History from the Dustbins

Abstract

In this essay, I reflect on the growing political obstacles to doing business history in China and how, in my doctoral dissertation research, I attempted to overcome them. More specifically, I discuss how I drew on unconventional historical sources and novel data to examine the relationship between informal entrepreneurial activity and economic change in Maoist China (1949–1978). Through the quantitative analysis of thousands of case files of individuals prosecuted as “speculators and profiteers”—discarded administrative documents that were recovered from Chinese flea markets—I reassessed the scale and scope of informal entrepreneurial activity in Maoist China. I then went on to triangulate these data with evidence found in other sources to illustrate how, over time, informal entrepreneurial activity became more collusive, encompassing, and impossible to contain. Ultimately, I argued that China’s “Reform and Opening Up” was not the state-led watershed event that it is often made out to be; rather, economic and institutional change was, at least partly, the result of a bottom-up transformation, decades in the making. This essay thus suggests that the use of unconventional sources and mixed methods presents opportunities both for doing research in contexts where history is being actively securitized and for producing countervailing narratives that decenter the state.

Full text

ARTICLE
History from the Dustbins
Adam K. Frost
In this essay, I reflect on the growing political obstacles to doing business history in China and
how, in my doctoral dissertation research, I attempted to overcome them. More specifically, I
discuss how I drew on unconventional historical sources and novel data to examine the rela-
tionship between informal entrepreneurial activity and economic change in Maoist China
(1949–1978). Through the quantitative analysis of thousands of case files of individuals prose-
cuted as “speculators and profiteers”—discarded administrative documents that were recov-
ered from Chinese flea markets—I reassessed the scale and scope of informal entrepreneurial
activity in Maoist China. I then went on to triangulate these data with evidence found in other
sources to illustrate how, over time, informal entrepreneurial activity became more collusive,
encompassing, and impossible to contain. Ultimately, I argued that China’s“Reform and Open-
ing Up”was not the state-led watershed event that it is often made out to be; rather, economic
and institutional change was, at least partly, the result of a bottom-up transformation, decades in
the making. This essay thus suggests that the use of unconventional sources and mixed methods
presents opportunities both for doing research in contexts where history is being actively
securitized and for producing countervailing narratives that decenter the state.
Keywords: China, Entrepreneurship, Informal Economy, economic development
The Politics of the Past
On December 18, 2018—the forty-year anniversary of Deng Xiaoping’s speech that ushered in
an era of Reform and Opening Up—political leaders gathered in the Great Hall of the People to
hear Xi Jinping’s retrospective assessment of China’s economic development since 1978. In
his exposition, Xi extolled the achievements of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), demar-
cating a series of reforms that had altered China’s developmental arc—the adoption of the
household responsibility system, the creation of township and village enterprises, the repeal
of agricultural taxes, the opening of special economic zones, the battle against rural poverty,
and, of course, the One Belt, One Road strategy. Conspicuously absent was any mention of the
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Business History
Conference. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use,
distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Enterprise & Society (2023), 1–12
doi:10.1017/eso.2023.38
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contributions of ordinary citizens to the making of the modern Chinese economy.
1
The subtext
of the omission was clear: The party-state was the motive force of change in the People’s
Republic of China.
Historical narrative is not simply a device imposed on the past to make sense of it; rather, it
is a “guide to purposeful action directed towards the future.”
2
Throughout its history, the CCP
has mobilized certain narratives of China’s past to “find legitimization …for the domestic and
external developments of her most recent present.”
3
Today, this is most evident in official
discourses that describe the historical inevitability of the CCP’s rise and its essential role in
guiding China’s socioeconomic transformation.
4
Chairman Xi has called on Chinese citizens
to “learn the histories of the Party and the country, draw experience from the past, have a
correct view of major events and important figures in the histories of the Party and the
country.”
5
Through such historical learning, Xi emphasizes, Party members and citizens alike
will realize that “without the leadership of the CCP, the country and the Chinese nation could
not have made today’s achievements and could not have obtained today’s international
status.”
6
To defend “official history,”the CCP has limited the scale and scope of historical inquiry in
recent years by silently re-securitizing formerly accessible archives. In 2012, the
No. 2 Historical Archives in Nanjing began refusing requests by foreign scholars to view its
holdings, on the grounds that its entire collection was “undergoing digitization”; although the
digitization project was slated for completion in 2017, the archives have yet to reopen. China’s
Foreign Ministry Archive, which was opened to domestic and foreign scholars in 2004,
originally contained more than eighty thousand accessible items in its collection; by 2013,
the number of viewable items had been reduced to eight thousand, and in the following year
the archives were closed entirely.
