"We Are the State": An Entrepreneurial Mission to Serve the People in Harbin, Northeast China
How can we explain market actors’ desire to use the state as a model for their entrepreneurial efforts? This article examines the varied and uneven ways in which the state is mimicked and appropriated by China’s market actors in the health caresector.A massagefranchiser,whichdoubles as a job-trainingcenter in Harbin, serves as an ethnographic instance. By invoking a scene where the persistent appeal to the state is bound up with volatile market activities, this article intends to disrupt the prevailing notions of the state-market binary. The murky encounter between “the state” and “the market” does more than merely reflect the persistent power of the so-called “authoritarian” state. By examining how the state-market complex is made and also severed by market participants who appeared at first to represent “the state,” this article underlines the precarious and patchy nature of state centrality.
What Determines Migrant Workers’ Life Chances in Contemporary China? Hukou, Social Exclusion, and the Market
It is widely believed that household registration (hukou) continues to play a fundamental role in determining migrant workers’ life chances in contemporary China. This article contends, on the contrary, that the importance of hukou has declined substantially, and that migrant workers’ life chances would not be significantly improved even if China were to abolish the hukou system. Based on an investigation of migrant workers in Beijing and Chifeng City in Inner Mongolia, the author shows that in addition to hukou, two other mechanisms—social exclusion and the market—also limit migrant workers’ life chances. Moreover, it is not hukou but social exclusion and market resources that most concern the majority of migrant workers when they strive to find a better job, move up the social ladder, and secure opportunities to settle in the city.
The Theoretical and Practical Implications of China’s Development Experience: The Role of Informal Economic Practices
Philip C. C. Huang<br />Jan 1, 2011; 37:3-43<br />
China’s New-Age Small Farms and Their Vertical Integration: Agribusiness or Co-ops?
The future of Chinese agriculture lies not with large mechanized farms but with small capital-labor dual intensifying family farms for livestock-poultry-fish raising and vegetable-fruit cultivation. Chinese food consumption patterns have been changing from the old 8:1:1 pattern of 8 parts grain, 1 part meat, and 1 part vegetables to a 4:3:3 pattern, with a corresponding transformation in agricultural structure. Small family-farming is better suited for the new-age agriculture, including organic farming, than large-scale mechanized farming, because of the intensive, incremental, and variegated hand labor involved, not readily open to economies of scale, though compatible with economies of scope. It is also better suited to the realities of severe population pressure on land. But it requires vertical integration from cultivation to processing to marketing, albeit without horizontal integration for farming. It is against such a background that co-ops have arisen spontaneously for integrating small farms with processing and marketing. The Chinese government, however, has been supporting aggressively capitalistic agribusinesses as the preferred mode of vertical integration. At present, Chinese agriculture is poised at a crossroads, with the future organizational mode for vertical integration as yet uncertain.
China’s New-Age Small Farms and Their Vertical Integration: Agribusiness or Co-ops?
The future of Chinese agriculture lies not with large mechanized farms but with small capital-labor dual intensifying family farms for livestock-poultry-fish raising and vegetable-fruit cultivation. Chinese food consumption patterns have been changing from the old 8:1:1 pattern of 8 parts grain, 1 part meat, and 1 part vegetables to a 4:3:3 pattern, with a corresponding transformation in agricultural structure. Small family-farming is better suited for the new-age agriculture, including organic farming, than large-scale mechanized farming, because of the intensive, incremental, and variegated hand labor involved, not readily open to economies of scale, though compatible with economies of scope. It is also better suited to the realities of severe population pressure on land. But it requires vertical integration from cultivation to processing to marketing, albeit without horizontal integration for farming. It is against such a background that co-ops have arisen spontaneously for integrating small farms with processing and marketing. The Chinese government, however, has been supporting aggressively capitalistic agribusinesses as the preferred mode of vertical integration. At present, Chinese agriculture is poised at a crossroads, with the future organizational mode for vertical integration as yet uncertain.
