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This article uses legal archives from Liangshan 梁山 county, Shandong, to explore the ambiguous position of rural markets in China during the Great Leap Forward campaign (1958–1962). These testimonies, though sparse, show that negotiations at a local, indeed personal, level underpinned the symbiosis between the "second economy" of illicit trade and the party-state's putatively socialist political economy. Liangshan's gray market bridged the gap between the party-state's Sputnik promises and catastrophic realities, contributing twofold to the party-state's political survival. First, illicit commerce helped famine survivors, including local cadres, obtain desperately needed sustenance; these cadres' support of trading villagers despite top-down restrictions on such transactions likely helped them retain local moral authority after the Leap. Second, the intermittent formal prosecution of "profiteers" in the ritualized space of the county courtroom projected justice, stability, and coercive power, which also contributed to the party's continuing hold on authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The basic facts of China's economic development have called into question Western transition economic theory, most famously presented in the works of János Kornai. On the other hand, the three most representative approaches to explaining China's development experience have variously emphasized the resource endowment structure, or the property rights system, or the incentive mechanism behind the behavior of local governments, as the key to China's economic development. Although they focus on different dimensions of China's economic practices, they ultimately converge on the logic of marketism as the explanation. The "social science of practice" approach proposed by Philip Huang is distinguished from these orthodox theories in that, first, it attends to the rise of the huge informal economy in China and reveals the historical roots of contemporary social inequality. This approach has three closely related characteristics: theoretical formulations based on analyses of paradoxical phenomena, a broad historical perspective on current problems, and the idea of substantive justice. The main significance of this approach lies not only in its insightful and practice-focused understanding of the key realities that have been ignored by mainstream theories, but, more importantly, in its multiple inspirations for constructing a social science theory that incorporates Chinese subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wenan county in Hebei province was “North China’s plastic waste recycling capital,” home to around ten thousand informal enterprises that together processed millions of tons of waste plastic annually until they were finally shut down in 2011. Based on fieldwork in North China’s informal recycling sector and data from gazetteers, government documents, news articles, and Chinese blogs, this article sketches how the informal waste sector developed in Wenan since the 1980s and analyzes how local government approaches to the sector changed as the devastating pollution and health effects of the industry became increasingly apparent. While the 2011 crackdown finally eliminated the sector from Wenan county, it predictably resulted in scattering these polluting enterprises throughout the region to work in more covert conditions, contributing to a “race to the bottom” dynamic in the sector. The conclusion proposes an alternative policy approach to the problem and briefly evaluates a national-scale initiative against the sector being planned for 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]