7
In 2017, Tianjin Municipal Archives listed approximately
1. This party-centered narrative of development was later inscribed into official history on November
11, 2021, at the Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee, when the CCP adopted its resolution on the
“Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century.”
2. Wadhwani and Lubinski, “Reinventing Entrepreneurial History,”767.
3. Kahn and Feuerwerker, “The Ideology of Scholarship,”13.
4. In recent years, politicians have increasingly co-opted “New Left”interpretations of Chinese history,
such as the scholarship of Hu Angang, an influential professor of economics at Tsinghua University. In his three-
volume series, The Political and Economic History of China, Hu argues that the relative decline of late imperial
China was attributable to “the absence of strong, modern-minded leadership”and the failure of traditional
institutions to cope with a rapidly changing world. The inability of the Qing dynasty and the Nationalist state to
meet the challenges posed by a rapidly industrializing West, contends Hu, necessitated the CCP’s rise and
provided legitimacy for a “government-enforced, fast, and dramatic socioeconomic transition.”Such claims,
which have been echoed in the works of Cui Zhiyuan, Wang Shaoguang, Pan Wei, and others, completely ignore
decades of research by business historians such as Madeleine Zelin and William Rowe, who have meticulously
retraced the indigenous evolution of Chinese business institutions and demonstrated their ability to rise to the
challenges of an increasingly globalized world. See Hu, The Political and Economic History of China; Zelin, The
Merchants of Zigong; Rowe, Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City. For an outline of the genealogy
of area studies scholarship, see Frost, “Reframing Chinese Business History.”
5. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202106/15/WS60c861c2a31024ad0bac6e1b.html.
6. http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2021-06/15/c_1310009389.htm.
7. Ghosh, “Urgent Update on Foreign Ministry Archives, Beijing”; Minami, “China’s Foreign Ministry
Archive: Open or Closed?”
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1.4 million accessible documents in its online index; by 2018, the number inexplicably shrank
to fewer than eight hundred thousand documents.
8
Additional barriers to archival research, in the form of new or previously unenforced rules,
have also been erected. In the Beijing and Shanghai Municipal Archives, visiting scholars are
now required to affiliate with a Chinese danwei (work unit) and present formal jieshaoxin
(letters of introduction) to view the digitized public collections. Other archives are imposing
mandatory waiting periods, requiring that foreign scholars arrange visits at least thirty days in
advance.
9
In many archives, researchers are no longer allowed to handle physical documents
or to browse through indexes of holdings; rather, they must access them only through digital
interfaces.
10
In a recent survey of more than five hundred international China scholars,
26 percent of respondents reported being denied archival access, while an additional 9 percent
had been “invited to tea”by state authorities.
11
Through such acts, the CCP has articulated its
stance that history itself is the sovereign domain of the party-state.
This raises a question of central importance for contemporary business historians: namely,
how ought we approach the study of the past in contexts where the production of historical
knowledge has been heavily politicized and historical sources are being securitized?
To illustrate how I approached this difficult question in my doctoral dissertation entitled
“‘Speculation and Profiteering’: The Entrepreneurial Transformation of Socialist China,”let
me begin with a story.
12
Rescuing History from the Dustbins
One afternoon, while conducting fieldwork in southern China, after an unsuccessful attempt
at gaining access to the local archives, I decided to take a stroll through a nearby flea market.
There, navigating between rows of stalls, stopping occasionally to rummage through faded
socialist memorabilia, I came across a stack of nondescript, brown-jacketed dossiers. I picked
up the folder on top of the pile and began flipping through its contents. Inside were dozens of
reports on black markets, underground factories, and other “spontaneous capitalist activities”
produced during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Excited about this incredible find, I
bought the documents without haggling over the price. When I asked the vendor if he had
more, he shared his contact info over WeChat and invited me to visit his home in Anhui. The
next week, I went to the address, an apartment located at the edge of a small town. Inside were
pillars of documents, stacked from floor to ceiling, with only narrow paths running between
them. Save for a small space in the living room that had been carved out for a two-person table,
the entire apartment was chock-full of historical material. The majority were documents
produced by the lowest levels of government administration that were originally earmarked
for destruction, but instead found their way into private circulation.
