import deal from Ceroilfood, a Chinese state-owned enterprise. But in the spring of 1976, both parties finally reached an agreement. Not only would Abrams import Chinese vodka and change the name; Ceroilfood also agreed to assist with a direct mail advertising campaign. Chinese students would address and stamp the flyers and send them from China to US liquor executives, businesspeople, and government officials. This was the first direct mail initiative from China to the United States, and Abrams, with his eye for drama, understood that its novelty was a crucial component of his marketing efforts.
Upon reaching the deal, Abrams told reporters that he felt “ecstatic.” For the first time since rapprochement began, China’s government was to embark on a marketing effort in the United States. Abrams, not one to shy away from his enthusiasm, declared, “This is the greatest afternoon of my life.”
With assistance from Ceroilfood, he would send flyers advertising Great Wall Vodka to 50,000 US homes. The Chinese students who addressed and stamped the flyers were not paid for their efforts. The Times reported that the students worked “free of charge” but concluded jauntily that Abrams “stands to make a profit for both himself and the Chinese.”
In addition to a free mailing campaign, Abrams profited even further by inflating his prices. US consumers could purchase a case of 12 Great Wall Vodka bottles for the hefty sum of $108. Abrams’s marketing campaign took full advantage of the high price tag. Great Wall was “the world’s most expensive vodka,” declared the advertisements, which appeared only in the New Yorker.
The campaign targeted consumers who would be interested in a vodka that was, as one advertisement put it, “strictly not for the peasants.” The class politics here was not subtle. Wealthy New Yorker-reading liberals consuming Chinese vodka, with an eye for the exoticism of the Great Wall, could distinguish themselves from the “peasants” thanks to the uncompensated labour of Chinese students.
