ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at two quite different aspects of Chinese society, concentrating on Taiwan, where the peoples have the most evidence, but with frequent reference to the People's Republic of China. First, it takes up the use of particularistic ties in business, especially the claim that the Chinese effectively mobilize family and other personal ties to avoid the extreme individualism of the West. The chapter examines the related attempts to work out a philosophical "post-Confucian" alternative to Western market culture. Second, it also takes up recent developments in popular religion, which both celebrate and substitute for a perceived amoral market. The available social and cultural resources influence how tensions between market and social values develop. Women have entered the market at all levels in the course of the twentieth century in China and no longer always rely on the mediation of their husbands, fathers, and sons. Yet their opportunities are certainly not identical to men's.