8. Yi, “Garbage Gleanings.”
9. Eyferth, “Jiangsu Archives.”
10. Lincoln. “Two Archives in Jiangsu.”
11. Chestnut Greitens and Truex, “Repressive Experiences Among China Scholars.”
12. The doctoral dissertation was accepted by the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at
Harvard University on November 10, 2021.
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As I later learned through interviews with document vendors, the diffusion of local archives
had occurred through different channels. Some exited the archives during the chaos of the
Cultural Revolution, when employees of state agencies began taking home bundles of unim-
portant documents to burn as heating fuel. Others entered private circulation in the 1980s,
when administrative restructuring led to a massive purge of materials that had been accumu-
lated over the previous decades. Because China suffered paper shortages at that time, rather
than destroy the documents, archivists were to deliver decommissioned materials to recyclers,
who would theoretically reprocess them into paper pulp, but somewhere along this chain of
custody, someone instead sold the materials to wholesale merchants. Others documents still
were recovered from skips by ragpickers in the 1990s and 2000s who resold them to collectors.
And thus, for half a century now, these discarded archival materials have been flowing into
and recirculating within private networks.
What do these materials look like? As it happens, they are just as varied as the institutions
that produced them. They include the forms, receipts, contracts, and other administrative
minutiae produced by grassroots government agencies; the case files of individuals who were
prosecuted for economic and political crimes; periodicals compiling the reports and internal
correspondences of state institutions; central government directives; heaps of political study
materials; and more.
Given that I wanted to explore how the Maoist economy operated in practice, I was
immediately drawn to the case files of so-called speculators and profiteers produced by the
State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC). These are incredibly rich sources,
comprising investigation reports, interrogation transcripts, self-confessions, and other mate-
rial evidence detailing how individuals tried (and failed) to circumvent the constraints of
Maoist economic institutions. Among the cases I salvaged were accounts of arbitragers who
smuggled grain and cloth ration certificates across administrative borders and resold them in
places where they commanded higher black-market prices; factory technicians employed by
state-run enterprises, who, in their off-hours, generated illicit incomes by working as “Sunday
engineers”in underground factories; “dark contractors”who recruited teams of unregistered
workers from the countryside and illicitly contracted out their labor to formal institutions;
“red-hat”enterprises that operated under the aegis of collective institutions, but functioned as
private, profit-driven businesses. In contrast to higher-level state documents that describe how
the Maoist economy ought to have functioned in highly stylized terms, case files thus offered a
radically different vantage from which to understand everyday business practice.
I am not the first scholar to realize the potential of historical documents that were relegated
to the dustbins of history by the Chinese state. The pioneering sinologist, Michael Schoenhals,
began procuring “rubbish materials”from secondary markets in the 1990s, and he used them
to study spy networks and postal inspection systems in Maoist China.
13
Other sinologists such
as Jeremy Brown and Daniel Leese have used recovered materials to explore everyday life
under socialism and the tensions between socialist legal principles and practice.
14
And, until
very recently, there was a sizable contingent of social scientists in China who gathered and
13. Schoenhals, Spying for the People.
14. Leese and Engman, Victims, Perpetrators, and the Role of Law in Maoist China; Brown and Johnson,
Maoism at the Grassroots.
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digitized discarded state documents at scale and used them to build new university-affiliated
institutional archives (which subsequently came under pressure to shut down or restrict
access to their collections).
While such scholars have been praised for generating novel insights into the minutiae of life
in Maoist society, they have also been criticized for “abandoning the commanding heights.”
As the political scientist Elizabeth Perry provocatively argues, China historians have con-
signed themselves to a “janitorial role”wherein they “grub for diversity in the dustbins of
grassroots society,”instead of addressing “the key questions that attracted but eluded an
earlier generation of social scientists.”
15
To be sure, this is an ungenerous characterization
of an interesting body of research. But it also contains an element of truth. As Jeremy Brown, a
prominent “Sinological garbologist,”has argued, “It is near impossible to use a handful of
dusty dossiers to build a broad historical argument or to claim that a local example is repre-
sentative of a wider trend.”
16
In my work, I have attempted to show that this is not, in fact, the case; it is possible to use
discarded materials to, as Perry puts it, ascend the “commanding heights.”
In the following sections I will describe how I attempted to view grassroots sources “from
afar”to identify patterns of activity in the Maoist economy. I will then go on to briefly discuss
how the insights derived through this approach are supported by other evidence in the
historical record.
