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The minimalist, atomistic classical liberal definition of markets is dominant in the global political economy literature, if often implicitly so. But major shifts are occurring in the 21st century, including China's rise, which highlight the deficiencies of this definition and challenge us to develop fresh tools to conceptualize global markets. There are three ways in which China's emergence challenges established market conceptualizations: the continued resilience of China's authoritarian state-led capitalist economic model, China's positioning around notions of power and fairness in the global economy, and China's mixed preferences regarding global markets. The study of China's rise, far from only impressing upon us how different China is, shines a light on dynamics that are prevalent everywhere, yet suffer from a lack of attention. This paper argues that the political economy literature is limiting the development of richer conceptualizations of the market because it operates within three conceptual 'straitjackets': the notion of the pure market as ideal- type, the state-market dichotomy and the notion of a sequential progression towards a market economy. The fact that markets are an underdefined concept deprives us of useful tools for elucidating important questions about markets in the global economy and limits our capacity to evaluate China's impact on global markets. Drawing from diverse literatures, from comparative politics, to classical political economy and economic sociology, this paper develops an institutionally grounded set of tools, including a list of characteristics and a typology, to define, evaluate and compare markets, and inspire others to contribute to the endeavour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the implications of one of the great intellectual revolutions of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the replacement of Marxist economics by neoclassical economics in China. The analysis summarizes what is distinctive about Marxist and neoclassical ways of thinking. The paper then demonstrates how these differences led to different framings and different conclusions about a number of key topics related to the development of capitalism in China. Among the topics explored are the merits of state-owned enterprises, the nature of inequality in China, and the relationship between capitalism and the environment. The paper concludes with a discussion of the different policy agendas that emerge from the different framings offered by neoclassical and Marxist economics. JEL Classification: B41, B51, P2, O53 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A dialectical relationship between 'big D' Development (broadly, the formal interventionist, international Development sector) and little 'd' development (the immanent structures and processes of capitalism) is a concept widely invoked in Geography and Development Studies. In this paper, we ask how the d/Development dialectic is evolving under current conjunctures of emergent state capitalism(s). We suggest that, going beyond 'containment', Development is ever more deeply inhabited by (capitalist) development; with implications for its palliative and restructuring roles, and for praxis, contestation and transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper examines the dynamic relationship between liquefied natural gas (LNG) price, LNG revenue, non-LNG revenue and government spending (GOVS) in China using autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) and structural vector auto-regressive (SVAR) model. The goal of carrying out ARDL and SVAR together is to consolidate and strengthen the consistency of the results obtained from both approaches. ARDL results show that a positive influence relationship between both short-run and long-run LNG prices, LNG revenue, non-LNG revenue and GOVS, but there was no significant relationship between LNG price and GOVS. The SVAR also substantiates the results of ARDL test and provides further insight which shows that long-run fiscal synchronization hypothesis is evidenced between the LNG revenue and GOVS, while spend-tax hypothesis exists in the long-run between GOVS and non-LNG revenue. It is also evidenced that there is a complementary relationship between LNG revenue and non-LNG revenue, but this complementary role is stronger than the substitution role. Since non-LNG revenue has a greater impact on GOVS in the short-run, and the impact of LNG prices and LNG revenue on GOVS in the long-run increases over time, thus, GOVS mitigates the direct impact of non-LNG revenue to some extent, and that an appropriate allocation of spending in the non-LNG industry will have a positive impact on the development of the market economy supporting the Keynesian and spend-tax hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have different views on the nature and pace of capitalist transformation of the Chinese agriculture. In this paper, we have, for the first time, estimated the approximate size of agricultural proletariat in China as well as the prevalence of wage labor in agricultural work. We argue that by comparing with typical capitalist agricultures in the world, China’s agriculture is increasingly capitalist rather than petty producer/populist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's economic system has yet to be adequately explained by any models. China's export-led industries were initially viewed as a source of cheap labor but its economy has now emerged as a serious competitor to advanced capitalism. However, after decades of market reform, China's state sector, rather than disappearing or being marginalized, has become a leader in strategic sectors and the driver of its investment-led growth. Heterodox political scientists and economists have long argued that China is at best a variant within global capitalism. This paper discusses heterodox theories that position China as part of global capitalism or regard it as a variety of capitalism. It then examines the anomalies of Chinese "capitalism" and suggests that primitive socialist accumulation—operating in conflict with capitalist accumulation—offers a more appropriate theoretical framework for studying China's development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The death of urban entrepreneurialism is proclaimed surprisingly by opposite conceptualisations of austerity urbanism and radical municipalism. This paper argues that rather than seeing them as contrasting types, post-pandemic statecraft reflects the increasing tension and entanglement between capitalistic and territorial logic. From the ground