1 For the sake of simplicity and because it is my primary focus, these statements are framed in terms of the family. However, it will become obvious that broader kinship relations and community arrangements are involved, and not simply “the family” defined narrowly. In order to present the broad comparisons required for this article it will be necessary to oversimplify reality. For the most part I ignore important variations within China and other societies in order to focus on the modal or dominant tendencies. This oversimplification does not mean that I believe that in any society, family patterns are universals that affect everyone in the same fashion.

2 I recognize that culture and social structure are intimately intertwined. However, cultural explanations tend to assume that cultural forces are unchanging; social structures, in contrast, can and do change, and may reinforce or obstruct the expression of particular cultural values. The dramatic shifts in popular values and economic behaviour in China require an explanation that is dynamic, rather than one that assumes a constant role of enduring cultural forces.

3 Some of the most important works detailing the way in which Chinese family firms impeded economic development were Feuerwerker, Albert, China's Early Industrialization: Sheng Hsuan-huai and Mandarin Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levy, Marion, The Family Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Feuerwerker and Levy were, of course, following the intellectual lead of Max Weber. See Books, Weber's, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1930Google Scholar [originally 1904–05]) and The Religion of China (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1951 [originally 1916]).

4 I deal with this controversy more extensively in a related paper, “The Chinese family and economic development: obstacle or engine?” under submission. Only an abbreviated version of the ideas covered in that paper is presented here.

5 Kerr, Clark et al., Industrialism and Industrial Man (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1977), p. 94Google Scholar [originally published by Harvard University Press in 1960], quoted in S. L. Wong, “The applicability of Asian family values to other sociocultural settings,” in Peter, Berger and H. H., Michael Hsiao (eds.), In Search of an East Asian Development Model (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988), p. 134.Google Scholar

6 Jenner, William, The Tyranny of History (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 80.Google Scholar Sociologist S. L. Wong, drawing upon his research on textile firms in Hong Kong, argues that there is a natural “life cycle” of Chinese family firms with four phases: emergent, centralized, segmented and disintegrative. See his article, “The Chinese family firm: a model,”British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 36 (1985), pp. 58–72.

7 This argument involving social mobility was stressed by Marion Levy in his article, “Contrasting factors in the modernization of China and Japan,” in Kuznets, S., W., Moore and J., Spengler (eds.), Economic Growth: Brazil, India, Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1955).Google Scholar

8 See Chandler, Alfred D., “The emergence of managerial capitalism,”Business History Review, Vol. 58 (1984), pp. 473–503CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in M., Granovetter and R., Swedberg (eds.), The Sociology of Economic Life (Boulder: Westview, 1992).Google Scholar

9 Wong, “The applicability of Asian family values,” p. 146.

10 See, for example, the discussion in Salaff, Janet, Working Daughters of Hong Kong (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Watson, James L., Emigration and the Chinese Lineage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).Google Scholar

11 See the discussion in Smart, Josephine and Smart, Alan, “Obligation and control: employment of kin in capitalist labour management in China,”Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 13(1993), pp. 7–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Greenhalgh, Susan, “Land reform and family entrepreneurialism in East Asia,” in G., McNicoU and Mead, Cain (eds.), Rural Development and Population: Institutions and Policies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 90.Google Scholar See also Greenhalgh, Susan, “Families and networks in Taiwan's economic development,” in E., Winckler and S., Greenhalgh (eds.), Contending Approaches to the Political Economy of Taiwan (Armonk, NY: M.E. Snarpe, 1988)Google Scholar; Harrell, Stevan, “Why do the Chinese work so hard? Reflections on an entrepreneurial ethic,”Modern China, Vol. 11 (1985), pp. 203–226CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Redding, S. Gordon, The Spirit of Chinese Capitalism (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Case studies of the operation of Chinese firms include Omohundro, John, Chinese Merchant Families in Iloilo: Commerce and Kin in a Central Philippine City (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Silin, Robert, Leadership and Values: The Organization of Large-Scale Taiwanese Enterprises (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Niehoff, Justin, “The villager as industrialist: ideologies of household manufacturing in rural Taiwan,”Modern China, Vol. 13 (1987), pp. 278–309CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Oxfeld, Ellen, Blood, Sweat, and Mahjong (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

13 One study in Hong Kong found that there was no correlation between the rate of growth of industrial firms and the extent to which kin were employed in them. See Espy, J. L., “The strategy of Chinese industrial enterprise in Hong Kong,” unpublished DBA dissertation, Harvard University, 1970Google Scholar, cited in Wong, “The applicabililty of Asian family values,” p. 139.

