Chinas Motor or Economics

China's Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism

Author: Hill Gates

This monumental work reveals the continuities that underlie the changing surface of Chinese life from late imperial days to modern times. With a perspective that encompasses a thousand years of Chinese history, China's Motor provides a view of the social, economic, and political principles that have prompted people in widely varying circumstances to act, believe, and behave in ways that are labeled as Chinese. Hill Gates identifies two modes of organization in Chinese society: the petty capitalist mode, through which small producers structure economic activities, and the tributary mode of state-centered initiatives. Applying these analytic categories, Gates renders transparent some of the contradictions in Chinese life. Important among these are an adeptness at simultaneously creating hierarchies of distribution and rough-and-tumble competition; an extraordinarily strong kinship system that nonetheless permits infanticide and the sale of family members; popular religious beliefs that deify bureaucratic power while revering egalitarian transactions between gods and humans; and gender relations that both emphasize and undermine female power. In each instance, Gates reveals the workings of the dialectic between tributary and petty capitalist action, drawing evidence from the history of urbanization and the gendered division of labor, from kinship studies, from folk ideologies, and from economic development in Taiwan and the People's Republic of China.

Library Journal

Gates (senior research associate at the Center for Far East Asian Studies, Stanford Univ., and the author of Chinese Working Class Lives: Getting By in Taiwan, Cornell Univ., 1987) deals here with the continuities that underlie the changing surface of Chinese life from the late imperial period to modern times. The book attempts to provide a view of the social, economic, and political principles that identify a people as Chinese. Gates identifies two modes of organization in Chinese society. The first is the petty capitalist, characterized by a set of attitudes developed by family businesspeople and carried over into Chinese firms that were run on the principle "the buyer should buy as cheap, and the seller sell as dear, as possible," with the gain going into the pockets of both parties. The second is the tributary mode of state-centered initiatives. Using these categories, Gates explores some of the contradictions in Chinese life, such as a strong kinship system that nonetheless permits infanticide. This book is recommended only for academic libraries with strong Chinese collections.-Dennis L. Noble, Sequim, Wash.

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments
	Chinese Dynasties of the Late Empire
Ch. 1	Introduction	1
Ch. 2	The Tributary and Petty-Capitalist Modes of Production	13
Ch. 3	Motion in the System	42
Ch. 4	Cities and Space	62
Ch. 5	Patricorporations: The State and the Household	84
Ch. 6	Patricorporations: The Lineage	103
Ch. 7	Dowry and Brideprice	121
Ch. 8	Folk Ideologies: Rulers and Commoners	148
Ch. 9	Folk Ideologies: Women and Men	177
Ch. 10	Petty Capitalism in Taiwan	204
Ch. 11	Re-creating the Tributary in China	243
Ch. 12	Conclusions	270
	Appendix: Dowry to Wedding-Cost Ratios	281
	Sources	287
	General Index	321
	Index of Place Names	325

Books about: Drawn to Extremes or Business of Writing and Speaking

Economics

Author: Stephen L Slavin

Steve Slavin's lively and comprehensive Economics student-friendly, step-by-step approach, coupled with its low price and built-in Workbook/Study Guide is very attractive to adopters. Instructors and students like the author's humorous anecdotes, direct language, and easy conversational style. The text encourages active rather than passive reading.