of Chinese urban governance, we illustrate how Chinese statecraft maintains state strategic and extra-economic intention through deploying and mobilising market and society – to create its own agents and to co-opt those that are already existent or emerging. This statecraft is illustrated through community building, urban development, and regional formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Borders and mobilities have played key roles in the transformations of capitalism that have accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic. We attempt to distinguish novel developments in the control of movements of bodies, labour, and capital from processes of renationalisation, financialisation, and platformisation that were in train before the outbreak. Focusing on logistical techniques and technologies that govern the global circulation of people and things, this article explores the spatial shifts and ruptures that have marked the capitalist crisis occasioned by the pandemic. We give empirical attention to movements and struggles of migration in China, India, the Americas, and the Mediterranean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the spatial dynamics and emerging locational hierarchies of the venture capital (VC) industry in China, largely as a result of the global expansion of VC investors from the US and other advanced economies. Based on a comprehensive database compiled by the author from the best available sources, this is the first systemic geographic study on the VC industry in an emerging economy. This study finds that the rising cluster of VC supply and demand in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen was enabled by the juxtaposition of spatial proximity effects, investment syndication, and interregional office networks within China's unique institutional environment. It further demonstrates that the spatial dynamics of the globalizing venture capitalism has to be understood in light of the geo-institutional mechanisms shaping the whole 'VC cycle' of fundraising-investing-divesting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrasting existing scholarship in 'socialism with Chinese characteristics', this article builds on the theorisation of infrastructural capitalism as an emerging global-capitalist project entangled with both China's state-socialist ideology and the latest nationalistic revitalisation agenda, serving both political and commercial goals, yet also rendering discontent and resistance in daily business and employment practices. Through participant observation across 13 Alibaba departments or subsidiaries, semi-structured interviews with workers in Alibaba and other Chinese platform companies, and the analysis of corporate documentation and media reports, our ethnographic study highlights the 'physical and digital (phygital)' nature of infrastructure, and theorises how discursive, symbolic, and sensorial techniques are adopted to direct and sustain infrastructural capitalism in daily organisational setting through three unique mechanisms: public-private partnerships, corporate prosumption networks (CPN) and imagineered global competition. This article's key contributions are threefold: to dissect the intertwined discursive, symbolic and affective mechanisms through which the 'invisible' infrastructures of capitalism are made 'visible' and 'sensible'; unpack the variegated impacts and inherent dilemmas of infrastructural capitalism; and reimagine the possibility of individual resistance and systemic transgression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a new approach to analyse labour relations at the level of companies, industries, and regions in China. Referring to Western and Chinese labour sociology and industrial relations theory, the author applies the concept of "regimes of production" to the context of China's emerging capitalism. This article focuses on China's modern core manufacturing industries (i.e. steel, chemical, auto, electronics, and textile and garment); it explores regimes of production in major corporations and new forms of labour-management cooperation, the growing inequality and fragmentation of labour policies within the modern sectors of the Chinese economy, consequences for further reform regarding labour standards, collective bargaining, and workers' participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent round of debate over China’s state and private economy has fundamentally touched upon whether or not China should abandon or strengthen the socialist elements within the market economy. In this paper, we argue that the debate is, in essence, a continued class struggle in the political and ideological superstructure. Then we discuss the foreseeable future of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) under current political and economic conditions. We will further propose the necessary reforms for the SOEs to move towards a truly socialist form of public ownership. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes a neo-Polanyian framework of neoliberalization-asmarketization for understanding geohistorically embedded marketization based on five interlinked theoretical conceptualizations: embedded marketization, hybrid integration, double movement, active society, and qualitative state. I argue that this framework can be useful to supplement existing theorizing of neoliberalism, and to facilitate comparative case studies across vastly differently contexts. This framework is then taken to analyze China's post-Mao transition to a market economy. I argue that China's gradualist transition from a centrally planned economy to a mixed economy has been maneuvered by a self-regulating party-state (dis)embedded in a deactivated (active) society. Due to the existence of multiple veto players and intraparty 'double movement', the marketization was able to be mostly socially progressive until 1993. However, it was no longer the case when the 'socialist market economy' was enshrined and, without political liberalization, the Chinese version of neoliberalization has become even bleaker than elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Isabella Weber's book is a prodigious contribution to the political economy of Chinese development. One of the text's most valuable contributions is its identification of the consistently anti-inflationary stance of CCP policy. Its coverage of debates surrounding price stability and liberalisation during the shifts away from the plan in the late 1980s is particularly valuable. Here, I focus on the question of inflation, which since 2021 has dramatically appeared on the agenda for the first time in the professional