Buying Brides in China-Again

Author(s): Hill Gates

Source: Anthropology Today, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Aug., 1996), pp. 8-11
Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
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 Buying brides in China - again
HILL GATES
Hill Gates is a Lectatrer
in the Department af
Anthropology, Stacnford
UniversitY, California.
1. 'Monopsony' is the
situation where the entire
demand market for a
product consists of only one
buyer. Editor.
2. 147 Golden Venture
(and other) smuggled
passengers are still being
held in a Kern County,
California, jail, including
ten women who
hunger-struck for over 45
days in late 1995 (Burdman
1995:A I-A 12).
3. Emily Honig (1992,
1986) gives historical
perspective to present-day
migration into Shanghai,
with attention to women;
most discussions of
contemporary migration
trends in China serloLlsly
underemphasize gender
(e.g. Goldstein and
Goldstein 1985: Goldstein
1990; Siu 1989: Yan 1991.
Zhu 1981; Ma and Lin
1993). Studies of migration
by ethnic Chinese womiien
in other regions are not
lacking (StraUch 1984:
Chiang 1984); but these
women migrate under
entirely different
macrostructural constr-aints.
See Oppong and AbuL
(1987:6) and Williams
(1990:14-17) for general
criticisms of the absence of
gender awareness in the
migration literature. This is
in spite of some important
work stressing the need for
assessment of both
macrostructural constraints.
and the microstructural
processes of local culture
and kinship by Fawcett.
Khoo and Smith (1984:4-5)
and Thadani and Todaro
(1984).
4. The direct role of the
state in instituting migration
is not minor. Sichuan s
share of China's total
population dropped between
1953 and 1984 in part
because of large-scale,
state-sponsored
outmigration (Yan
1991:219).
5. For recent summaries
of the petty commodity
producer debates, see part
one of Littlefield and Gates
(1991); for the informal
sector, see Hart (1992).
6. The abundant studies
of working Chinese women
outside China proper are
suggestive, but most focus
on unmarried women in
paid external employment,
rather than on unpaid
8 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 12 No 4, August 1996
Telling stories
'My wife and daughters can manage the inn without
my help, so I decided to open a dance-hall [my Tibetan
host responded to my query about his occupation] With
the truckers coming through, and all our local people, I
thought a dance-hall would be a good business. I'd
been to a few in Chengdu City, and seen how the Han
people run them. They sell tickets at the door, and also
sell food and drinks inside. I tried that, but our Tibetan
people refused to pay at the door. "You can charge us
for drinks - that's fair - but you can't charge us just to
dance!" they said. "Dancing is part of life, free to
everyone. How can you ask money for dancing?" I had
to agree [he said]. Dancing is part of life, not at all like
a bottle of beer.'
I am fond of this anecdote. The west Sichuan family
was delightful; their inn was fragrant with a butter-and-
woodsmoke smell that made me feel absolutely at
home; and who could resist this sturdy, pre-capitalist
restatement of the truism that money can't buy happi-
ness? Charming or not, however, the point is thor-
oughly trite. At least since Malinowski, anthropologists
have been emphasizing that economies take very differ-
ent forms, and that commoditization makes its way
only with difficulty into some realms of experience.
The idea that the commoditizing edge of capitalism was
the great transformation that reworked all the world's
cultures was the central insight of my graduate training
at Michigan in the late 1960s, and has been a fun-
damental assumption for many anthropologists since
that time.
But my work among Chinese has been productive of
an additional line of argument about the limits of the
present world system. Chinese people have made
mighty efforts to evade being engulfed by capitalism in
the past two centuries. At the same time, they are a
people whose producer classes developed an extraordi-
narily effective set of market mechanisms which they
have been perfecting for at least a thousand years.
