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

Drawing upon almost two years of ethnographic fieldwork in China, Wank reveals a system in which the state continues to play a significant and central, though transformed role in business. He shows how entrepreneurs running private trading companies in Xiamen (one of China's five Special Economic Zones) in Fujian province must cultivate patron-client networks with local state agents in order to maximize profit and security. The author examines how processes of opportunity, transactions, contracts, and competition are constrained by both statist and popular institutions in commercial clientelism. He considers the implications of this patron-client network system for China's economic dynamism relative to Eastern European, post-communist economies, and looks at the political consequences for state-society and center-local relations. This book offers a portrait of how private business is conducted in China's emerging "free" market.