ABSTRACT
Self-sufficiency (zili gengsheng) – the opposite of trade among localities – was a Communist ideal during the revolution. A quick rise of regional trade during reforms reversed it. The early 1970s saw a revival of horizontal (hengxiang) relations between rural enterprises and urban experts. In the thirty years after the mid-fifties, 1,400,000 Shanghai people – not counting rusticated youths – were sent to help other places in China. Three-tenths had technical skills, often in trade. Many consultants in Jiangnan were sardonically called “high-priced old men,” when they were not “Sunday engineers” taking weekend jobs away from their weekday posts in Shanghai. “Inopportune resignations” presented problems for Shanghai state-sector plants that paid less well than inland cooperatives. When Shanghai’s supervising industrial bureaus could not deliver materials at low state prices, they formed “enterprise groups” (qiye qunti) that “worked for the transfer of Shanghai’s material-consuming industries to places where the materials are produced.” Entrepreneurs’ clubs and the regionalist Shanghai Economic Zone sponsored traveling salesmen and “horizontal links,” some of which were illegal and many of which were buoyed by “boat people’s” barges on canals. Trade boomed, first domestically and then abroad.