14 Research dealing with Taiwan and Korea during the 1960s found that small firms were as efficient or more efficient as larger firms in many sectors of those economies. See Ho, Yhi-Min, “The production structure of the manufacturing sector and its distribution implications,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, Vol. 28 (1980), pp. 321–343CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ho, Samuel P., “Small scale industries in two rapidly growing less developed economies: Korea and Taiwan - a study of their characteristics, competitive bases, and productivity,”Studies in Employment and Rural Development, No. 53 (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 1978) (studies discussed in Greenhalgh, “Families and networks in Taiwan's economic develop- ment,” p. 229).Google Scholar

15 The reduction in fertility rates in Taiwan after 1960 was almost as rapid as in the PRC in the 1970s, even though the coerci veness of the PRC family planning system was not present in the ROC. See the discussion in Greenhalgh, Susan, “Fertility as mobility: sinic transitions,” Population and Development Review, Vol. 14 (1988), pp. 629–674CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Johnson, D. Gale, “Effects of institutional policies on rural population growth: the case of China,”Population and Development Review, Vol. 20 (1994), pp.503–531.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 The widespread success of émigré Chinese in South-East Asian countries provided evidence for this phenomenon and an apparent exception already visible a generation ago to the claim that Chinese families inhibited entrepreneurship.

17 Peter Berger, “An East Asian development model?” in Berger and Hsiao, In Search of an East Asian Development Model, p. 7.

18 We have also exchanged communications and drafts of papers related to these issues. She is, of course, not responsible for my interpretation of her ideas in the present article. See also Nee, Victor and Young, Frank, “Peasant entrepreneurs in China's ‘second economy': an institutional analysis,”Economic Development and Cultural Change, Vol. 39 (1991), pp. 293–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rawski, Thomas, “Social foundations of East Asian economic dynamism,” unpublished paper, 1994.Google Scholar

19 Greenhalgh, “Land reform and family entrepreneurship in East Asia,” p. 86.

20 See David, Ransel (ed.), The Family in Imperial Russian (Urbana, DL: University of Illinois Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Jasny, Naum, The Socialized Agriculture of the USSR (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1949), pp. 134–146.Google Scholar The available literature suggests that, while entrepreneurship was not totally absent in Imperial Russia, a large proportion of the entrepreneurs in that society were either foreigners or members of ethnic minorities, rather than Russians. See the discussion in Gregory, Guroff and Fred, Carstensen (eds.), Entrepreneurship in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).Google Scholar

21 The claim here is that softening the family hierarchy helped to reduce one of the main problems the earlier literature saw in Chinese family firms - the tendency of patriarchs to monopolize all decisions, ignoring the ideas and advice of their better educated and potentially more innovative children.

22 See the discussion in Olson, David and Matskovsky, Mikhail, “Soviet and American families: a comparative overview,” in J., Maddocket al. (eds.), Families Before and After Perestroika (New York: Guilford, 1994).Google Scholar This is a gross generalization which applies much less to the national minority populations of the Soviet Union than it does to the Russians, Ukrainians and Belorussians, not to mention people in the Baltic republics. Throughout the Soviet period and still today, Georgians and other non-Russians have displayed family loyalties and commercial predilections much stronger than those of the dominant Russians.

23 See the earlier account of Rong Yiren offered in Snow, Edgar, The Other Side of the River (New York: Random House, 1961), p. 198.Google Scholar At the time Rong, the eldest son of a Shanghai textile magnate, was deputy mayor of Shanghai and a vice-minister of the Textile Ministry. Compare his current situation, described in Beijing Review, No. 35 (1994), pp. 22–23.