lives of many political economists and geographers in the global north. The book provides valuable, fine-grained evidence from contemporary Chinese policymakers (above all through a reading of Zhao Ziyang's writings) to make the case that the inflationary pressures experienced in China as the government experimented with reforming the planned economy during the late 1980s were not principally monetary phenomena – nor were they understood as such by contemporary actors. I build on the text by showing how it demonstrates the relevance of exploring the inflation question at a variety of spatial scales. I conclude by considering how contemporary Chinese policymakers may negotiate this inflationary 'scale-jumping'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a framework to discuss when a community's data is moved abroad without their informed consent, a practice I term data trafficking. I analyze Grindr, an LGBTQIA+ dating platform that has changed hands between China and the United States to demonstrate what data trafficking is, how it undermines national sovereignty, and how it erodes human rights. In the United States, corporate policies are the leading indicator for data governance practices, influencing a system known as multi-stakeholderism. In China, forced localization to government servers drives data governance practices. This article extends how we think about transnational consumer data security by examining how weak data security designed to support the growth of Silicon Valley firms amplifies the capacity of extra-territorial data governance practices asserted by the Chinese government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In socialist economies, work organizations differ widely in the compensation they provide employees, despite the absence of key product and labor market processes thought to explain such inequalities in market economies. Existing theories of stratification in socialist economies focus on the power and privilege of elites, but inequalities among organizations are not created by political particularism or elite power. In this paper I sketch elements of an institutional theory of stratification anchored in a conception of property rights -- the right to derive income from productive assets. Two aspects of property rights guide the analysis: (1) the dispersion of property rights across a hierarchy of government jurisdictions, and (2) the exercise of these rights by government jurisdictions as they extract revenues, primarily through taxation. Extraction of revenues from a work organization varies with the budgetary resources of a government jurisdiction and the dependence of that jurisdiction on the outputs of the organization. Variation in revenue extraction, in turn, creates inequalities among work organizations in their abilities to provide benefits to employees. An analysis of survey data on the provision of housing and benefits by work organizations in the large industrial city of Tianjin, China provides provisional support for these ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for the construction of a new political economy based on Chinese practices. It begins with an explanation of the research approach of starting from practice, and from a distinctive mode of thinking that is akin to that of medicine, rather than Newtonian physics and mathematical logic. Then it discusses the present-day Chinese practices of combining socialism with market economy, state enterprises with private enterprises, the peasant economy with an industrial economy, and the party-state with the economy—all distinctive realities about the new Chinese political-economic system. The foil for the discussion is the long-standing hegemonic ideology and worldview of Anglo-American classical and neoclassical liberal economics and law. This article suggests that we employ China's traditional dyadic integration worldview, evident in today's practices, to arrive at a new integrative cosmological view that rises above both. To a considerable extent, this article is also a reinterpretation of classical Marxist political economy. What the article advocates may be termed a "participatory socialist market economy," to be distinguished from a bureaucratized and controlling socialist planned economy. This is a system that is still very much in the process of formation, its particular content and characteristics yet to be clarified and specified through a sustained period of searching through practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key to the local audience’s conceptions of the global spectacle, the marketized regional press in China has been increasingly confronted with a complex world to cover as China finds itself integrating steadily into the global marketplace and rising as a formidable power in the post-WTO era. Using the data collected from five Chinese regional newspapers in 1989 and 2009, this study indicates that the consequences of spillover in China’s growing integration with the global system and the ever-increasing media marketization have been carried into the domain of international news, particularly in terms of a more neutral journalistic perspective and a widened range of vision at the local level. The results also show that the regionalization of international news reporting is still contained within the orbit of the party-state. The comparison over a 20-year time span suggests that China’s integration into the world capitalism system has opened up a larger global landscape for the local press, but not necessarily a wider latitude to negotiate the terrain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author examines the dynamics of primitive accumulation through market-based competition for factors of production. Although much existing analysis of primitive accumulation focuses on accumulation through dispossession, in fact, competition in factor markets is one of the two principal means of primitive accumulation in rural China. A model of market-based interaction between capitalist and noncapitalist production is estimated with data from China in the 1990s. In this model there is no tendency for capitalist production to eliminate other forms of production; nor for income differences between sectors to disappear. Rates of migration between noncapitalist and capitalist systems of production depend on the means and variances of incomes in the two sectors; however, at incomes prevailing in 1990s China, rates of migration were predicted to be (and in fact were) higher where capitalist incomes are higher, where noncapitalist incomes are higher, and where the ratio of capitalist:noncapitalist incomes are lower. