The Fruits of Ambivalence
China's Urban Individual Economy
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2908352 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Linda Hershkovitz (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1985 |
| Volume | 58 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 427 |
| Publication date | 1985-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Pacific Affairs (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0030-851X • E-ISSN: 1715-3379 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2759239 |
| OpenAlex | W2313069608 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
IT HAS HOW BEEN more than six years since the watershed Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist party (CCP) initiated a dizzying series of changes in economic policy. Amidst the furore over special economic zones, agricultural responsibility systems, and the more recent urban industrial reforms, over three million people in China's cities are quietly going about their businessrunning small shops, restaurants, workshops, and service enterprises which they themselves own. They form a sector of the economy that before 1979 had become close to invisible-the urban individual economy. The individual economy (geti jingji) is the smallest, and in some respects the least significant, of the three major sectors (as defined by ownership) of the non-agricultural economy: the other two are the state-run sector (ownership by the whole people) and the collective sector. Basically, the individual economy can be defined in terms of self-employment. It includes small-scale, privately-owned industrial, commercial, catering, transport, and service enterprises, operated for the most part by individuals or households, with a strictly limited number of employees and/or apprentices. It covers a broad range of operational forms, including work in the home, small shops and workshops, fixed-location sidewalk and market stalls (permanent as well as periodic and seasonal), and itinerant businesses operated from pushcarts and baskets balanced on shoulder-poles. The key feature they share is private ownership. The proliferation of these small private businesses-tailors and dressmakers, restaurants and cooked-food stalls, book and newspaper stands, letter-writing services, corner groceries and dry-goods shops, stalls stocked with the latest fashions from Shanghai and Guangzhou, peddlers hawking home-made wooden combs and plastic hairornaments, shoe repair stands, appliance repair services, photography
Ambivalence · China · Economics · Economy · Political science · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance · Psychology · Social Psychology
| Unique citing works | 7 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,19 |
| Citation span | 1990 - 2017 (28) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |