Village Economy and Culture in Contemporary China  

Oleh:

Hogersen, Sting

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Modern China vol. 28 no. 2 (Apr. 2002), page 253-274.
Topik: Village Economy and Culture in Contemporary China
Fulltext: 253MC282.pdf (155.54KB)

Isi artikel

The remarkable growth of China’s township and village enterprises (TVEs) has attracted global attention, and several different explanations of their success have been presented.The eight volumes of Village Economy and Culture in Contemporary China1 examine how informal constraints rooted in Chinese culture have influenced the behavior of the TVEs and their relation to the communities in which they exist and, conversely, how industrialization has transformed rural culture.In 1997, this book series received the prestigious National Book Prize (Guojia tushu jiang) in the category of economics, demonstrating the keen interest its cultural approach to economic studies raised in Chinese academic and political circles.These studies thus deserve serious attention, both as a unique and ambitious attempt to place several in-depth village studies inside a common interpretive framework focused on the notion of Chinese culture and as an expression of Chinese social scientists’thinking about culture in the 1990s. For several years, it has been very fashionable to attribute the recent economic growth in “Greater China” at least partly to Chinese cultural characteristics.Ethnic Chinese business networks (“bamboo networks”) and family values have been analyzed, and the possible links between Confucianism, on one hand, and entrepreneurship and modernization, on the other, have been discussed not least inside the East Asian region itself.The cultural approach has also been attacked, though, and for good reasons.Critics assail its essentialized and monolithic concept of culture, which is not very useful for understanding historical change and local variations and tends to cloak exploitation and social conflicts under the cover of cultural harmony and ethnic unity (Dirlik, 1996; Chan, 2000).My focus here, after summarizing these volumes, will be how the series operationalizes the concept of culture and how it makes its way across the “culturalist” minefield.

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