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After nearly 450 years of colonial administration, Portugal returned the territory of Macao to the People's Republic of China in 1999. Following the handover, Macao's postcolonial government dismantled the forty-year-old local gambling monopoly and opened Macao to investment by gaming companies from North America, Australia, and Hong Kong. These companies are collectively spending $25 billion to tap the increasingly affluent and mobile market of tourists just across the border in mainland China. This investment has prompted remarkable economic development in the tiny city as well as a phantasmagoric transformation of the cityscape and a concomitant transmutation of Macao's social landscape. Understanding contemporary Macao requires attending to how the legacies of Portuguese colonialism and fascism and Chinese communism and market socialism merge in the spaces of the city today. Drawing inspiration from Walter Benjamin's dialectical analysis of the obsolete commodities of mass culture, this paper meditates through text and photographs on four copresent moments of Macao-socialist fossil, colonial ruin, capitalist dream, and utopian wish. A form of physiognomic urban 'dream analysis' rescues these multiple contradictory meanings of Macau and investigates the city's crucial role in both China's economic reforms and its utopian desires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theory and ideology of mainstream Anglo-American "marketism" do not accord with reality. Its core idea—equating all trade with equal and mutually beneficial market exchanges, and believing that such exchanges are certain to lead to division of labor and transformative changes in labor productivity—is a one-sided, idealized construction. It erases unequal exchanges under imperialism and ignores the realities of the use of cheap informal labor in developing countries by hegemonic capital in the globalized economy. It also disregards pervasive unethical pursuits of profit among producers and widespread human weaknesses among consumers. If we proceed instead from China's actual experiences, we can come to see and grasp the many different varieties of trade that differ from the abstractions of conventional marketism, including the "commercialization of extraction" that long characterized the principally unidirectional "trade" based on severe inequities between town and country, as well as the "growth without (labor productivity) development," or "involutionary commercialization," that long characterized domestic Chinese commerce that emerged under severe population pressures on the land. If we turn instead to the "take-off" period of the recent decades in Chinese economic development, we can see also the great contrast between Chinese realities and the mainstream economics construct of a "laissez faire state," and see instead the state engaging most actively in development, and state-owned enterprises working closely together with private enterprises. Those realities are perhaps most evident in the recent dramatic development of China's mammoth real estate economy that has been the main engine of rapid development since about 2000—most especially in its immense process of the "capitalization of land." We can also see how the tradition of the "socialist planned economy" has operated in unison with the new capitalist market economy, by combining the twin ideals and mechanisms of "people's livelihood" and "private profit." What is needed is a new kind of political economy that can grasp and illuminate such changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses panel data to investigate the different roles of the Chinese government in influencing companies' decision making about corporate environmental reporting (CER) via a two-stage process. The results show that the Chinese government appears to mainly influence the decision whether to disclose or not, but has limited influence on how much firms disclose. The results also show that the traditional model of authoritarian capitalism (under which state-owned enterprises [SOEs] are the major governance arrangement) is transforming into a new model. In the new model of authoritarian capitalism, the Chinese government uses newer, more sophisticated tools to manage both state-owned and non–state-owned companies. In addition, these new governance arrangements appear to be more efficient than the traditional model. The findings of this study have implications for both the Chinese government and for Chinese companies, as well as making important contributions to the literature and knowledge of CER in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within three decades, the urban housing reform in China has changed access to housing from a system of socialist administrative allocation to that of more market-dominated housing development and consumption. Researchers have studied the socioeconomic and spatial consequences of these profound transformations. This review focuses on China's housing inequality literature in relation to the changing origins, spatial patterns, and recent policy responses. The article reveals the unique features of China's transitional economy along with massive urbanization, in which housing inequalities are rooted in socialism and strengthened by institutional changes of a state-led market economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than 150 years ago, Marx predicted that the working class would become "the gravedigger of capitalism," a seemingly prescient prediction as socialism flourished between the two World Wars. However, traditional capitalist countries are thriving, while many socialist countries have collapsed during the past quarter-century. Nonetheless, capitalism is revealing its flaws both in the developed world (e.g. recent financial crises) and in rapidly developing countries (e.g. ecological damage), leading to social unrest that is making Marx's prediction relevant once more. Considering this situation from a broader historical perspective suggests that new social groups often evolve to fill niches left open by more traditional groups and can support the evolution of new social systems during the establishment of new industries, technologies, and institutions. Thus, they play a crucial role in initiating and guiding fundamental institutional change. Although capitalism has been surprisingly long-lived by historical standards for such systems, new systems may be evolving to push it aside. China's rapid socioeconomic changes in recent decades provide an opportunity to watch new social groups emerge and begin to play an important role in changing social