Commoditization has penetrated very deeply into
Chinese world views, institutions, and intimate rela-
tions. The commoditization of people must be seen as a
persistent and continuously reproduced element of
Chinese culture. This paper ponders some of the con-
nections between past and present that must be un-
ravelled before the current outbreak of trafficking in
women can be properly contextualized. That context is
essential not only to our understanding of this specific,
outrageous infringement of human rights, but to the
overall trajectory of change in China, which I see as
motivated much more by a well-established indigenous
petty capitalism than by the effects of an exogenous
capitalism.
For obvious reasons, I must rely on anecdote and re-
portage to illustrate my argument about the selling of
women. Now, in the mid 1990s, the Chinese country-
side is experiencing yet another of the many policy re-
formulations that have shaped rural people's lives in
this century. Authorities are desperately seeking to
bring the production of agricultural staples under their
control, to monopsonize I key rural products, and to
channel accumulation toward official rather than house-
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hold coffers. People have much to complain of, and
local officials are sensitive - no, jumpy - about visits
by their superiors and/or (heaven forbid) foreigners.
Many topics are closed to my formal investigation.
Yet the problem of human trafficking is widely re-
ported in the Chinese press, and much discussed by
those with an interest in women's welfare. Since 1990,
I have spent a total of about one year in rural Sichuan,
Fujian, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu provinces, conducting
large-scale surveys; women have many tales to tell.
And so, another anecdote:
My concentration on a mumbly old woman's heavy
Sichuan accent was interrupted by an urgent whisper
into the ear of the local Women's Federation cadre sit-
ting between us. The cadre vanished; I resumed the in-
terview. But afterwards, in the privacy of the car, I
asked my colleagues: 'What was that all about?'
With an air of embarrassment, one of them replied:
Well, actually, Little Lu had to go to the railway station to
pick up and escort home a young woman who was kid-
napped into another province. You know we've had some
cases of this in Sichuan. Girls are tricked into signing on
to work on the coast, and then are sold as brides into poor
mountain villages. If they can contact the Women's Feder-
ation, we send someone to rescue them, buy them a ticket,
and make sure they get back home. We sometimes also
need to persuade their parents to take them back, that they
are still good girls, and still marriageable. It's really ter-
rible, but we do what we can.
Counting cases
One readily understands her embarrassment and her un-
derstated presentation of these unhappy facts to me, a
foreign visitor and potential source of international
scandal. Sichuan - and other provinces - have had
more than 'some' such cases. How many is extraordi-
narily difficult to estimate. Many kidnapped women,
when offered help in returning home, refuse it. Perhaps
already pregnant, certainly gravely devalued for mar-
riage, or simply too ashamed to return home 'ruined',
some accept their fate. Natal families may fail to report
as missing a daughter who left home to work, thinking
that she is merely unfilial when she sends no money
home, fearing she has made a marriage without parental
permission, or even suspecting that she has been drawn
into prostitution or other illegalities. A missing persons
report could subject the 'wayward' girl and 4ier parents
to considerable trouble; many parents would not even
consider reporting such an absence to authorities.
Most who are reported missing are never found. Offi-
cials in charge have been known to argue that an ab-
ducted wife would not be worth recovering (Faison
1995: Al, A4). When officials do offer assistance, they
do so despite the fact that abductions on their watch
earn them black marks. Officials have many reasons to
bury the matter, even when they help the woman.
Some women pursue prosecution and punishment for
their tormentors, but at even greater personal cost than
attends the allegation of rape in the United States. Their
most obvious target for legal action - their purchasers -
remain relatively secure from prosecution. For while
the Chinese government prosecutes sellers and decries
the behaviour of buyers, there appears to be no specific
 Associated Press 1995.
Thousands rescued from
slavery in China. Scanitca Rosa
Press Demiiocract February 17,
p. 8.
Bruun, Ole 1993. Blusiniess anid
bureaucraci in Cl Chinieve
citv: aC) ethnography of
private businiess households
in conitemporcarn Chinia
Berkeley: Institute of East
Asian Studies.
