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In this article we develop and analyse novel datasets to retrace the persistence and scale of underground market activity in Maoist China. We show that, contrary to received wisdom, Chinese citizens continued to engage in market-based transactions long after "socialist transformation" was ostensibly complete, and that this activity constituted a substantial proportion of local economic output throughout the Maoist era. This helps to explain, in part, why, when markets were officially reopened in China, private economic activity took off. We arrive at these findings through the development and analysis of novel datasets based on unconventional historical sources – namely, a collection of 2,690 cases of "speculation and profiteering" that were recovered from flea markets in eastern China. We show how these grassroots sources can be systematically analysed and used, in lieu of official statistical aggregates, to develop new insights into the macro workings of the Maoist economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the growing body of research on social assistance (SA) dynamics by analyzing patterns of SA receipt in China, a middle-income country with a large informal employment sector. Using national low-income household survey data and event history analysis, this study explored the mechanisms underlying exit from Dibao (formally known as Minimum Living Security) and changes in exit probability over time. We found that in the context of an informal economy, the 'explicit' change of individual characteristics and employment structure decisively affects receipt duration on the micro and macroeconomic levels, respectively. On the policy level, affected by the informal employment structure, employment services tend to be of low quality and fail to promote Dibao exit effectively. Although the specific Dibao payment strategy, which is used to address the difficulty in means tests, largely curbs the risks of declining working motivation, it considerably increases the possibility of prolonged Dibao use. With this systemic influence of informal employment, a unique pattern of SA receipt characterized by the combination of long-term use and a nondecreasing hazard rate has developed in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chiefly drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork in the district of Keqiao in Zhejiang Province since 2009, I argue that irregular financial transactions—conceptualized as "funny money" in this article—play a significant role in the sustenance of otherwise tenuous business relations between Indian traders and Chinese suppliers in the China–Dubai fabric trade. Much of the fabric exported from Keqiao to Dubai relies on intertwined formal and informal transactions operated by Indian trading networks. These labyrinthine transnational funny money transactions aim to circumvent institutional hurdles and overcome deficiencies in operating capital, yet inherent to this system is a cycle of payment lags that cause tense relations between payers and payees. Funny money transactions facilitate eventual payment in most cases most of the time and maintain enough trust to keep the trade network alive. Furthermore, the interlocking circuits of funny money also prevent the overaccumulation of wealth and power by any particular stakeholder involved in the international trade and defy or at least circumvent the formal political authority of state and financial institutions that seek to curtail such practices. These transactions thereby create a larger space for business survival among the grassroots players, especially Indian traders who may not have enough capital available when they initiate a deal with a Chinese supplier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to the debate on the nexus between informal economies and the environment by investigating the long-term dynamic impacts of China's informal economies on pollution and considering regional differences in informal economies' pollution. This paper uses the Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes (MIMIC) model to estimate the size of informal economies and employs econometric models to examine their relationships to pollution based on provincial-level panel data from 2000 to 2017. The results indicate that informal economies' effects on environmental pollution are not purely positive or negative. Rather, our model indicates that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between informal economies and pollution in the long run in China; this means that the level of environmental pollution increases at first and then decreases with the growth of informal economies. Further analysis shows that while this inverted, U-shaped relationship is significant in different regions of China, it is affected by different environmental impact factors. The paper concludes by discussing the policy implications for environmental protection and sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project is an interpretation of the regulation of religions in China through economic language, analyzing the religious behavior of individuals given heavy regulation. The relationship of Chinese regulation of the five legal religions as either a regulated monopoly or an oligopoly. Due to the fundamentally legal nature of the industrial organization of religion in China, the project will analogize the legal relationship between the Chinese government and the five legal religions with the legal status of Chinese state-owned enterprises. The comparison between the laws governing state-owned enterprises and the laws governing social organizations like the legal religious organizations is important in interpreting the behavior of religious groups. The project will be focused mainly on the behavior of so-called religious "firms" in the context of the industrial organization model and the constrains that such a model puts on these firms. Furthermore, given the presence of an industrial organization of religion, spurs the creation of a parallel "informal" market of religious activity which includes special economic behavior among religious consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops the critical concept of digital utility through studying the case of DiDi Chuxing and the platformization of transport services in urban China. By examining DiDi's business model, its datafication strategies, its relations with the Chinese government, and its labor management systems, the article demonstrates how the platformization of transport is emblematic of a private company becoming a digital utility provider. With technological imagination and practical inconsistency, this process remediates service delivery while reworking infrastructures and redefining the access to public and private services. We argue that platform companies are able to become digital utility suppliers because of their capacity to straddle the public and the private sectors, their aspiration to become "ecosystem builders," and their heavy reliance on the constant intensive labor of users, particularly drivers, to produce data. However, these factors also make instability a definitive feature of digital utility companies in their present condition. Morphing into the terrain of utilities is a common