Suchergebnisse

"For decades, China's Xinjiang region has been the site of clashes between long-residing Uyghur and Han settlers. Up until now, much scholarly attention has been paid to state actions and the Uyghur's efforts to resist cultural and economic repression. This has left the other half of the puzzle--the motivations and ambitions of Han settlers themselves--sorely understudied. With Oil and Water, anthropologist Tom Cliff offers the first ethnographic study of Han in Xinjiang, using in-depth vignettes, oral histories, and more than fifty original photographs to explore how and why they became the people they are now. By shifting focus to the lived experience of ordinary Han settlers, Oil and Water provides an entirely new perspective on Chinese nation building in the twenty-first century and demonstrates the vital role that Xinjiang Han play in national politics--not simply as Beijing's pawns, but as individuals pursuing their own survival and dreams on the frontier"--Ebook Central description

In a context of increased state expectations that Chinese private enterprise will "give back to society," this article argues that the way that locally developed private enterprises engage in welfare and poverty relief in rural China is decisively shaped by the social networks of the owners. Three very different industrial structures located near to each other in Fanhua County, Shandong Province, are compared. These are: a small group of large conglomerates situated near the county seat, a networked cluster of over 3,000 mostly small and micro furniture companies, and a cluster of midsize companies that produce sheet steel. Industrial structures have shaped the owners' social networks in each of these three industries. The norms embedded in the businesspeople's social/business networks, which are affected by the influence on the networks of political authority, factory-owner peers, and ordinary locals, orient the private enterprise owners toward providing or not providing social welfare in particular ways. (China J/GIGA)

This article analyses the money transformations and institutional frameworks that are central to highly successful and innovative, yet legally questionable, community welfare funds in Huagang (pseudonym), an industrialized township in Shandong. One of two aims is to address the question, "How do funny money transactions constitute, undermine, affirm, and/or modify political authority—and whose political authority?" The second aim is to contribute to the study of formation within the economy—"how an economy emerges in the first place, and grows and changes structurally over time". Both are approached by detailing how the irregular or nonlegal financial transactions that underpin welfare provision by private enterprise in Huagang are made acceptable to local authority by institutional articulation at the village level. Institutional articulation involves registered community welfare funds being granted limited and contingent autonomy on the basis of their formalised exterior institutional face, but operating according to their informal interior institutional mechanisms. The detailed case study supports the argument of this special issue that the admixture of legitimate with illegitimate transactions is intrinsic to the operation of the formal economy in China. Institutional articulation and irregular financial transactions play key roles in innovation, structural change, and the production of political authority.

This special issue of American Behavioral Scientist examines the irregular transactions and informal institutions that constitute the essential underside of the Chinese economy. Contributors with a range of disciplinary backgrounds explore shadow banking, social welfare and rural development by private enterprise, NGO financing, the credit/debt cycle of informal international trade, and offshore investment by Chinese state-owned enterprises. The question posed by all contributors is as follows: How, in China through the 2010s, do irregular or nonlegal financial transactions influence political authority? Institutions, the rules and norms by which we live, are found to be key. This "Introduction" sketches the conceptual links between money, rules, and ruling in the context of the heightened authoritarianism and institutional formalization of the 2010s—the Xi Jinping era.

The socialist-era danwei lives on in contemporary, ever-reforming China. Ironically, the processes of reform helped to enable the perpetuation of the traditional danwei's paternalistic practices by concentrating monopoly power in selected, partially market-listed, centrally owned enterprise groups. The Tarim Oilfield Company is an outstanding example of this balancing act between socialist and market structures-a neo-danwei. This article maps these structures using detailed ethnographic data gathered over two years working in the company. Multiple subjective viewpoints show that distinctions between different categories of employee are crucial to maintaining the danwei in the midst of marketization. Like the socialist-era danwei, the oil company produces dependency and constrains social mobility. Yet, amidst glorification of open competition and individual achievement, the desire to enter a danwei is as strong as ever. The certainty of danwei life is highly valued; stability becomes a status symbol. (China J/GIGA)