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Primitive accumulation in modern China

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Abstract

This article surveys the history of primitive accumulation in China, from the early 1980s to the mid 2000s. It observes that the principal means of primitive accumulation have been the transformation of state and collective enterprises into capital, the peasants’ loss of land through various forms of dispossession, and the voluntary migration of peasants from agricultural to industrial pursuits. These mix dispossession and market mechanisms in complex ways. They have involved the creation of markets; but more, the creation of workers and capital. While the processes that drive primitive accumulation have economic logics, they also have logics that derive from concerns over social welfare, over environmental management, and over ethnic struggles. Furthermore, the state has been closely involved in the entire process—as a regionally differentiated actor, directly involved in ownership, asset transformation and the control of migration. Primitive accumulation in China does not have one motive, does not simply reflect class interests, is not a particular case of a global capitalist project, but is complex and localised.

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Acknowledgement

The research reported in this article was supported by ARC grant DP0209563. I am grateful to Jon Barnett, Harapriya Rangan, Eric Sheppard and Zhu Ying for their comments on this research program. I am also grateful to my former students, Debbie Dickinson, Ben Hopper and Brooke McDonald, who conducted some of the empirical research I rely on; to Zhu Ying and John Benson, who collaborated on the research on the transformation of enterprises; as well as to Brian Finlayson and Mark Wang, who have been colleagues on some of the exploration that underpins the empirical work.

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    Michael Webber

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Webber, M. Primitive accumulation in modern China. Dialect Anthropol 32, 299–320 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-008-9039-8

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