Burdman, Pamela 1993. Inside
the Chinese smuggling rings
'snakeheads' operating a
global crime network. Sani
Franicisco Clhroniicle. August
23: Al, AIO.
1995. Smuggled Chinese
wait in U.S. jails. San
Franicisco Chroniicle.
December 26:A 1, A 12.
Chiang, Nora Huang 1984, The
Migration of rural women to
Taipei. In James T. Fawcett
et al (1984).
China Focus 1995. Kidnapping
of women and children. 3, 5:7
Chinia News 1994. Child
selling still goes on in
Taiwan: Report. February
17:3.
China News Digest [online]
1995. China hammers
insidious crimes against
female college students. April
22:#10 Chinia Post 1992.
Couple sentenced for selling
daughter. February 24:12.
China Statistical Yearbook,
1994. Beijing. State
Statistical Bureau.
de Dios Garcia Davish, Juan
and Lilia Torrentera 1993.
Detienen otros 110 chinos
'ilegales.' Uiornasunio, July
30, p. 3.
Faison, Seth 1995. Women as
chattel: in China, slavery
rises. New York Titnes, June
9:AI, A4.
Fawcett, James T., Siew-Ean
Khoo & Peter C. Smith (Eds)
1984a. Womiieni in the Cities
of Asia Boulder CO:
Westview Press.
1984b. Urbanization,
migration, and the status of
women, in Fawcett et al.
(1984a: 3-14).
Fei Xiaotong and Chang Chih-i
1948. Earthbolund Chinia
London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
Gates, Hill 1989. The
commoditization of Chinese
women. Signis 14, 4:799-832.
1991 Taibei family
businesswomen experiences
with commoditization, in
E.K.Y Chen, Jack F.
Williams, and Joseph Wong,
eds., Taiwani economY,
societv, and history
pp.327-338. Hong Kong. U.
of Hong Kong
1993. Cultural support for
birth limitation in Chengdu
and Taibei. In Deborah Davis
& Stevan Harrell (Eds)
Family straltegies inl
post-Mao Chinac, pp.25 1-74.
Berkeley: U. of California P.
1996. chila 's Motor a
thousan?d ,'ears of Petty
capitalism. Ithaca, NY.
Cornell U. P.
Goldstein, Sidney 1990.
Urbanization In China.
effects of migration and
rec lass ificati on, Populactionl
anld Developm)enlt Reviwev 16,
4-673-702.
Goldstein, Sidney, and Alice
Goldstein 1985. Poplallction
mobility i)1 thle Peopvle's
law against purchasing women and children (China
Focus 1995: 7).
Quantifying the stream of woman-selling is nearly
impossible: there is room for much error in any avail-
able figures. I attempt no overall summary - any cumu-
lative total would be worthless - but instead offer some
accounts reported by official sources.
Large numbers of cases began to break into print in
the 1980s, prompting a study by Jia Lusheng and Xie
Zhihong (1989). A report by the People's Supreme
Court revealed that 14,385 abductors were sentenced in
1990, double the number in 1989. 2,530 kidnapper
gangs were involved (Schmetzer 1991). Police and the
Women's Federation have reported that between 1986
and 1994, 48,100 women from throughout the country
were sold in just six counties (in Xuzhou Municipality)
in Jiangsu Province. In Anhui Province in 1992, 4,000
kidnappers were arrested, and 10,000 women freed
(Zhu Hong 1994). In 1991, in densely populated Shan-
dong Province, 14,000 women and 8,200 children were
reported kidnapped. Of them, only 78 women and
children were rescued, and only 35 slavers apprehended
(Schmetzer 1991). While the calculation does not mean
much, this suggests a rescue rate of only about 1 in 28
reported abductions. Jiangxi and Shandong public se-
curity officials announced in 1991 that they had freed
180 women and children captured from Sichuan. In
1993 and 1994, 2,861 women and 134 children were
rescued in Guangxi by police who arrested 3,886
people and broke up 600 kidnapper gangs (Associated
Press, Feb 17, 1995). By the 1:28 ratio, this might
mean 5,000 reported Sichuan abductions during a
period when special anti-kidnap squads had become
commonplace - and possibly several times 5,000 unre-
ported ones. A 1995 report from the public security
ministry announced that in the last two years, nearly
50,000 abductors were caught and 24,751 women and
2,731 children were freed, including 12 college students
who had been sold as wives to Inner Mongolian
farmers (China News Digest 1995: #10). The highly
critical Chinese emigre newsletter China Focus offers
an estimate for 1993 of 100,000 cases of kidnapped
women and children (1995: 7).
