ABSTRACT
The issues of market understanding and bargaining call into question other aspects of Chinese commercial life, for example in the domain of information. As Boisot argues, the lack of codification and diffusion of information in the PRC creates a business context in which it is particularly difficult to comprehend market structures. The rapid growth of network capitalism accounts for much of China's recent economic success, and it is anticipated that by the year 2000 the economy will be as much as 75 percent dependent on two sectors which behave in a capitalist manner: town and village enterprise and the private sector. Traditional Chinese culture placed the merchant at the bottom of a four-tier social structure beneath the literati, the peasant, and the artisan. Industrialization in more recent years has tended to extend the lessons learned over centuries in the commercial realm to the networking of cooperation for production processes.