From the Grass Roots to the Commanding Heights
In the process of rummaging for historical documents, I was fortunate enough to come across
relatively complete collections of case files of “speculators and profiteers”who were prose-
cuted by two local administrations in eastern China. Together, they totaled some 2,690
individual cases. Equally fortunate, in institutional gazetteers published by the municipal
branches of the SAIC in both administrations, officials happened to have also reported the total
number of cases that were prosecuted within their jurisdictions each year. From this, I was able
to gather what percentage of cases were extant, as well as the distribution of extant cases over
time. This critical bit of information would enable me to use the cases to generate reasonable
estimates of the overall level of informal entrepreneurial activity prosecuted in each admin-
istration. To this end, I then turned to coding the data contained within individual cases.
To explain how, let us take, for example, the case of Mr. Ye, a cloth dyer who was
prosecuted for moonshining and “labor exploitation”(i.e., running an illicit business that
employed unregistered workers). In Mr. Ye’s case file, we are provided a helpful case summary
from which we learn that Mr. Ye was seventy-one years of age and came from a “middling-
farmer”background. According to the reporting cadres, Ye ran an underground dying busi-
ness that sold dyed cloth across ten different administrative regions. In the late 1960s, the
business generated more than 2,400 RMB in revenues and more than 1,000 RMB in illicit
15. Perry, “The Promise of PRC History.”
16. Brown, “Finding and Using Grassroots Historical Sources from the Mao Era.”
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profits. For these economic crimes, Ye was issued a 400 RMB fine. All this information (and
much more) can be coded as unique data.
This simplified example belies the difficultly of working with these historical sources.
The case files were written by semiliterate cadres who frequently made orthographic errors
and homophonic substitutions. Their reporting practices were highly idiosyncratic. Rarely
did they use standardized forms. And the materiality of the documents they produced also
varied; because of paper shortages, many files were simply written on the back of other
government documents. All of this made the process of coding the cases rather arduous
and error prone. Reading through nearly 2,700 cases, manually coding their contents into
more than 40 categories of data, and checking the resulting data for errors took approximately
2years.
17
But what resulted from this endeavor was the largest data set of its kind for Maoist
China.
So, what exactly can the data tell us?
First, they reveal something about the spatial scope of informal entrepreneurial activity.
Every time a case mentioned that an activity traversed administrative boundaries, I coded the
origin and terminus of said activity as nodes and the relationship between the nodes as a
unique edge. In Figure 1, I have graphed the resulting distribution of network connections
extending from the node of Chun’an (a county-level administration featured in the data set).
We find that underground economic activities did not just occur within socialist adminis-
trative units, but between them. Indeed, if we examine the core cluster of activity around
Chun’an, we find that network connections transitioned smoothly into the adjacent
Figure 1. Informal networks originating from Chun’an, Zhejiang.
17. A fuller description of the coding process is provided in Frost and Li, “Markets Under Mao.”
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prefectures and provinces. In other words, underground activity does not appear to have
been overly constrained by administrative boundaries. Rather, its area seems to have corre-
sponded more to closely to topographical features and the spatial scope of older commercial
networks.
Second, the data reveal something about the scale of informal entrepreneurial activity.
Figure 2 presents the summary statistics for the two administrations featured in the data set.
Here, we find that the mean value of the activity described in cases was on the order of
300 RMB, and that the average case involved about 150 RMB in combined cash and ration
certificates. What is more, the very largest cases involved some tens of thousands of RMB
worth of goods, cash, and ration certificates. These are fairly huge numbers. To put the figures
into perspective, the mean annual consumption of a rural worker in the 1960s and 1970s was
around 100 RMB per year. In other words, the mean case involved quantities of goods whose
value represented several years’of consumption for the mean worker.
Third, and perhaps most interestingly, the data suggest that local governments did not
faithfully execute central government directives for suppressing illicit economic activity.
During the Cultural Revolution, central directives stated that “speculators and profiteers”
should be punished with utmost severity and that all goods uncovered in investigations
should be seized in full. However, an analysis of prosecution outcomes suggests that indi-
viduals who were found guilty of engaging in “speculative and profiteering behaviors”were
rarely ever sentenced with extra-monetary forms of punishment; that is, they were not
subjected to “reform through labor”in gulags or made the targets of political persecution
in public “struggle sessions.”Rather, most individuals were simply fined and released.