Human trafficking in China is not confined to do-
mestic abduction for marriage (and prostitution). Those
who deal in workers for an international market have
been extremely active in recent years. The 1993 arrival
in New York of 282 illegal immigrants from Wenzhou
and Fuzhou on the ship The Golden Venture was only
one of many such recent undertakings.2 One investiga-
tor estimates that in the 1990s, 2,000 southeastern
Chinese enter the United States illegally every week
(Burdman 1993: AIO), with upwards of 200,000 from
Fujian alone having arrived here since 1990 (Singer
1995: 8). Traffickers smuggle Chinese labourers to
countries like Mexico (de Dios Garcia Davish and Tor-
rentera 1993: 3), Japan, Australia, the Netherlands, and
Argentina (Kwong 1994: 17). Most of these are men,
and are either volunteers or have been sent by their
families. Involuntary servitude is often their lot at their
destination, however, and other Chinese are often their
employers. Virtually enslaved, they represent both a
historical oddity and a human tragedy in the capitalist
world of sometimes all-too-free labour. They also serve
- and I bring them up for this reason - to illustrate how
effectively the gangsters that organize this trade evade
even international controls. Chinese internal controls
are wholly incapable of dealing with gangs that turn to
serving the domestic market.
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 12 No 4, August 1996 9
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It is not only China's surplus population and general
poverty that creates this trade. In prosperous Taiwan,
too, sales of children and young women are by no
means rare. There as well as in China, I am sometimes
offered children, usually with the polite opener that 'we
wouldn't even ask any money from you'. A Taibei
couple told me they had sold their twin sons in the mid
80s; the Taibei District Court sentenced parents in 1992
for selling their daughter into prostitution (China Post,
February 24, 1992: 12); the Taiwan Provincial Depart-
ment of Social Affairs reported that 'some' of the 118
registered and over two hundred unregistered children
abandoned in 1992 were sold to brothels. About equal
numbers of boys and girls were abandoned. More than
80 per cent of these children were healthy and under
one year of age (China News 1994: 3).
Giving reasons
Human trafficking in Chinese settings cannot be ex-
plained purely as a response to capitalist initiatives in
China. Nor is it motivated purely by the need for ex-
ploitable labour. One often hears of cases in which a
kidnapped woman, once she has borne her purchaser a
male child, is set free. Particularly as it affects the
women of Sichuan and other industrially backward re-
gions, human trafficking relies upon patterns of belief
and behaviour which fit readily into capitalist demands,
but are not generated by them. Sichuan is a region
where both Arthur Wolf (fieldnotes 1980) and I have
encountered women 'married by capture' in the pre-
1949 period. When two families made such an arrange-
ment, attempting to preclude the young woman's
potentially embarrassing opposition, the bride was
seized by the groom and his friends, wrapped in a quilt,
and carried off to a brief marriage ceremony. Her loss
of virginity generally settled the matter, even to herself,
of where she belonged.
Evidence for the history of the commoditization of
family members in late imperial times is imposing
(Gronewald 1982; Jaschok 1988; Gates 1989, 1991;
Jaschok and Miers 1993; Shaw 1994). Contemporary
bride-buying and -selling are more characteristic of
remote areas than of the coastal regions to which
women eagerly migrate for work and marriage - some-
times to strangers. The sale of kidnapped brides is feas-
ible because it aligns with already existing kinship/gen-
der relations. Fellow-villagers of the purchaser typically
regard bride-buying as legitimate, as do local auth-
orities. Rescuers of bartered brides must come armed to
many rural communities. It is partly for this reason that
my Women's Federation colleagues are reluctant to risk
their skins in many of Sichuan's villages, especially
with a foreigner in tow.
