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 |
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