Political Ideology, the Party, and Politicking: Justice System Reform in China
In November 2008, the Politburo issued a new justice system reform plan that it hailed as emblematic of China’s new approach to harmonious society building. This reform plan is an exemplar of how politics works in the Hu Jintao era. It represents an attempt—using ideology, party leadership, and “politicking”—to change the way both social and organizational problems are handled. Looking at one facet of justice administration—criminal justice—reveals how these three political aspects intertwine to produce a path to reform that relies on a strong authoritarian hand. A new emphasis on balance, heralded as a key to the reform, provides a way of navigating the problem of how to achieve social stability in China within the broad state objective of building a harmonious society. The approach in the 2008 plan uses the discourse of harmonious society to attempt to maneuver out of some long-standing stalemates in both institutional management and the punitive culture of justice administration. This new reform path has less to do with creating the conditions for judicial independence and more to do with generating the conditions for greater uniformity in judicial practice across the nation.
The May Fourth Movement and Provincial Warlords: A Reexamination
This article reexamines the relationship between the May Fourth Movement and warlordism by questioning the long-held assumption that the movement was from its inception as anti-warlord as it was anti-imperialist. In particular, it shows that popular nationalism before and at the beginning of the May Fourth Movement received continual support from many provincial warlords under and beyond the nominal control of the Beijing government. It demonstrates how and why these provincial warlords endorsed the patriotism of the movement at the national and international levels, even as they suppressed radical protests in their political domains. This analysis uncovers the long-obscured fact that the May Fourth Movement succeeded with crucial support from such provincial warlords because of its broad nationalism and the disunity of warlord politics. This rediscovery also reveals how military involvement in the movement changed the trajectory of both warlord politics and anti-warlordism in modern China.
The Theoretical and Practical Implications of China’s Development Experience: The Role of Informal Economic Practices
China’s economic reform has been understood mainly in terms of the “new institutional economics,” emphasizing the role of marketized private firms and related laws. Andrew Walder and Yingyi Qian, however, have pointed out instead the crucial role played by Chinese local governments, especially their township and village enterprises. Neither interpretation, however, can account for what has happened in China since the mid-1990s, when the main engine for development shifted to local governments’ competition for and active support of outside investment. Typically, local governments have provided land and related infrastructural support below cost, plus special subsidies and tax privileges, and also circumvented formal rules and regulations on labor use and environmental protection. Those informal practices and the huge accompanying informal economy, not just the new enterprises drawn in, have been the main dynamic both for China’s striking GDP growth and its mounting social and environmental crises. The analysis presented here is historical-cum-theoretical and calls for a new understanding of China’s development experience and of its practical implications.
The Theoretical and Practical Implications of China’s Development Experience: The Role of Informal Economic Practices
China’s economic reform has been understood mainly in terms of the “new institutional economics,” emphasizing the role of marketized private firms and related laws. Andrew Walder and Yingyi Qian, however, have pointed out instead the crucial role played by Chinese local governments, especially their township and village enterprises. Neither interpretation, however, can account for what has happened in China since the mid-1990s, when the main engine for development shifted to local governments’ competition for and active support of outside investment. Typically, local governments have provided land and related infrastructural support below cost, plus special subsidies and tax privileges, and also circumvented formal rules and regulations on labor use and environmental protection. Those informal practices and the huge accompanying informal economy, not just the new enterprises drawn in, have been the main dynamic both for China’s striking GDP growth and its mounting social and environmental crises. The analysis presented here is historical-cum-theoretical and calls for a new understanding of China’s development experience and of its practical implications.
The Theoretical and Practical Implications of China’s Development Experience: The Role of Informal Economic Practices
China’s economic reform has been understood mainly in terms of the “new institutional economics,” emphasizing the role of marketized private firms and related laws. Andrew Walder and Yingyi Qian, however, have pointed out instead the crucial role played by Chinese local governments, especially their township and village enterprises. Neither interpretation, however, can account for what has happened in China since the mid-1990s, when the main engine for development shifted to local governments’ competition for and active support of outside investment. Typically, local governments have provided land and related infrastructural support below cost, plus special subsidies and tax privileges, and also circumvented formal rules and regulations on labor use and environmental protection. Those informal practices and the huge accompanying informal economy, not just the new enterprises drawn in, have been the main dynamic both for China’s striking GDP growth and its mounting social and environmental crises. The analysis presented here is historical-cum-theoretical and calls for a new understanding of China’s development experience and of its practical implications.