Bride-buying is driven by an unhappy pattern of
labour allocation that has blurred the boundary between
kinsperson and hired hand in Chinese societies for cen-
turies. When people are sold to be wives, daughters and
sons, we are seeing the underlying logic of a key aspect
of Chinese political economies, not an isogloss of
world capitalist influence. Failure to analyse appropri-
ately the connection between East Asian systems of
kinship/gender and of labour allocation stands, I be-
lieve, as the principal obstacle to a comprehensive ana-
lysis of the political economies that are emerging in
that world region. The kidnapping for sale of women in
China is only the most dramatic form of an enormous
new labour migration - greater for women than men -
that is both shaped by and a factor in shaping the 're-
formed' economy.
 Republic of Chinia. Honolulu.
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10 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 12 No 4, August 1996
Since the reforms of the 1980s, China's changing
economic structure has demanded greater labour mo-
bility, and offered expanded opportunities to those who
migrate. This demand, and these opportunities, are
broadening the horizons of women more dramatically
than at any time in Chinese history. Young women
seek work in even distant factories, while increased re-
gional inequalities spur marriage migration. The move-
ment of women as wage labour is conspicuous and im-
portant to China's growing export industries. However,
the nearly invisible flow of brides from poorer to more
prosperous communities constitutes the most significant
form of labour transfer for owner-operators of farms
and small businesses and the millions who work for
them. Both as wage workers and as unwaged wives,
women are essential to the light industry, petty produc-
tion and services on which China's current economic
expansion depends. To be useful, research must capture
both work and marriage migration for women in some
common frame.
In many parts of East Asia, where migration channels
female labour to emerging industry, we see economic
growth based on women's adaptability and low wage
expectations, along with lowered birthrates as young
women delay and limit childbearing in favour of in-
come. In China, sorely in need of economic expansion
and voluntary limitation of fertility, the new, more ac-
tive female migration of the 1980s and 1990s is an im-
portant element in readjustments leading to a more suc-
cessful national adaptation.
Choosing migration
Two assumptions often hamper understanding of the
patterns and economic consequences of female migra-
tion in industrializing countries. First, social analysts
often sharply distinguish migration aimed directly at
employment from that undertaken for purposes of mar-
riage (e.g. Thadani and Todaro 1984: 47-9). The latter
is seen as simply 'rural-to-rural', and thus irrelevant to
changes in the economy (Ware 1981; e.g. Skeldon
1986: 760-61, Goldstein 1990: 689).
In China, hypergamous marriages [marriage of a so-
cially inferior female to a socially superior male] are
favoured both by cultural norms and by an increasingly
unbalanced sex ratio. The present shortage of brides re-
plicates late imperial demographics: sexual selection is
once again destabilizing the sex ratio that the Maoist
revolution had rendered normal. Chinese hypergamy
carries brides up central place hierarchies, creating sys-
temic surpluses of female labour/potential wives at the
'top', and deficits of female labour/potential wives at
the 'bottom'. Dowry wealth is also transferred in mar-
riage. Marriage migration thus plays an important econ-
omic role, exacerbating existing regional inequalities.
Labour transfers through marriage influence the econ-
omy powerfully where most production occurs within
the household.
The second troubling assumption buried in analyses
of migration is that the migrant is taken as the decision-
maker, treated like the classically alienated bourgeois
self offering its labour power in a perfectly responsive
market. In China, parental authority and the pooled
family economy are strong; migrants rarely make deci-
sions to leave home principally on the basis of their
individual interests. The hierarchical family, speaking
through its authoritative household head, is the effective
unit. Young Chinese women' s individual interests,
whether in work or in marriage, are sharply subordi-
nated to those of the larger family (Greenhalgh 1985).