Moreover, in most cases—especially those that involved large values of cash, goods, and
ration certificates—cumulative fines and seizures amounted to only a portion of the total
value of described activity. In fact, the size of seizures and fines was inversely correlated
with the total value of the activity described. This suggests that local cadres were selective
in their enforcement practices, exercising agency over what activities ultimately were
suppressed.
Figure 2. Summary statistics.
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The important question then is what could be made of these findings? Were the patterns
that emerged from the analysis of the data set indicative of broader trends in the Maoist
economy? Or were they merely artifacts of sampling and survivorship bias?
Triangulating Evidence
To begin answering such questions, I then triangulated the case-based data set with evidence
from different types of sources, namely, formal archival documents, interviews with retired
employees of the SAIC and former entrepreneurs, declassified intelligence reports gathered by
Taiwanese and American intelligence agencies, and the internal reports and communications
of the SAIC published in institutional periodicals. Similar patterns emerged from the evidence
gathered from each type of source. But for the sake of brevity, I will provide just a few quick
examples of from the lattermost category.
Much like the case data, the internal reports of SAIC suggested that, over the course of
the 1960s and early 1970s, informal entrepreneurial activity grew increasingly pervasive.
Throughout the Chinese countryside, local cadres reported a sharp rise in black-market
activity. Rural citizens circumvented state procurement institutions to privately exchange
a widening array of products and services. Underground factories manufactured goods that
were in perennial short supply and sold them at prevailing market (rather than state-fixed)
prices. Labor contracting businesses hired workers from production brigades with excess
capacity and contracted out their labor to urban enterprises (including collective and state-
run enterprises). Logistics businesses smuggled agricultural goods and manufactured
products between the cities and countryside. Over time, the proliferation of informal
entrepreneurial activity fundamentally reshaped the character of rural markets. As one
rural politics department reported:
Our region’s rural markets have been transformed into hotbeds of capitalism and speculative
activity. Everyday droves of people participate in market exchange, wasting untold labor
power. They freely transact class one and class two goods, such as grains, cotton, and cooking
oil. And the quantities being traded are huge! They even trade bicycles, sewing machines, and
other manufactured products. It is obvious that these are not proper socialist markets, but
capitalist free markets!
18
The internal reports of the SAIC also confirm that after the outbreak of the Cultural Revo-
lution, as revolutionary struggle disrupted the very institutions that were designed to enforce
state control over the economy, local cadres exercised growing autonomy vis-à-vis the center.
There are reports of rural production brigades dispatching laborers to engage in illicit com-
merce and remit profits back to the collective; state-run enterprises operating clandestine
production lines and transacting with black-marketeers; state agencies colluding with unre-
gistered enterprises, allowing them to use their official documents and seals to conduct
business in exchange for a percentage of their profits. At the same time, the reports suggest,
18. Yuncheng Rural Politics Department, “We Must Stop Practicing Free Markets,”author’s collection.
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employees of the SAIC and other state institutions had become increasingly complicit in the
very activities that they were tasked with suppressing. As members of the Central Committee
of the CCP argued:
Many cadres operate with ‘one eye open and one eye shut,’ignoring the familiar activities of
speculators and profiteers. They stroll over here and take a little look over there, and when
they see someone selling goods they just let them go. Others have gone so far as to announce at
production meetings: ‘As long as you don’t sell opium, anything goes.”
19
Thus, it was not quite the case, as Frank Dikötter has argued, that grassroots cadres simply
“got out of the way”as villagers “surreptitiously reconnected with traditional practices.”
20
Rather, as these internal reports reveal, local cadres were highly agentic mediators who
navigated contradictions between central policies and local practices and ultimately had a
say in which activities were prosecuted and which were permitted in practice.
Throughout the dissertation, I attempted to weave together such accounts with quantitative
data to explore different facets of the intwined histories of informal entrepreneurship and
economic governance in Maoist China. Chapter I laid out the empirical foundations of the
following chapters by providing robust quantitative evidence for the persistence and spread of
informal entrepreneurial activity. Chapter II focused on the tensions between competitive
market and state-fixed prices during and after the CCP’s boldest experiment with socialist
economic organization, the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962). Chapter III retraced the history
of the subsequent institutional struggle between the SAIC and the so-called spontaneous
forces of capitalism throughout the 1960s, highlighting the state’s repeated attempts (and
failures) to assert administrative control over the economy. Finally, Chapter IV explored the
growth of collusive ties between government officials, state employees, and private market
actors in the wake of the early Cultural Revolution. Collectively, these chapters gesture toward
a new periodization of economic change in Maoist China, one structured not as a clean-cut
series of political campaigns, but as episodes of a messy, uneven transformation that came as
much from below as from above.
