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Craft Development: Socialist and Capitalist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Eugene Cooper
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Extract

The post-war development of the art-carved furniture and camphorwood chests manufacturing industry of Hong Kong was the direct result of the relocation of large numbers of workers and entrepreneurs in the trade from Shanghai to Hong Kong in the wake of China's 1949 socialist revolution. In a brief visit to a carved-furniture factory in Shanghai in late 1978, I was able to gather data which provide the opportunity to compare in several crucial respects developments in the wood carving craft in post-revolutionary Shanghai with the results of an earlier study I made of the craft's development in Hong Kong, and to reflect on the fate of a single industry undergoing parallel development under socialism and capitalism between 1949 and 1978.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 83 , September 1980 , pp. 447 - 460
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1980

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References

* The visit was arranged for me personally by China Travel Service in the course of a standard 12-day tour of China. Most of the data was provided in a question and answer session presided over by the factory manager and several workers, during which labour force composition, forms of remuneration for labour, recruitment and apprenticeship, and mechanization were discussed. A tour of the factory premises confirmed that the overall division of labour and organization of production were virtually identical to Hong Kong firms of similar size in the mid- to late 1960s. The tour enabled me to question workers about their careers, apprenticeships, relatives in the trade, place of origin etc. One older worker of Dongyang descent, with work experience in Hong Kong in the 1950s, provided information on the close connection of Dongyang county with the carved furniture industry, the tendency of the craft to run in families, and the nature of the Dongyang community in Shanghai. He was seen again in a subsequent visit to the factory by one of my students at the University of Hong Kong, Mrs Wendy Luk Pik-chay, and questioned further on the co-operativization movement, forms of remuneration and incentive schemes and factory organization and management.

The information was provided spontaneously in the course of questioning and no written records were made available. In general I am reasonably certain of the reliability and accuracy of the information presented here, although the data are unavoidably sketchy. Further investigation will, I am confident, confirm the general accuracy of my findings.

1. Cooper, Eugene, The Woodcarvers of Hong Kong: craft production in the world capitalist periphery (Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology No. 29, CUP. In press)Google Scholar;

2. Stanley, Arthur, “Chinese Woodcarving,” in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, North China Branch, 45:76 (1914)Google Scholar;

3. de C. Sowerby, Arthur, “A New Art Craft in Shanghai,” in The China Journal of Science and Arts, 8:1 (1926)Google Scholar;

4. Ibid.

5. Marx, Karl, Capital (New York: International Publishers, 1967, pp. 336Google Scholaret seq.); Cooper, Eugene, “The Period of Manufacture in the Development of the Chinese Art Carved Furniture Industry: a study in the evolution of the mode of craft production,” in Leons, M. B. and Rothstein, F., eds., New Directions in Political Economy: an approach from anthropology (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979)Google Scholar;

6. Herman, Theodore, An Analysis of China's Export Handicraft Industries to 1930, unpublished Ph.D. manuscript (Ann Arbor University Microfilms, 1954, P. 29)Google Scholar;

7. Marx 1967; cf. also Bettelheim, Charles, “China since Mao,” Monthly Review, 30: 3 (1978)Google Scholar;

8. Marx, 1967, p. 555.

9. Ibid. p. 367.

10. Phelps-Brown, E. H., “The Hong Kong Economy: Achievements &, Prospects” in Hopkins, K., ed., Hong Kong: the industrial colony (Hong Kong: OUP, 1971), p. 13Google Scholar;