undertaking by DiDi and similar platform companies. To problematize the logics of digital utility, especially its labor-intensive datafication processes and its complex relations with regulators, provides a conceptual anchor for further debates on the infrastructuralization of platforms and the platformization of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decades, urban villages proliferate in major cities of China. These marginalised places not only are home to many local villagers, but also host millions of rural migrants. This paper provides an ethnographic account of the spatial and social production of Chinese urban villages. It discusses urban village residents’ detailed tactics in developing/participating in the informal housing market, service market and labour market. By so doing, it emphasises people’s agency in making their own living spaces and further challenges the marginalisation paradigm that either victimises or disparages urban village residents. It shows peasants, who are commonly assumed to be the antithesis of modernisation and urbanisation, are major actors and urbanise their living spaces. This paper also elaborates on the types of governing strategies at the village and municipal levels. It points out that the contradictions and loopholes in state power have left space for the formation of informal markets and contribute to the making of urban villages in contemporary China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an assessment of the informal waste recycling sector in selected sub-districts of urban Beijing excluding inner suburbs and discusses the question of the segment’s survival amidst an increasingly challenging socio-economic environment. Based on several field trips and two research projects in 2013 and 2016 on informal recycling in Beijing, the paper analyses the sector specific changes over recent years. The results display the various changes in size and organisation, waste recyclable collection rates and income levels as well as the institutional structures of informal stakeholders in Beijing. The herein documented deteriorating performance of the informal recycling sector, i.e. a decline in collected recyclable quantities and thereof generated incomes, is the central topic of the subsequent discussion section. Here, we highlight the role of informal stakeholders regarding costs and revenues as well as their embeddedness in Beijing’s waste management system. Based on the key points in the results and discussion sections, we conclude that the informal sector at present constitutes an indispensable pillar for Beijing’s waste management. A significant challenge for the future existence of the IRS will most likely occur in form of labour supply shortages and, if continued, a further decline of secondary material prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We measure the size of informal employment using both labor market as well as energy consumption approaches. We find that the share of informal employment in total employment was increasingly most of the time between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s, and started steadily decreasing after that until now. This has two contradicting implications for the Chinese economy. On the one hand, it is good news for China’s progress in human development as the process of formalization often brings better income and welfare. On the other hand, for China’s capitalism this could be bad news since the labor costs are likely to continue increasing with a decline in the reserve army of labor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on the operational dynamic of informal small-scale trade in the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands as disclosed by local traders’ strategies of negotiation. It questions the impact of financial transaction practices – management of official fees and procedures related to payments – on the sustainability of cross-border trade. It engages with the notion of “trust” and stresses its significance in a space where the vagaries of trade policies challenge business rules, and contest the local power hierarchy. It argues that despite the principles underlying “trustful cooperation” being unevenly adhered to, traders manage to adjust to one another’s methods, revealing the nature of their tacit complicity in maintaining business logistics regardless of the limits imposed by national policies, institutional regulations and stereotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: This paper brings some clarity to the debate on Chinese participation in Ghana's artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) sector. Over the past decade, tens of thousands of Chinese nationals have migrated to rural Ghana, where they have proceeded to extract gold, for the most part undeterred, illicitly. The perceived impacts of this migration have captured the interest of the global public and attracted considerable media attention. The Government of Ghana has responded, albeit rather pedestrianly, to mounting concerns by assembling a National Task Force to ‘flush out’ illegal miners. It is argued here, however, that this will only provide short-term relief because the issue being tackled – growing Chinese participation in ASM – is the latest ‘expression’ of a much bigger problem: namely the sector's perpetual informality, brought about by an excessively-bureaucratic legalization process and failure, on the part of the government and donors, to deliver adequate and appropriate support to desperate operators. The key to reducing the inflow of Chinese migrants to Ghana's mining regions is adequately addressing the root causes of this informality. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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The mixing of socialist and capitalist discourses in Reform China has engendered some complex and misleading usages of key legal and statistical categories. This article considers three in particular: “labor,” “individual entities,” and “private enterprises.” The meaning of the word “labor” has changed from its early days’ meaning of the “working class” in a Marxist revolutionary perspective into a relatively privileged group classified along with government officials as “employees-workers” who are under the protection of formal labor laws and regulations. The category in fact excludes the great majority of China’s laboring people today, who work mainly in the informal economy, considered to belong outside the official legal-statistical category of “employees-workers” and formal “labor relations,” and to belong rather under casual or “task-based labor relations,” not covered by the state’s labor laws. “Individual entities,” on the other hand, includes mainly self-employed artisans, peddlers, and service workers closely tied to peasants, even as it includes also a minority of new-style shops and eateries, higher-paying service entities, and other individual businesses. As for “private enterprises,” it includes mainly small-scale businesses that currently employ an average of just 13–15 people and does not include the larger private and part-private firms. They are also as a rule not formally incorporated as limited liability companies with separate “legal person” status and are therefore not considered legal “employing units” that are involved in “labor relations.” As will be seen, literal usage of these terms according to their surface meanings in English without consideration of the complex historical backgrounds and changes in the categories can lead to some serious misunderstandings of Chinese realities, as has occurred in even some of the best scholarly studies of China—by Ching Kwan Lee, Kellee Tsai, and Yasheng Huang. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