24 Some of the details of these experiences differ, of course. The Soviet Union had no counterpart to China's coercive birth control campaigns but instead a mild pro-natalist policy. The rupture of families as a result of deaths (particularly in the mass purges and during the Second World War) was at least proportionally much greater in the Soviet Union.

25 See the discussion in Davis-Freedman, Deborah, Long Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Yang, Hai'ou, “Population and kinship dynamics of the elderly in China: a microsimulation study,”Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology, Vol. 7 (1992), pp. 135–150.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

26 See Parish, William, “China - team, brigade, or commune?” Problems of Communism, Vol. 25 (1976), pp. 51–65.Google Scholar

27 See Whyte, Martin K., “Revolutionary change and patrilocal residence in China,” Ethnology, Vol. 18 (1979), pp. 211–227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 For a personal account of repeated efforts to augment family income from private sidelines and marketing despite official threats and sanctions, see Liyi, He, Mr China's Son (Boulder: Westview, 1993).Google Scholar

29 Until the 1960s adult collective farmers did not possess internal passports and therefore could not migrate to urban areas without special permission. However, there were massive rural recruitment drives connected to major new industrial projects, and rural young people could use education, military service and other means to escape the farms and receive an internal passport. In the Khrushchev era the internal passport system was abolished.

30 Such efforts to uproot villages took place on an even greater and more disruptive scale in Ceaucescu's Romania. In a few locales in the PRC experiments were made with building apartment complexes to replace villagers’ scattered private homes, but such experiments were not part of a national policy, as in the Soviet Union and Romania.

31 See the discussion in Dunn, Stephen, “Structure and functions of the Soviet rural family,” in James, Millar (ed.), The Soviet Rural Community (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1971), pp. 234–35.Google Scholar

32 The wrenching experiences for Chinese peasants came not with collectivization but with the collapse of the Great Leap Forward a few years later, when an estimated 30 million excess deaths occurred, overwhelmingly in rural areas. Unlike the Soviet collectivization drive, however, this episode did not involve mobilized class struggle and forced deportation of parts of kin groups, and the survivors of the Chinese famine were probably driven closer together, for reasons discussed below. Large numbers of excess deaths were caused by Soviet collectivization and the famine it induced, as detailed in Conquest, Robert, Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

33 China Research Centre on Ageing, A Data Compilation of the Survey on China's Support Systems for the Elderly (Beijing: Hualin Press, 1994), p. 95.Google Scholar

34 See my paper, “ Changes in mate choice in Chengdu,” in D., Davis and E., Vogel (eds.), Chinese Society on the Eve ofTiananmen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 197Google Scholar; Unger, Jonathan, “Urban families in the eighties: an analysis of Chinese surveys,” in D., Davis and S., Harrell (eds), Chinese Families in the Post-Mao Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 28.Google Scholar The dingti system of job inheritance was formally abolished in 1983.

35 Even for Red Guards who denounced a parent, family rupture was often followed by eventual reconciliation and closer bonds. See the account in Yuan, Gao, Bom Red (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).Google Scholar One of the most important stories of the immediate post-Mao period was Lu Xinhua's “The Scar,” the short story which gave its name to a new genre of critical works on the Cultural Revolution era. The story concerns the emotional turmoil of a young woman who had broken all ties with her mother when the latter was branded a traitor in 1969. The young woman learns in 1978 that her mother has been exonerated and is in failing health. The daughter tries to return in time to apologize and be reconciled with her dying mother, but arrives too late. The story is translated in Liu, Xinwu, Wang, Meng et al., Prize-Winning Storiesfrom China. 1978–1979 (Beijing:Foreign Languages Press, 1981).Google Scholar

36 There were restrictions on moving into the largest Soviet cities, although these did not restrict urban migration as sharply as in China during the Mao period. Individuals were forbidden to move to or register in such cities without a job. However, the existence of a labour market and the perennial labour shortages of the Soviet system meant that individuals could obtain urban jobs and use those to move legally into large cities.

