1 An excellent discussion of this new phenomenon is Gordon White, Prospects for civil society in China: a case study of Xiaoshan city, The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs,No. 29 (January 1993), pp. 63–87;Google Scholar also see White's Riding the Tiger: The Politics of Economic Reform in Post-Mao China(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), esp. pp. 225–29. An informative Chinese-language source is Wang Ying, Zhe Xiaoye and Sun Bingyao, Zhongguo shehui zhongjian ceng: gaige yu Zhongguode shetuan zuzhi (The Intermediary Level of Chinese Society: Reform and China's Associational Organizations)(Beijing: Zhongguo fazhan chubanshe, 1993).Google Scholar

2 As of 1993, 1,400 such national associations were registered with the central government; 19,600 organizations and branches of organizations were registered with provincial authorities; and more than 160,000 were registered at county level (China Daily,7 May 1993, p. 3).

3 Philippe C. Schmitter has devised a one-sentence core definition of corporatism that is often cited in papers on the topic: Corporatism can be defined as a system of interest representation in which the constituent units are organized into a limited number of singular, compulsory, noncompetitive, hierarchically ordered and functionally differentiated categories, recognized or licensed (if not created) by the state and granted a deliberate representational monopoly within their respective categories in exchange for observing certain controls on their selection of leaders and articulation of demands and supports. Schmitter, Still the century of corporatism? in Fredrick B. Pike and Thomas Stritch (eds.), The New Corporatism: Social-Political Structures in the Iberian World(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974), pp. 93–94. Also see Douglas A. Chalmers, Corporatism and comparative politics, in Howard J. Wiarda (ed.), New Directions in Comparative Politics(Boulder: Westview Press, 1985), pp. 56–79.

4 Ronald Dore, Japan: a nation made for corporatism? in Colin Crouch and Ronald Dore (eds.), Corporatism and Accountability: Organized Interests in British Public Life(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 4.

5 Studies of Chinese trade unions and of the foreign-funded enterprise managers' association as examples of corporatism are Anita Chan, Revolution or corporatism? Workers and trade unions in post-Mao China, The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs,No. 28 (January 1993), pp. 31–61, and Margaret Pearson, The Janus face of business associations in China: socialist corporatism in foreign enterprises, The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs,No. 31 (January 1994), pp. 25-A6.An overview analysis of Chinese associations from this perspective is Jonathan Unger and Anita Chan, Corporatism in China: a developmental state in an East Asian context, in Barrett L. McCormick and Jonathan Unger (eds.), China After Socialism: In the Footsteps of Eastern Europe or East Asia ?(Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996), pp. 95–129; a shorter version appeared in The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs,No. 33 (January 1995), pp. 29–53. Also White, Prospects, pp. 85–86.

6 Steven M. Goldstein, China in transition: the political foundations of incremental reform, The China Quarterly,No. 144 (December 1995), pp. 1124–26.

7 Zhongguo de getijingji he siyingjingji (The Individual and Private Economy of China),a brochure published by the Self-Employed Labourers Association, March 1993, p. 8; also interviews at the Association's national headquarters, 1993; Ole Odgaard, Private Enterprises in Rural China(Aldershot: Avebury, 1992), p. 205.

8 Half a dozen district-level officials were interviewed at length, as well as several officials at levels higher than the district.

9 SeeJ. Bruce, Jacobs, Elections in China, The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs,No. 25 (January 1991), pp. 171–199.Google Scholar

10 On this, see Andrew Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); also Elizabeth Perry and Lu Xiaobo (eds.), Between State and Society: The Changing Chinese Work-Unit in Historical and Comparative Perspective(forthcoming

11 See e.g. Zai Beijing fasheng dongluan, baoluan qijian Dalianshi dui getihu jiaqiang jiaoyu qude chengjiao (Success achieved in strengthening education towards the getihuduring the period of Beijing turmoil), in Ding Li (ed.), Zhongguo de geti he siying jingji (China's Petty Entrepreneurial and Privately Managed Economy)(Beijing: Gaige chubanshe, 1990), p. 234, which claims that more than 80% of the getihuin the districts of Dalian city had participated in this direct propaganda education within two weeks of the 4 June 1989 massacre.

12 Shi Xianmin, Getihu yu Beijing chengshi shehui jiegou de fenhua yu zhenghe: Beijingshi Xicheng qu getihu yanjiu (Petty entrepreneurs and differentiation and conformity in Beijing's urban social structure: research on the petty entrepreneurs of Beijing's Xicheng district), Ph.D. dissertation, Beijing University, 1992, p. 175.

