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Tales from the Development Frontier
The extensive use of bookkeeping and accounting in households, lineage trusts, and guilds, as well as in businesses, confirms the widespread commercial orientation and numeracy during the Qing era (1644–1911) and the Republican era (1912–49) (Gardella 1994; Yuan and Ma 2010). Writing about the early decades of the 20th century, Wright (1984, 325) refers to China’s “abundance of small-time entrepreneurs.” These observations reflect the long-standing realities of Chinese life and thought. Anticipating the Wealth of Nations by nearly 2,000 years, Han Fei-tzu (1959, 44) used language that matches Adam Smith’s description of individual behavior: In the case of workmen selling their services in sowing seeds and tilling farms, the master would … give them delicious food and by appropriating cash and cloth make payments for their services. Not that they love the hired workmen, but that … by so doing they can make the workmen till the land deeper and pick the weed more carefully. The hired workmen … speedily pick the weed and till the land. … Not that they love their master, but that … by their so doing the soup will be delicious and both cash and cloth will be paid to them. Thus, the master’s provisions and the workmen’s services supplement each other as if between them there were the compassion of father and son. However, their minds are well disposed to act for each other because they cherish self-seeking motives.
China’s enduring tradition of commercial activity and market participation by elites and villagers alike counters Polanyi’s contention (1944, 43–44) that, before the English enclosure movement, “the alleged propensity of man to barter, truck, and exchange is almost entirely apocryphal. … [And that] no economy prior to our own [was] even approximately controlled and regulated by markets.” Thus, despite 20 years of official efforts to denigrate entrepreneurship and profit seeking, “when China stopped suppressing such activities … the response was immediate. Shops, restaurants, and many other service units popped up everywhere … [because the] Chinese … had not forgotten how to trade or run a small business” (Perkins 1995, 231). Wenzhou District, Zhejiang Province saw a revival of traditional credit associations (hui) and “old-style private banks (qianzhuang)” (Dong 1990, 95; Tsai 2002). The “1980s witnessed … a massive expansion of economic contracts, so that by the mid-1980s a single xian [county; China has more than 2,000] could have up to half a million