Constructing China's Capitalism Shanghai and the Nexus of Urban-Rural Industries

"The proliferation of township and village enterprises (TVEs) in post-Mao China was once heralded as a dynamic form of rural industrialization that built upon firm socialist foundations to permit rapid economic growth under market reform. Numerous scholars have explored the rise of the TVEs in the 1980s and early 1990s and their remarkable contributions to the Chinese economic miracle. Far fewer, however, have traced the equally remarkable demise of the TVEs at the end of the twentieth century. Drawing upon original field work in the Shanghai region, Daniel Buck offers an informed account of this dramatic development. Arguing that the turnaround was the result of neither government policy nor market competition, he shows how rural TVEs and urban state-owned enterprises actively restructured commodity chains to put in place a new labor regime that favored urban capital over rural labor and livelihoods. This is important reading for anyone interested in the complex causes and immense human cost of China's amazing economic rise." - Elizabeth J. Perry, Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government, Harvard University