Moreover, household heads are legal and customary
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agents of the state, the non-commissioned officers in a
hierarchy of command that reaches virtually everyone
(v. Gui and Liu 1992: 533). In China's unique political-
economic structure, state control of labour still looms
large, and much of that control is deputed to household
heads. Allocation of labour is constrained not by the
operation of a perfect market on an unencumbered indi-
vidual, but by the multiple tasks of a self-reproducing
patrilineal household firm with political responsibilities
to a larger system of production.
Our knowledge of the new migrations set in train by
China's economic reforms is very incomplete, espe-
cially in regard to women.3 After 1949, internal migra-
tion in China was curtailed by household registration
and grain rationing systems established in 1955, tight-
ened with the establishment of communes in 1958, and
made yet more effective in the early 60s. For the next
two decades, except for very localized movement for
marriage (e.g. Goldstein 1990: 689), migration other
than that sponsored by the state4 was very limited, re-
sulting in no 'basic transformation in the uneven and
irrational distribution of the population' (Zhu
1981: 101) by the early reform period.
In the 1980s, the Maoist pattern of labour allocation
was fractured by an increasingly free labour market and
the accompanying broadening of marriage-partner
pools. Young women (and men) from poorer provinces
and regions have sought out work in factories, con-
struction, agriculture and domestic service. They now
often marry people who would formerly have been out-
side their sphere of acquaintance. Changed regtulations
since 1984 make movement up the central place hier-
archy easier, especially into smaller towns and cities.
Expanded mobility has resulted in substantial floating
populations even in large cities. The recent reimposition
of planning on agricultural production, the reinstitution
of grain and cloth rationing in some cities, and the
commoditization (at high prices) of urban residence
permits are attempts to contain this mobility. They may
mark a significant new trend in the political economy
as a whole, a deliberate move to limit market forces
and reassert the power of distributional hierarchies.
Allocating female labour
In this study I have outlined certain parallels in the
petty capitalism of China, Taiwan, and late imperial
China, and I have emphasizes the centrality of
kinship/gender resource transfers in Chinese political
economies (Gates 1996). With the Sichuan Women's
Federation, I am now probing this theoretical frame-
work for weaknesses by surveying thousands of house-
holds. These interviews provide an empirical basis for
interpreting contemporary allocation of, unmarried
female labour through marriage and/or jobs. They also
expand my capacity to get beyond unhelpful, capital-
ism-centric distinctions between 'kinswoman' and
'worker' in present-day petty capitalism. Preliminary
eyeballing of 1,500 surveys supports the following po-
sition.
China' s current political economy increasingly re-
sembles that of successful peni-Chinese societies such
as Taiwan. It has a large state sector, a corporate capi-
talist sector based on both domestic and foreign private
investment, and a huge and growing sector of petty
capitalist firms which depend heavily on family labour.
Three principal mechanisms currently allocate female
labour among these sectors: a) state assignment; b)
markets; and c) marriage. State assignment is analyti-
cally unproblematic, although it is important to track
 Young woman operatinig a
knitting machine. Photo bx
Hill Gates.
Northwest China Council of
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Victims. New Haven: Yale U. P.
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Smart, Josephine & Alan Smart
1991. Obligation and control:
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the declining proportion of women who now receive
such coveted positions.
Market allocation of female labour directs streams of
young workers to capitalist export producers, but also
to petty capitalist family firms. Responding to the de-
mands of an increasingly open labour market, families
decide whether to use their daughters' labour at home,
or to send them outside as wage labour, inventing all
imaginable maximizing strategies to make best use of
the dedicated labour of their female members. Such la-
bour transfers are temporary; families can recall their
daughters and reassign them elsewhere.
By contrast with the market allocation pattern, alloca-
tion by marriage permanently transfers women and
their labour power from a natal to a marital family.
