Commodifying Communism
Business, Trust, and Politics in a Chinese City

An examination of how private business is conducted through personal ties in China's market economy.

David L. Wank (Author)

9780521620734, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 January 1999

312 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.3 cm, 0.606 kg

"...this perceptive book offers a penetrating account of the dynamics of private business growth in China...excellent." American Journal of Sociology

Commodifying Communism is an ethnographically grounded account of the institutional organization and political consequences of China's historically unprecedented market growth. Drawing upon almost two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this book challenges conventional views of post-communist emerging markets being tied to the retreat of the state. David Wank shows how entrepreneurs running private trading companies in Xiamen City, Fujian Province (one of China's five special economic zones) maximize profit and security through patron-client networks with local state agents. The book examines how processes of opportunity, exchange, expectations, and advantage are constrained by both statist and popular institutions in market clientelism. It also considers the implications of market clientelism for the dynamism of China's emerging market economy relative to Eastern European post-communist economies and its political consequences for state-society and center-local relations.

Introduction
1. Orientation of the study
2. Institutional commodification: concepts and categories of analysts
Part I. Instituted Processes of Commercial Clientelism: 3. The structure of commercial opportunity of Xiamen
4. Symbiotic transactions between private firms and public units
5. Enhancing expectations: the social organization of contracts
6. Entrepreneurial paths and capital: personal attributes as competitive advantage
Part II. Economic and Political Outcomes: 7. Comparing economic performance in China and Eastern Europe
8. The transformation of political order
9. Epilogue: evolutionary trends in the 1990s.

Subject Areas: Social research & statistics [JHBC], Social groups [JFS]