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Low Power: Small Enterprises in Shanghai, 1949–67
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2009
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Small firms in Chinese cities, which before 1949 were private, have in the communist era gradually come under more government authority. The stages of this slow process can be treated as a case study in the political socialization of small units. They tell a tale of tensions between different levels of economic power, high, medium and low. Research into the kinds of power that promoted this step-by-step centralization, and also into those that resisted it, may suggest a more comprehensive approach to power in China generally.* The author expresses great thanks to the Joint Committee on Contemporary China of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies for support related to this article. The Center of International Studies and the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, supplied some clerical help, and the Foreign Area Fellowship Program supported the author's first researches on Shanghai. Very useful comments were received from James Nickum, Gordon Bennett, Bruce Reynolds, Thomas Rawski, Carl Riskin, Dick Wilson, and an anonymous reader for The China Quarterly. All opinions here are the author's solely.
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References
1. An example of this tendency is Chang Ch'un-ch'iao, On Exercising All-Round Dictatorship Over the Bourgeoisie (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1975). A less hasty approach, at least in rural cases, was suggested a few months later in Hua Kuo-feng, Let the Whole Party Mobilize for a Vast Effort to Develop Agriculture and Build Tachai-type Counties Throughout the Country (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1975). As final revisions were being made on this article, Hua's faction defeated Chang's. The precise implications for future management policies are still unclear, but the continuing importance of these issues is quite clear.Google Scholar
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49. Ibid. 11 October 1957.
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56. Ibid. 31 March 1957.
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65. Ibid. 15 August 1957.
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73.Ibid.Google Scholar
74. Cf., for example, Hsin-min pao wan-k'an, 22 February 1957.Google Scholar
75. An example: NCNA (Shanghai), 13 June 1956.Google Scholar
76. Hsin-wen jih-pao, 24 May 1957.Google Scholar
77. Cf. Ibid.
78. Wen-hui pao (Documentary News) (Shanghai), 5 February 1958; transl. Survey of the China Mainland Press (SCMP) (Hong Kong), No. 1723, p. 37.Google Scholar
79. Hsin-wen jih-pao, 24 May 1957; on the sales tax, see ibid. 22 July 1957.
80. Chieh-fang jih-pao, 7 May 1958; transl. SCMP, No. 1794, p. 32. Cf. also Audrey Donnithorne, China's Economic System (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1967), p. 290. Especially in the autumn, one goes to East China teahouses to drink, eat the crabs that are best then, and watch the chrysanthemums bloom. This context, as a site for 5,000-watt power generator deals, is a metaphor of the best in this city's life.Google Scholar
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82. Schurmann made a distinction between “decentralization I,” or power-transfer “all the way down” to the production units, and “decentralization II,” only down to “some lower level of regional administration.” Franz Schurmann, Ideology and Organization in Communist China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), p. 175. The Leap “localization” was of the second sort – in other words, it was the opposite of localization from the viewpoint of the lowest levels.Google Scholar
83. Hsin-wen jih-pao, 6 January 1958, deals with the creation of subsidiaries under the Second Huangp'u District Food Store (Huangp'u Ch'ü Yin-shih Ti-erh Ch'ü-tien).Google Scholar
84. Wen-hui pao, 23 January 1958.Google Scholar
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114. Ibid. 21 September 1965. The “three on-the-spot” work method: collecting pigs on the spot, butchering pigs on the spot, and selling meat on the spot (chiu-ti shou-chu, chiu-ti tsai-chu, chiu-ti mai-jou).
115. Ibid. 18 March 1965.
116. Ibid. 12 January 1966.
117. Ibid. 23 October 1965.
118. Ibid. 17 January 1966.
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120. Jen-min, 6 June 1965.Google Scholar
121. Hsin-min wan-pao, 14 May 1966.Google Scholar
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128. Herbert A. Simon, Administrative Behavior: A Study of the Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organizations (NewYork: Macmillan, 1957), p. 12.
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