13 As just one example, the work of the Party's United Front Department used to have a relatively low status compared to other sectors of the Party bureaucracy, as its mission entailed ongoing contact with non-Party members of politically dubious standing. As the status of these non-Party notables rose markedly under Deng's opening up during the 1980s and 1990s, so too did the bureaucratic status of being part of the United Front Department.

14 In Beijing, unlike what has been reported for a number of other locales, corruption in the form of demands by officials for pay-offs does not seem to be a major problem, nor rip-offs in the form of officials regularly pocketing excessive fees and fines from getihu.Certainly, this was not reported in my subsequent private interviews with getihu.The type of corruption that they did report involves low-level tax officials, who often accept gifts and meals in exchange for lower tax rates. But in such cases the revenues of the government are adversely affected, not the getihu.Notably, too, the local Bureau/Association officials do not seem to live beyond their means. By chance I attended several social dinners in the same apartment building that several of the district Bureau/Association officials occupy, and neighbours commented approvingly that they do not possess any consumer goods or furnishings beyond what would be expected at their levels of salary. Why this Beijing district differs in terms of corruption from other reported field sites is not altogether clear. On how increasingly corrupt bureaucrats milk the getihuin a district of Chengdu, Sichuan, see Ole Bruun, Business and Bureaucracy in a Chinese City(Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1993).

15 Information on Nanjing is based on interviews conducted on my behalf by an acquaintance; the information on Tianjin appears in Christopher E. Nevitt, Private business associations in China: civil society or tools of local government autonomy? The China Journal,No. 37 (July 1996); the information on Chengdu derives from Bruun's excellent monograph Business and Bureaucracy in a Chinese City,esp. pp. 112–120. A similar description based on research in the city of Wenzhou is contained in Kristen Parris, Private entrepreneurs as citizens, paper presented at the 1994 American Political Science Association convention, esp. pp. 31–32.

16 Sun Bingyao, Xiangzhen shetuan yu Zhongguo jiceng shehui (Rural township associations and grassroots Chinese society), Zhongguo shehui kexuejikan (Chinese Social Science Quarterly)(Hong Kong), No. 9 (autumn 1994), pp. 33, 35. Also see Susan Young, Private entrepreneurs and evolutionary change, in David Goodman and Beverley Hooper (eds.), China's Quiet Revolution: New Interactions between State and Society(Melbourne: Longman Cheshire; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), pp. 117–18; Ole Odgaard, Entrepreneurs and elite formation in rural China, The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs,No. 28 (July 1992), pp. 99–100. Leaning to the side of their memberships may not mean that such rural private proprietors necessarily form a represented constituency per se:rather, some individual proprietors with sufficient resources at their command can make use of the local Association to form beneficial official linkages, while others may feel burdened by the association, in the words of Ole Odgaard. Odgaard, who has examined a Self-Employed Labourers Association chapter in a Sichuan county, reports that there the association strengthens controls of most of the private enterprises, while forging alliances with the few very rich and influential entrepreneurs. See Odgaard's book Rural Enterprises in Rural China,pp. 211–12.

17 Three getihuwere formally interviewed through prior appointments made with the help of mutual acquaintances. In addition, more than a dozen others were approached informally at their stalls in open-air markets and at rented shops in working-class neighbourhoods and up-market shopping areas, and were chatted up at length in what Tom Gold refers to as guerrilla interviewing. Thomas Gold, Guerrilla interviewing among the getihu,in Perry Link (ed.), Unofficial China- Popular Culture and Thought in the People's Republic(Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), pp. 179–192.

18 This friction of distance has in turn given rise to a relocation by small-scale garment manufacturers to Beijing to service the local market directly, and consequently a number of large so-called Zhejiang villages (Zhejiang province is China's major clothing producer for the domestic market) have sprung up semi-illicitly in the rural outskirts of Beijing.

19 This friction of distance has in turn given rise to a relocation by small-scale garment manufacturers to Beijing to service the local market directly, and consequently a number of large so-called Zhejiang villages (Zhejiang province is China's major clothing producer for the domestic market) have sprung up semi-illicitly in the rural outskirts of Beijing.

20 Zhang Wenwei, Shilun dui geti jingji de yindao he guanli (Preliminary discussion on the guidance and management of the self-employed sector of the economy), Shehui kexue (Social Science),No. 5 (1992), p. 14. A 1989 survey by Rosemary Bannan of street vendors in Beijing found that fully 48% of the 198 surveyed had previously been farmers, 18% had been workers, 13% had been at school, 13% had been unemployed, and 4% had been housewives, demobilized soldiers, etc. Bannan, Little China: street vending in the free market, 1989, Journal of Developing Societies,Vol. VIII, No. 2 (July 1992), p. 150.