Like most dissertations, this work was imperfect and incomplete. By focusing on the
development of robust quantitative foundations for reassessing the Maoist economy, I neces-
sarily had to reduce emphasis on other, equally valid, modes of historical knowledge produc-
tion. Present, but admittedly underdeveloped, was the microhistorical analysis of individual
cases—precisely the area where other historians drawing on “rubbish materials”have suc-
ceeded most. Deeper readings of case files, both “along”and “against the grain,”will be
needed to understand the mechanisms by which informal entrepreneurial activity and infor-
mal bureaucratic administration operated, interacted, and transformed local economies. Sim-
ilarly lacking were explorations of regional diversity. We ought to know, for example, how
cadres across different administrations responded differently to the rise of informal entrepre-
neurial activity within their jurisdictions, as well as how these different responses might have
19. Central Committee of the CCP, “Quotas for Combatting Corruption and Speculation and Profiteering,”
1970, author’s collection.
20. Dikötter, “The Silent Revolution.”
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contributed to heterogenous developmental outcomes. These are significant shortcomings
that I hope to address in my future book.
That being said, the adopted approach did at least open exciting new lines of inquiry and
produce a few interesting findings. In my conclusion, I will limit myself to what I think are the
three most important.
Conclusions
First, my work pushes back the timeline of China’s transformation by at least two decades,
showing how bottom-up entrepreneurial forces were operative throughout the socialist era.
Beginning with the earliest enactment of planned production and distribution, there emerged
in China informal ecosystems that provided alternative channels for the flow of people, goods,
and capital in the planned economy. Despite repeated efforts of the CCP to wage political
struggle against private actors and bring them “within the orbit”of socialist institutions,
informal entrepreneurship not only persisted, but proliferated. And as it expanded to encom-
pass an ever-growing array of activities, institutions, and actors, it gradually reshaped the
workings of the Chinese economy. When the CCP did eventually realize the necessity of
reform, many changes they made were simply a formalization of informal entrepreneurial
activities that were already pervasive and normalized on the ground. In short, Reform and
Opening Up was not the genesis of Chinese entrepreneurship—it was a tipping point.
Second, my work helps deconstruct oversimplifying, antagonistic binaries—for example,
state/society, socialist/capitalist, formal/informal—by revealing how state actors and institu-
tions were thoroughly enmeshed in networks of informal entrepreneurial activity. The dis-
sertation reveals that underground factories were manufacturing inputs for sale to state-run
enterprises; state-run enterprises were hiring undocumented rural labor and running their
own illicit sideline production; unregistered enterprises were operated under the aegis of
formal institutions; and local cadres (at least in some places) were actively sheltering this
activity from the central government. Thus, the informal was not a realm of activity that
existed outside or in the shadows of the formal; rather, informal entrepreneurial activity could
be found across all types of institutions and at all levels of the Chinese economy.
Third, and finally, my work demonstrates that Chinese entrepreneurship did not simply
survive two decades of socialism, but was remade within it. Recent scholarship has begun to
situate China’s postsocialist success within the longer history of Chinese business, using
entrepreneurial culture, for example, as an explanation for why regional patterns of business
activity have endured over time. While there is much merit to these longue durée analyses, as
my work shows, one cannot simply draw a trend line between the pre- and postsocialist
periods. During the 1960s and 1970s, new entrepreneurial practices and processes of innova-
tion emerged in response to the particular constraints and opportunities posed by socialist
institutions. Moreover, the selection criteria of entrepreneurial success shifted dramatically.
The “winners”in the Maoist economy were those who cultivated and deployed personal
networks to muster resources, establish business ties, and, ultimately, avoid prosecution in a
hostile and ever-shifting sociopolitical context. Some of these are features that we continue to
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associate with entrepreneurial success in China today. Put most simply, in the history of
Chinese entrepreneurship, the Maoist era matters.
ADAM K. FROST is a postdoctoral fellow at CBS. His research draws upon novel historical
sources, oral histories, and original data sets to explore the history of entrepreneurship and
state–business relations in 20th century China. Contact information: Copenhagen Business
School, Frederiksberg 2000, Denmark. E-mail: af.bhl@cbs.dk.
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