Primitive accumulation in modern China

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• 作者：Michael Webber
• 关键词：Capital ; Workers ; Development ; Class ; Dispossession ; China
• 刊名：Dialectical Anthropology
• 出版年：2008
• 出版时间：December, 2008
• 年：2008
• 卷：32
• 期：4
• 页码：299-320
• 全文大小：235.7 KB
• 刊物类别：Humanities, Social Sciences and Law
• 刊物主题：Social Sciences
  Anthropology
  
• 出版者：Springer Netherlands
• ISSN：1573-0786

文摘

This article surveys the history of primitive accumulation in China, from the early 1980s to the mid 2000s. It observes that the principal means of primitive accumulation have been the transformation of state and collective enterprises into capital, the peasants’ loss of land through various forms of dispossession, and the voluntary migration of peasants from agricultural to industrial pursuits. These mix dispossession and market mechanisms in complex ways. They have involved the creation of markets; but more, the creation of workers and capital. While the processes that drive primitive accumulation have economic logics, they also have logics that derive from concerns over social welfare, over environmental management, and over ethnic struggles. Furthermore, the state has been closely involved in the entire process—as a regionally differentiated actor, directly involved in ownership, asset transformation and the control of migration. Primitive accumulation in China does not have one motive, does not simply reflect class interests, is not a particular case of a global capitalist project, but is complex and localised.