institutions. The institutional diversity created and sustained by these groups may be important for humanity's long-term survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's economic and political reforms since 1978 represent one of the biggest institutional changes in the last century. Because most research has focused on the economics of institutional change rather than the evolution of political institutions, a theoretical framework to explain China's rapid economic development is lacking. To understand the successes and failures of China's institutional change, we reviewed China's innovative political and economic practices during the past 30 years. We found that the country's political and economic institutions combine to form a dynamic equilibrium that can explain the impressive economic results. China's leaders dream of new institutions that will improve upon traditional Western capitalism, based on a combination of central planning with traditional capitalist approaches that increase the system's flexibility. If China's leaders can combine this approach with decreased social costs compared with previous socioeconomic systems, this will represent a new era and a model that other nations can follow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferation of global value chains is portrayed in academic and policy circles as representing new development opportunities for firms and regions in the global south. This article tests these claims by examining original material from non-governmental organizations' reports and secondary sources on the garment and electronics chains in Cambodia and China, respectively. This empirical evidence suggests that these global value chains generate new forms of worker poverty. Based on these findings, the article proposes the novel Global Poverty Chain approach. The article critiques and reformulates principal concepts associated with the Global Value Chain approach – of value-added, rent and chain governance – and challenges a core assumption prevalent within Global Value Chain analysis: that workers' low wages are a function of their employment in low productivity industries. Instead, it shows that (1) many supplier firms in the global south are as, or more, productive than their equivalents in the global north; (2) often predominantly female workers in these industries are super exploited (paid wages below their subsistence requirements) and (3) chain governance represents a lead firm value-capturing strategy, which intensifies worker exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deploys Bob Jessop’s strategic-relational approach to ask two questions: First, how is China’s party-based power bloc seeking to renew its hegemony, as the symbolic power of ‘Dengism’ erodes in an age marked by class formation and increasing social tensions? Second, how are subaltern social movements seeking to influence the articulation of a new, less elitist hegemonic project? Based on original interview data, I compare two of China’s most famous organic intellectuals, both centrally placed in class-based counter-movements triggered by China’s marketization. Both advocate a non-dissident strategy of change within rather than against the party-state, but their visions differ greatly. Trade unionist and 1989 protest leader Han Dongfang favors a social democratic vision based on strengthening the collective bargaining power of the Chinese working class within the market economy. In contrast, the self-declared ‘petty bourgeois’ vision of agricultural economist Wen Tiejun advocates resisting marketization, reinvigorating traditional lifestyles, and enhancing the power of the peasantry through self-organization. I argue that both visions are in partial tension with the status quo: While Han’s ‘laborism’ is compatible with the power bloc’s plans for a post-exportist accumulation strategy centered on domestic consumption, its liberal democratic premise contradicts the dictatorial state project of the Communist Party of China. Conversely, Wen’s ‘peasantism’ is symbiotic with the Communist Party of China’s hope to renew its political-ideological mandate by revitalizing Chinese culture, yet its radical economic underpinnings (emphasizing de-commodification and de-urbanization) make it hard to square with the overall logic of capitalist reform and opening-up. The successful articulation of a populist counter-hegemony depends on the extent to which the gap between laborism and peasantism is overcome both organizationally and intellectually. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Eccles et al.’s (1983) Expectancy Value Model, the two major constructs that influence young people’s activity choice are subjective task value and expectancy beliefs (Eccles et al., 1983). Eccles et al. (1983) conceptually distinguished four dimensions of subjective task value: attainment value, intrinsic value, utility value and cost, and two dimensions of expectancy beliefs: expectancies for success and competence beliefs. Previous studies have been conducted with Western populations, but little is known about how the subjective task value and expectancy beliefs act in relation to physical activity for Chinese populations. This study sought to examine the factors that contribute to Hong Kong Chinese young people’s values and expectancy beliefs in physical activity. The participants were selected purposefully for this qualitative interview study from a larger mixed method study (Pang and Ha, 2010). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 Hong Kong Chinese young people (six boys and six girls, aged 10–12) in three government-funded schools. Results invite us to take into account the two contrasting values of collectivism and individualism, the deeply rooted capitalistic economy and the philosophy of Confucianism that act hand in hand in shaping the physical activity values and expectancy beliefs of contemporary Hong Kong Chinese young people. