China's Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism

by Hill Gates

Overview

This monumental work reveals the continuities that underlie the changing surface of Chinese life from late imperial days to modern times. With a perspective that encompasses a thousand years of Chinese history, China's Motor provides a view of the social, economic, and political principles that have prompted people in widely varying circumstances to act, believe, and behave in ways that are labeled as Chinese.

This original reinterpretation of Chinese culture, as meticulous in detail as it is vast in scope, will revise not only the study of China but also the very terms of social analysis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801431432
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	03/07/1996
Series:	1/7/2003
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.12(d)
Lexile:	1410L (what's this?)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Hill Gates is Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. She is the author of Chinese Working-Class Lives: Getting By in Taiwan, also from Cornell.

Editorial Reviews

Gates is a Marxist anthropologist with chutzpah. Best known for her compelling portrayal of contemporary working-class Taiwanese, she considerably broadens and deepens her analysis of China's socioeconomy in this work.

Choice

Gates (senior research associate at the Center for Far East Asian Studies, Stanford Univ., and the author of Chinese Working Class Lives: Getting By in Taiwan, Cornell Univ., 1987) deals here with the continuities that underlie the changing surface of Chinese life from the late imperial period to modern times. The book attempts to provide a view of the social, economic, and political principles that identify a people as Chinese. Gates identifies two modes of organization in Chinese society. The first is the petty capitalist, characterized by a set of attitudes developed by family businesspeople and carried over into Chinese firms that were run on the principle "the buyer should buy as cheap, and the seller sell as dear, as possible," with the gain going into the pockets of both parties. The second is the tributary mode of state-centered initiatives. Using these categories, Gates explores some of the contradictions in Chinese life, such as a strong kinship system that nonetheless permits infanticide. This book is recommended only for academic libraries with strong Chinese collections.-Dennis L. Noble, Sequim, Wash.

Library Journal

Gates is a Marxist anthropologist with chutzpah. Best known for her compelling portrayal of contemporary working-class Taiwanese, she considerably broadens and deepens her analysis of China's socioeconomy in this work.

-- "Choice"

From the Publisher