ABSTRACT
During reforms, rural enterprises decreasingly depended on sales to government-owned companies. The state’s planning organizations lost clout as buyers. Markets were still made by power institutions, but no longer just by relatively centralist ones. As early as 1971, trade fairs were active in Jiangnan, offering local manufactures for sale nationally. Chinese consumption was increasingly rural. New economic “models” (moshi) emerged, notably the free trade “Wenzhou model” – whose liberalism became an excuse for less radical experiments in Jiangnan. County militia and trade bureaus kept out products against which their factories did not want to compete. County inspection cars (‘guan ka’) patrolled rural roads, demanding local tolls from trucks. Boat people, often Catholics, hauled bulk commodities by barge. Reforms increased rather than reduced local imposts on rural commerce. Local entrepreneurialism was arguably the basic cause of the booms in commerce as well as industry. This factor is local and political more than it is economic.
