Marketing death: culture and the making of a life insurance market in China

Abstract

Based on an extensive ethnography of the emergence of commercial life insurance in China, this book examines how culture impacts economic practice. It details how a Chinese life insurance market is created in the presence of an ingrained Chinese cultural taboo on the topic of death. It documents how transnational insurance firms, led by AIG’s subsidiary AIA, introduced commercial life insurance to Chinese urbanites, and how they were confronted with local resistance to the risk management concept of life insurance. It compares the organizational strategies of the transnational and the newly emerged domestic insurance firms, analyzing why they adopted disparate strategies to deal with the same local cultural resistance. It further compares the management styles of individual firms headed by executives of different origins, explaining why some were more effective in managing and motivating the local sales agents. It describes how sales agents mobilized various cultural tool-kits to prompt sales, and how potential buyers negotiated with life insurers regarding the meaning of life insurance, and the kinds of products they preferred. The book argues that these dynamics and micro-politics produced a Chinese life insurance market with a specific developmental trajectory. The market first emerged with a money management, instead of risk management, character. As the local cultural tool-kit enabled insurance practitioners to circumvent local resistance to achieve sales, local cultural values shaped the characteristics of the emergent market. This analysis sheds light on the dynamics through which modern capitalist enterprises are diffused to regions with different cultural traditions