We Are the State

An Entrepreneurial Mission to Serve the People in Harbin, Northeast China

Bibliographic Data

ID6007772
AuthorsMun Young Cho (Yonsei University, corresponding author), Mun Young Cho Mun Young Cho (Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea,)
Year2011
Volume37
Issue4
Pages422-455
Publication date2011-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueModern China (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0097-7004 • E-ISSN: 1552-6836
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0097700411400057
OpenAlexW1963733846
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited29

How can we explain market actors’ desire to use the state as a model for their entrepreneurial efforts? This article examines the varied and uneven ways in which the state is mimicked and appropriated by China’s market actors in the health care sector. A massage franchiser, which doubles as a job-training center in Harbin, serves as an ethnographic instance. By invoking a scene where the persistent appeal to the state is bound up with volatile market activities, this article intends to disrupt the prevailing notions of the state-market binary. The murky encounter between “the state” and “the market” does more than merely reflect the persistent power of the so-called “authoritarian” state. By examining how the state-market complex is made and also severed by market participants who appeared at first to represent “the state,” this article underlines the precarious and patchy nature of state centrality

Appeal · Authoritarianism · Centrality · China · Democracy · Ethnography · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · State (computer science · China's Ethnic Minorities and Relations · China's Global Influence and Migration · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance · Law

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