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article gives a broad characterization of China's political economy, as well as specific aspects of its socio-economic instabilities. With a focus on China's export-oriented industry sectors, concepts from comparative and international political economy are applied to show how the Chinese economy can be understood as a variegated form of state-permeated capitalism that at the same time is deeply integrated into world economic processes. The article goes on to portray the socio-economic dynamics, as well as the instabilities of China's new capitalism, that are at the root of the state leadership's attempts to turn away from a one-sided model of export and investment-driven growth. Thereby, a number of obstacles are revealed for the "rebalancing" of the economy: a continued dependence on exports, a lack of domestic consumer demand which impedes a significant "social" upgrading, the ongoing low-wage model for which there is no end in sight, the limits of the state's steering capacity and the weaknesses of its fragmented, competition-driven structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of rural reform and China’s integration into the global capitalist market have increased the vulnerability of the rural poor to financial hardship, loss of cultural identity, and other deprivations. In response to this situation, we initiated a pilot action research project in 2005 in an ethnic minority community in the Yunnan province of China. It encouraged local women to form a handicraft group to preserve and develop indigenous cultural artefacts and crafts which are available for market consumption. It aims, through capacity building, enhance the women’s income, promote a new form of collectivism, protect the Zhuang ethnic minority traditional culture, and strengthen local cultural identity and confidence. This article first describes the dilemma of China’s rural development and introduces our theoretical perspective. Then it demonstrates how we invigorated the community participation and facilitated the rural social work step by step. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chongqing’s experience suggests that while Janos Kornai is surely correct about shortage in a planned economy, he is mistaken that market signals may only be employed under an economic regime of private property. Chongqing has called instead on government-owned firms, and their market earnings and appreciation, to fund social equity programs and infrastructural construction. This “third hand” is different from Adam Smith’s “invisible” first hand, which, on the basis of rational individuals pursuing their own interests, supposedly generates a self-regulating and optimizing market economy; it is also different from the second hand, by which the state engages in a variety of interventions in order to perfect the functioning of such a market economy. Its main actors are state-owned and not privately owned enterprises but, unlike earlier state enterprises, it strives not for the profit of the enterprise but rather for social equity and public benefit. It in fact at once challenges and utilizes the other two hands. Though state-owned, in the context of China’s current political-economic system and the globalized economy, this third hand does not behave like a monopoly; rather, it must compete against the other two hands, and not only against other localities within China but also other nations and economic entities outside China. Only if it succeeds in driving economic development under such competition can it become a “model” with wider application in China as a whole. And only thus can it, in a globalized economy dominated by capitalism, establish equitable development as a realistic alternative. Thanks to the Chongqing “experiment,” the question is no longer just a theoretical or ideological one, but one of observable and evolving realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban change in north-western China, an important region in economic history terms, has received relatively scant attention in the existing literature. To help fill this gap, this article examines the evolution of a state-owned industrial area called the City of Textiles, in Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, from its establishment and rise during the planned economy to its decline, deterioration, and redevelopment in the new market economy. The article focuses particularly on the roles played by the state and other factors relevant in the transformation, as well as exploring the experiences of local residents and businesses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

China’s economic liberalization reforms and quest for global status have raised concerns over ideological inconsistencies (the adoption of market economy is discrepant from China’s avowed belief in socialism) and image problems (the world that China wants to embrace perceives her as a menace). Official media discourse makes frequent reference to globalization and uses it to manage the inconsistencies and to bolster China’s global image. These discursive functions, though related to media discourse’s meaning-making functions, are sufficiently distinct from the latter to merit their own analysis. This article provides a theoretical discussion of the functions derived from social—psychological research on inconsistency justification and intergroup relations, with illustrative examples from relevant articles published in the People’s Daily between 1996 and 2006. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The consensus among economists is that China’s post-1978 market reform policies have produced one of the world’s greatest economic success stories. Some progressives believe that China is now capable of serving as an anchor for a new (non-U.S. dominated) global economy. A few claim that the reform experience demonstrates the workability (and desirability) of market socialism. This article is critical of these views. Its four main conclusions are as follows: first, the reforms have led to the restoration of capitalism, not a new form of market socialism. Second, the gains attributed to the reforms have been seriously overstated. Early successes were largely due to the economic foundation established during the pre-reform Mao era. Moreover, the reform process has begun to undermine this foundation, increasing the country’s dependence on foreign investment, technology, and markets. Third, the reforms have produced an increasingly exploitative growth process, one that generates considerable wealth for a minority at unacceptably high cost for the majority. Finally, the reforms also produced a growth process whose logic led it to become enmeshed in, and dependent upon, a broader process of transnational restructuring, one controlled by transnational capital. As a result, China is not only incapable of serving as an anchor for an alternative global economy, its accumulation dynamics actually contribute to the strengthening of existing structures of power and the global imbalances and tensions they generate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, the authors explore whether brands as they currently conceive of them existed in premodernity. They trace branding practices in China from 2700 BC to contemporary times and demonstrate that China has had a sophisticated brand infrastructure with a continuous history that has no known correspondence in any other part of the world. They review previous research on the history of branding and create a systematic overview of what is currently known about branding throughout history. From an historical analysis of branding practices and consumer culture in China, they find that premodern brands were important agents of consumer culture as early as the Song dynasty (960-1127). In China, brands emerged outside of a capitalist context and served primarily social functions. They chronicle the consumer culture of the time in China, and how brands developed out of it, demonstrating that brands can develop in varying ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in Jingdezhen between 2003 and 2006 revealed that copying and counterfeiting dominated porcelain production. Ideas about markets and the organization of production encouraged ceramists to copy and counterfeit in search of profit. At the same time, producers responded to others' fraudulent acts by personalizing their market participation. Their network building was motivated by the belief that individuals with whom you shared a personal connection would not cheat you. Ideas about atomized individuals and dishonest markets, on the one hand, and strategies to personalize market activity, on the other, characterized contemporary capitalism in Jingdezhen (and perhaps China more broadly). This contradiction exemplifies a dual process by which capitalism affects how people think and what they do, while at the same time preexisting ideas and practices inform how capitalism operates in a particular setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's rapid economic growth since 1978 has occurred precisely because it has not followed the strategy of parallel partial progression and financial liberalization advocated by Fan and Woo. However, China missed an historic opportunity to build welfare capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, choosing instead to dismantle its rural health care and educational systems and—as Philip Huang rightly argues—failing to secure workers' right in the burgeoning informal sector. In these respects, China's transition path has been far inferior to that of Britain in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Nevertheless, the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 has discredited Anglo-Saxon capitalism and presents a renewed opportunity for China to build a form of xiaokang socialism modeled on the Rheinish capitalism that was so successful in countries such as France, Germany, and Japan before 1989. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent actor-centric theory about the historical rise of capitalism emphasizes the role of the autonomous agrarian elite in fostering a sustained agricultural revolution. This revolution generated ample agrarian surplus, in the form of rural elite's elevated income, to fuel a capitalist-industrial takeoff in late-eighteenth-century England. The nontransition to capitalism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China, despite the vast surplus generated in its advanced agrarian sector, shows that high agricultural productivity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a capitalist takeoff. By comparing Qing China with eighteenth-century England, where capitalist industrialization erupted spontaneously, and nineteenth-century Japan, where capitalist industrialization succeeded under intensive state sponsorship, this article argues that a strong urban entrepreneurial elite, capable of centralizing the agrarian surplus and investing it in productive industrial innovation, were as important as the existence of the surplus itself in fomenting capitalist transition. The reproduction of the elite in eighteenth-century China was constrained, not by the anticommercial "oriental despotic" state as presumed in earlier literature, but by the state's paternalist disposition in managing urban class conflict. Capitalist-industrial development in China was further impeded in the nineteenth century, when a nexus of local predatory-military elite emerged in response to millenarian uprisings and wasted most of the agrarian surplus in their accumulation of means of violence. The negative case of China helps us advance the actor-centric model of capitalist transition by bringing urban entrepreneurs and class politics back in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The critical role of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) in firm performance has been widely studied in the U.S. context. However, the examination of this key construct in emerging regions such as China has been very limited. In this article, we hypothesize that the relationship between EO and firm performance is best represented as curvilinear, as opposed to linear, in China. We use a two-study approach to test the link between EO and performance, as expressed in both perceptual and objective performance. Findings of both studies demonstrate an inverted U-shape relationship. Implications for future research on EO are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does working in a western restaurant mean to people in urban China? This article, based on ethnographic research at three western food places in the northeastern Chinese city of Harbin, argues that for Harbiners at the turn of the century, working in western restaurants was meaningful for two reasons. First, these workplaces were seen as connected to the global capitalist economy and the world of cosmopolitan consumerism, in contrast to the local, provincial, and backward. Second, these workplaces were seen as distinct, and indeed oppositional, to state socialist workplaces and to the socialist understanding of work where individual contribution was rewarded by state paternalism. People who worked in western food restaurants understood work through the concept of development — people should develop themselves by acquiring skills and experiences through work. In other words, for those who worked in western food places, jobs were something to be `consumed' like courses in a self-designed training program for entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Control over communications is a crucial concomitant of political-economic power. China's emergence as an important force within the global capitalist system is thus giving rise to a substantially greater presence in the system of international communications. A series of initiatives, briefly inventoried here, aims to win a place for Chinese interests across the entire spectrum of media and telecommunications systems, spanning hardware, software