ABSTRACT
The success enjoyed by ethnic Chinese outside of the People’s Republic of China has led scholars to claim that there are important commonalities in their overall style of enterprise (Gates, 1996:3). For example, Yeung notes that Hong Kong Chinese industrialists ‘are known for their entrepreneurship and higher propensity to engage in risky business and overseas ventures’ (Yeung, 1994:140). These tendencies are said to be due, in part, to shared experience of repression (reducing local opportunities) in their home territories, the existence of active social networks in other countries, and historical experience of specialization in ‘middleman capitalism’ (Chirot, 1997). A main theme of his book is that this form of organization is ‘peculiarly effective and a significant contributor to the list of causes of the East Asia miracle’ (Chirot, 1997). Social networks are also said to be constructed and mobilized to develop particularistic interpersonal forms of trust which encourage ‘co-operation, loyalty, obedience, duty, stability, adaptiveness and legitimacy in the short and long term’ (Thrift and Olds, 1996:324). Other studies have likewise pointed to the frequency of the family enterprise and the strengths offered by the overlap between household and enterprise (Redding, 1990:143, Hamilton and Biggart, 1992, and Yeung, 1998). According to Redding what is special about Chinese business organization is that: ‘it retains many of the characteristics of small scale, such as paternalism, opportunism, flexibility, even to very large scale.’ (Redding, 1990:3) Hamilton and Waters also believe that common organizational forms can be identified, and likewise suggest that what has been significant is the migrants’ ability to adapt to very different contexts so as to succeed in ‘ways as numerous as the institutional and organizational contexts of the societies in which they lived and worked’ (Hamilton and Waters, 1997:279).3 It has been hypothesized that the conditions that now encourage transnational production and distribution, including flexible response to rapidly changing consumer demands, have rewarded the kinds of organizational skills that the overseas Chinese are well known for (Thrift and Olds, 1996). However, there are scholars who, after critically examining the discourse about ‘Chinese capitalism’, reject many of the ‘culturalist claims’ which attempt to explain business success in terms of ‘essential, exclusive and unchanging Chinese values’ (Dirlik, 1997; Ong,
1997; Nonini, 1997; and Greenhalgh, 1994). But merely demonstrating the ideological nature of these narratives does not resolve the question of whether or not there is something fundamentally different about the way Asian societies have accomplished their rapid economic growth. With some reluctance, I have come to accept that there is something called ‘economic culture’, which has clearly played a significant role in the cross-border relationships to be discussed below and, more generally, in the rapid growth of the South China region.4