21 I have also been informed, though, of a couple of contrary cases where entrepreneurs, hoping to avoid heavier tax burdens, have concealed the size of their operations and have indeed sought to have themselves listed as getihu.

22 Both Chinese source materials and Western-language studies assert that this eightperson dividing line was determined by a passage in Karl Marx's writings. But the deputy head of the national Association dismisses that notion as a misunderstanding: In 1981 we looked to see what could be considered a modest family business, with a head, a few family members, a couple of hired employees and apprentices, and the total number in such an undertaking might reach about eight. So we decided on that as the dividing line between a family undertaking and a qualitatively bigger type of enterprise. It turned out that this coincides with Marx's definition, which was merely a happy coincidence. In Beijing city, more recently, a capital value of 500,000 yuanor more has become the criterion (300,000 yuanfor a technical-services firm), in the realization that an enterprise's scale cannot be gauged adequately simply by counting the numbers employed.

23 Nation-wide, as of the end of 1992, some 139,000 private enterprises (siying qiye)were registered, employing 2,300,000 people, so the average enterprise employed some 17 personnel (from a mid-1993 interview at the national headquarters of the Bureau).

24 Sun Bingyao, Xiangzhen shetuan, pp. 29, 32.

25 Interviews were conducted in 1993 with an official of some standing at the national level and with several officials of the Federation's city-level headquarters. Interviews were conducted by Anita Chan on my behalf in 1995 with officials from two of the Beijing Federation's district-level offices (in Chaoyang and Chongwen districts) and with an official from the national headquarters.

26 From a Chinese-language pamphlet on the Democratic Parties and the Federation, published in March 1993 by the secretariat of the CPPCC, p. 24.

27 As a United Front Department official declared in a 1991 speech, the Federation has always been a united-front people's organization, rather than chiefly an economic organization or a department supervised directly by the government. Although it is not a Democratic Party and has no political program, like the Democratic Parties it participates in politics and has a place in the political system (Issues&Studies,Vol. 30, No. 7 (July 1994), p. 125).

28 Gongshangjie (World of Industry&Commerce),magazine published by the Beijing chapter of the Federation, November 1993, p. 6.

29 This new regulation was laid out in Zhongfano. 15. See Issues&Studies,Vol. 30, No. 7 (July 1994), pp. 125, 127.

30 More recently, the CNCA has shifted gears and has begun to concentrate on recruiting professionals whose jobs are associated with the economy.

31 As just one small example of such co-operation, they have jointly established a for-profit night school in Chaoyang district to teach accountancy and other business skills.

32 Zhongguo gongshang lianhehui zhangcheng (Constitution of the Chinese Federation of Industry&Commerce),pamphlet printed by the Beijing branch of the Federation, 1994, p. 2.

33 Agence France Presse dispatch from Beijing, 21 October 1994.

34 China News Digest(internet service), 6 December, 1995. It is entitled the Minsheng Bank.

35 I am grateful to David Wank for originally bringing this aspect to my attention in a private communication. He has found such tendencies in his study of associations in Xiamen, and notes that the entrepreneurs there perceive Party organizations as being more willing to comply with the Party's line in favour of raising the status of private business and protecting the legal rights of private businesspeople in contrast to the Bureau's emphasis on its own regulatory and disciplinary functions and fees. On this distinction, also see Kristen Parris, Local initiative and national reform: the Wenzhou model of development, The China Quarterly,No. 134 (June 1993), p. 261. On Xiamen, see David L. Wank, Private business, bureaucracy, and political alliance in a Chinese city, The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs,No. 33 (January 1995), p. 60.

36 This information derives from an interview with a national Federation official.

37 For these other associations, see the citations in Unger and Chan, Corporatism in China.

38 This advantage is partially offset by other factors, such as a central government policy that strongly seeks to keep labour organizational activity under control, and the relatively low status of working-class and female constituencies (see below).

39 An excellent discussion of this factor, illuminating the differing interests of district and municipal level officials in Tianjin vis-a-vis the Association and the Federation, has been published in recent weeks. See Nevitt, Private business associations in China.

40 Zhonghua gongshang shibao (China Industrial&Commercial Times),14 April 1995, p. 6.

41 Ibid.