and services. How should we interpret these in the context of China's rise? Chinese initiatives in communications and information are best apprehended neither as a developing country's attempt to redress glaring imbalances in the global communications system, though of course they contain traces of this, nor as a current threat to the global dominance of the United States, though over the long term this might change, much as the US challenged and ultimately unseated British control over international communications. Rather, they are seen here as contributing to the ongoing structural reconfiguration of the political economy of transnational capitalism. The likely outcome is greater, rather than lesser, instability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Market reforms in China have transformed relations between the mainland and its expatriate capitalist class, which is returning to participate in the country's economic resurgence. The "comprador" capitalism that China exported throughout East Asia is coming to an end, and with it the subservience of Chinese business to foreign capital. The transformation of China's relationship to its expatriate trading class is changing even the geography of the country. China has assimilated the foreign-ruled outposts on its borders Hong Kong and Macao--and shifted the center of economic gravity to the southeastern coastal regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protestant Christianity in China is divided into two segments, an official Protestant church and unofficial, "underground" church. As China's doors are opening to increased capitalism and modernization, the Protestant church in China may have the potential to offer a much-needed stabilizing societal influence. This article examines the strengths and weaknesses of both the official and unofficial Protestant churches from an organizational perspective. Four organizational theories -- social construct theory, social network theory, religious marketplace theory, and religious cultural influence theory -- are employed in evaluating each church group's potential for influencing a changing Chinese society and the likelihood that the two churches will unite in that effort. Each church group has developed distinctive qualities that make social influence possible but in limited venues and with limited groups of people. Their unique but conflicting characteristics make it unlikely that the two would become a united Protestant church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assesses the role played by market reforms in shaping the level and composition of production, energy use, and carbon emissions in China. Historical background on market reforms implemented in China from 1978 to 2003; Examination of the implications of eliminating state-directed allocation of capital; Possible consequences of China's transition to a market economy.

The strategic fit paradigm, originally derived from observations in market-based economies, asserts that an appropriate match between environment and strategy has significant and positive implications for business performance. Based on a random sample of Chinese electronics firms, this study systematically examines the applicability of the strategic fit paradigm in China's centrally planned economy in transition. Results indicate that while environment-strategy coalignment is evident, coalignment only improves performance under certain environmental conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Max Weber's comparative studies of the great non-European civilisations of India, China and Islam were, in spite of their breadth of content, focussed on the problem of the non-evolution of modern capitalism in them and most Weberian scholars did not, unfortunately, move far away from this. But the most interesting topic of comparison between China and India is not their common non-generation of capitalism but the totally different relation that evolved between the intellectuals and the state in each. A collaborative relation of the literati in the service of the state was evolved in China by the Han dynasty by a clever distortion of the Confucian ethic and it lasted with minor discontinuities until early this century. By contrast, the Indian Brahmin intellectuals gave only conditional support to the State, treating Dharma or Universal law as supreme and gave up hope of the imperial integration of India by the seventh century. Instead, they built a flexible pattern of cultural integration - based on Bhakti for contact with the masses and an all-India cultural elite for leadership-which has lasted all these centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay assesses the usefulness of Max Weber's sociology, particularly his writings on China, for the analysis of East Asian industrialisation. Many scholars writing about modern Asia criticise Weber's views on the relation between Confucian values and the development of capitalism. This essay suggests that many of these critics misinterpret Weber's writing on China. Acknowledging that Weber made errors in interpreting China, the authors, nonetheless, argue that Weber's perspective is most valuable in analysing Asian economic development because of the institutional approach he developed. Weber's institutional approach is outlined and briefly applied in a comparison of Japanese and Chinese industrialisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the split labor market discrimination against Chinese immigrants. Between 1852 and 1882, Chinese immigrants to the U.S. faced periodic outbursts of extensive discrimination. This was a period of transition from petty-commodity to capitalist relations. when producers became proletarians. In the course of this transition, emerging working-class solidarity was recurring disrupted by ethnic antagonism by white workers against Chinese competitors in the labor market. By the l870s, white small-business owners who employed white labor and competed against employers of Chinese labor had formed a political alliance with white workers in the Democratic Party which secured passage of the 1882 Exclusion Act banning further immigration of Chinese workers. The pattern of discrimination against the Chinese is analyzed from a split labor market perspective in order to explain the sources and outcomes of ethnic competition under conditions of unequal labor costs. Split labor market theory is expanded to include analysis of the reproduction of split labor market conditions and alternative sources of labor market segregation with emphasis placed on the effects of market crowding, a self-perpetuating racist discourse, and state action.