37 The variety of changes, as well as continuities, in Chinese family patterns during the socialist period are discussed in detail in my two books co-authored with William Parish and published by the University of Chicago Press: Village and Family in Contemporary China (1978) and Urban Life in Contemporary China (1984).

38 See the discussion in my paper, “Changes in mate choice in Chengdu.” See also Yan, Yunxiang, “Socialist transformation and family relations: the rise of conjugality and individuality in a Chinese village,” unpublished paper for the American Anthropological Association meeting, 1992.Google Scholar

39 See the discussion in Yunxiang Yan, “Socialist transformation and family relations”; Cohen, Myron, “Family management and family division in contemporary rural China,”The China Quarterly, No. 130 (1992), p. 371.Google Scholar

40 See the discussion in Vogel, Ezra, One Step Ahead in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).Google Scholar See also Smart and Smart, “Obligation and control: employment of kin in capitalist labour management in China.”

41 For alternative views, see Odgaard, Ole, Private Enterprises in Rural China (Aldershot: Avebury, 1992)Google Scholar; Croll, Elisabeth, From Heaven to Earth: Images and Experiences of Development in China (London: Routledge, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kate Xiao Zhou, How the Farmers Changed China (Boulder: Westview Press, forthcoming).

42 These alternatives can be stated in a different form: is the analogy with Taiwan's development experience, with family-run firms a dominant feature, appropriate or inappropriate in understanding the dynamism of rural industry in the PRC in recent years?

43 See the discussion in Yan Yunxiang, “Dislocation, reposition and restratification: structural changes in Chinese society,” in M., Brosseau and Lo, Chi Kin (eds.), China Review 1994 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1994).Google Scholar

44 Greenhalgh, “Land reform and family entrepreneurship in East Asia,” pp. 105–106. One 1989 survey conducted in eight provinces found that an average of one in every seven rural households surveyed was involved in non-agricultural businesses, and that the distribution of such activity was surprisingly even, rather than concentrated in coastal regions or near cities. See Entwisle, Barbaraet al., “Gender and family businesses in rural China,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 60 (1995), pp. 36–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45 See the discussion in Zhou, How the Farmers Changed China.

46 Alex Inkeles, C. Montgomery Broaded and Zhongde Cao, “Causes and consequences of individual modernity in mainland China,” unpublished paper. Common elements in Inkeles's syndrome of individual modernity and entrepreneurship include conceptions of personal efficacy, the ability to get ahead through diligent effort, and rational planning. However, the notion of strong loyalty to the family is somewhat discordant with Inkeles's conception of individual modernity. For a more general discussion of the concept of attitudinal modernity as a cross-national phenomenon, see Inkeles, Alex and Smith, David, Becoming Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).Google Scholar

47 The family-based firms that have been established by Chinese urbanites tend to be small-scale efforts in the service sector, such as family-run restaurants, rather than the full range of industrial, construction and other firms that their rural counterparts are establishing.

48 In Poland, of course, private farming was allowed to persist from the 1950s onwards, as was the case in the former Yugoslavia.

49 A recent study produced an estimate that in 1990 there were 37 million overseas Chinese, with more than 32 million of these residing in Asia. See Poston, Dudley, Mao, Michaeland Yu, Mei-Yu, “The global distribution of the overseas Chinese around 1990,” Population and Development Review, Vol. 20 (1994), pp. 631–645.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

50 For further discussion see my paper, “The Chinese family and development: obstacle or engine?”

51 See the discussion in Piore, Michael and Sabel, Charles, The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity (New York: Basic Books, 1984)Google Scholar; Kenney, Martin and Florida, Richard, Beyond Mass Production (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Hirst, Paul and Zeitlin, Jonathan, “Flexible specialization versus post-Fordism: theory, evidence, and policy implications,”Economy and Society, Vol. 20 (1991), pp. 1–56.Google Scholar

52 Urbanites also have their fertility limited even more sharply than do rural residents. In China's largest cities there is a high degree of compliance with the one child policy, whereas in the countryside the norm is closer to two children.