Marriages are contracted by men and their families for
many reasons, but obtaining a wife's labour services is
transparently one of them. While all families fervently
hope that their bride will produce healthy offspring,
they expect as well that she will work and earn for
them. A woman's dowry, education, skills, body size,
and energy levels are much discussed in marriage ar-
rangements, and weigh heavily in the final decision. Fei
Xiaotong and Chang Chih-i were explicit about the
characteristic peasant view: 'The acquisition of a
daughter-in-law is in many respects equivalent to the
securing of a long-term laborer' (1948: 66); my field-
work in China, and recent research Taiwan by Hsiung
Ping-chun (1996) on women who marry into small fac-
tory-owning families, confirm the persistence of this
old expectation.
While many women still work for the state in China,
their numbers are diminishing rapidly as socialist af-
firmative action disappears. Private corporations, des-
pite the hullabaloo that surrounds them, actually em-
ploy only a tiny fraction of the female workforce.
China's (admittedly doubtful) 1994 official statistics re-
veal that of the approximately 600 m. labour force aged
15 to 60, fewer than six million - one per cent - works
directly in private enterprises that register eight or more
employees. Such figures are open to serious challenge;
we might easily multiply them by a substantial factor.
Even so, in employment terms, the number of women
in private, corporate employment would remain nearly
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trivial. Most of China's production now and for the
foreseeable future is in the hands of state enterprises
and of very small family firms (B, C, and an undeter-
minable share of the Collective sectors) in which the
ties of kinship and marriage form the principal relations
of production.
Table 1. Employment of persons aged 15-60 by
ownership of firms, August 1994 (in millions)
A 'Corporate' employees 147.885
State 108.982
Collective 33.467
Private (siving give, joint 5.436
venture, and multinational)
B Self-employed and their paid workers in geti 29.390
give
Total profit/wage wvorkers 177.275
C Marginal direct producers (for subsistence and 425.725
taxes), and the unemployed (estimated)
Total workforce 600
Source: calculated from China Statistical Yearbok. 1994
Sinifying petty capitalism
The significance of petty capitalism (and petty com-
modity production or the 'informal sector') is much de-
bated by students of developing societies.5 In the West,
family firms historically have been mostly replaced by
capitalist corporations. In many of the world's poorer
regions, petty producers form a semi-proletariat. Their
tiny capital and lack of control over many factors of
production leave them economically impotent against
the international market in which they are embedded.
Their 'firms' survive, but do not prosper. China's petty
capitalists, by contrast, are growing in number, perhaps
because they are partially sheltered from that market.
They have shown astonishing dynamism through the
reform period - as have those of the 'miracle' econ-
omies on China's fringe. Petty capitalism offers many
opportunities to Chinese wives, who, more than unmar-
ried women, find cultural support for independence of
action in many spheres (including fertility limitation)
when they enter the market with both capital and labour
(Gates 1993).
The contemporary petty capitalist context is becom-
ing ethnographically well-documented for China (Ode-
gaard 1992, Bruun 1993), but much research is needed
to clarify the possibilities for women who are family
employees rather than owners of capital.6 Seeing mar-
riage as a mechanism of labour allocation enables us to
set marital and wage-work-seeking mobility within a
political economy characterized by a very large petty
capitalist sector. The buying and selling of brides, de-
plorable as it is, is an aspect of this system, one end of
a spectrum legitimated for many by its culturally--
elaborated logic. The Chinese state has long both de-
plored and criminalized bride-buying. Yet it uninten-
tionally maintains it by the authority it delegates to par-
ents, as well as by the interpretation parents make of
that authority. Pressures to merge wife and worker are
strong in an economic atmosphere where the commo-
ditization of family resources is being emphasized as
the road to riches. It is time that anthropologists began
to look more seriously at the political-economic con-
struction of kinship/gender systems in those regions of
the world - East Asia, South Asia, the Mediterranean
basin - where both powerful states and commodity pro-
duction are much older than capitalism. O