China’s economic reform has been understood mainly in terms of the "new institutional economics," emphasizing the role of marketized private firms and related laws. Andrew Walder and Yingyi Qian, however, have pointed out instead the crucial role played by Chinese local governments, especially their township and village enterprises. Neither interpretation, however, can account for what has happened in China since the mid-1990s, when the main engine for development shifted to local governments’ competition for and active support of outside investment. Typically, local governments have provided land and related infrastructural support below cost, plus special subsidies and tax privileges, and also circumvented formal rules and regulations on labor use and environmental protection. Those informal practices and the huge accompanying informal economy, not just the new enterprises drawn in, have been the main dynamic both for China’s striking GDP growth and its mounting social and environmental crises. The analysis presented here is historical-cum-theoretical and calls for a new understanding of China’s development experience and of its practical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a great deal of criticism levied at street vendors, despite the fact that these vendors, as part of a global informal economy, are becoming more important as millions are being occupationally downsized. Criticisms include street vendor businesses are not economically robust, they can be conduits for pirated goods, they do not make good use of public spaces, and they are considered by economists to be 'bad news' for the world economy. This article reports on a study of the operations of 80 street vendors in Dalian, China. It shows their operations (e.g., buying, selling, merchandising) are very similar to those of permanently anchored small retailers, and consequently they should be able to make similar societal contributions. Research propositions and recommendations for further research are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper addresses the immediate impacts of the China–Africa trade on Africa’s informal traders and its longer term impact on urban poverty, based on a comparison of the major cities of two West African countries and drawing on semi-structured interviews with traders and on schedule-based interviews with key informants in government, business and the informal trade sector. The findings are that the increase in imports from China initially broadened access to trading for the poor, creating short-term improvements in livelihoods, but competition is driving down profit margins, and restricting the trade to a survival mechanism for many today. Thus it has provided limited long-term potential as an economic platform for national development and poverty reduction. The findings are discussed in terms of structuration theory and in terms of alternative conceptualizations of informal trade in Africa. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper analyses China's recent engagement with Zambia, examining especially Chinese hiring practices, methods of business organisation and the labour conditions maintained by Chinese-operated construction and mining firms. Moving beyond existing analyses which remain focused solely on Chinese trade, aid and investment, this study begins to explore the micro-level of Chinese ventures, arguing that the continued employment of co-nationals as well as the generally substandard labour conditions maintained by Chinese firms lead to the offloading of Zambian workers into the country's burgeoning informal economy. There, newly emerged Chinese businesses stand to threaten local entrepreneurs who lack the resources necessary to parry Chinese competition. The result is a rapidly growing national unemployment rate and an increasing number of Zambians left struggling to sustain their livelihoods. This paper further argues that the characteristics defining China's engagement with Zambia are not particular to the Zambian context alone, but are rather abiding characteristics of overseas Chinese businesses in general. The paper ultimately calls for a policy framework regulating Chinese business activities in Zambia, lest the negative consequences of the Sino-Zambian partnership prevail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The informal economy—defined as workers who have no security of employment, receive few or no benefits, and are often unprotected by labor laws—in China today accounts for 168 million of the 283 million urban employed, but the official statistical apparatus in China still does not gather systematic data on the informal economy. Part of the reason for the neglect is the misleading influence of mainstream economic and sociological theories, which have come from the "economic dualism," "three-sector hypothesis," and "olive-shaped" social structure theories that held great influence in the United States in the 1960s. This article reviews the core elements of that modernization model, the "revolution" in development economics that followed in the 1970s and 1980s, and the "counterrevolution" from neoclassical economics that came with the rising ideological tide of neoconservatism. The article argues for a balanced theoretical perspective that can more appropriately capture the realities of the informal economy today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's engagement with African countries is growing rapidly, spanning trade, aid and investment. While speculation remains over the opportunities and challenges China brings to the continent, some observers have suggested that capital inflows from the Chinese may foster sustainable economic development in the region. The majority of such claims, however, remain rooted in assessments of “globalization from above,” with little regard for the rapid rise of Chinese small and medium enterprises (SMEs) among many of Africa's informal economies. Drawing on case study data from Kenya, this paper argues that rather than large scale investment and aid projects, it is this proliferation of Chinese entrepreneurship that carries the greatest ramifications for Africa's economic development, with mixed results. The analysis first explores the social and economic organization of overseas Chinese enterprises, and the centrality of Kenya's informal sector - the jua kali - for the country's economy. It proceeds to examine China's engagements with Kenya, both in terms of trade and investment, and the emergence of Chinese SMEs in the informal sector. The article argues that the distinct nature of Chinese business networks endows them with significant competitive advantages over their Kenyan counterparts. Unlike the structural integrity maintained by Chinese networks, ethnic cleavages preclude effective coordination among Kenyan SMEs, in turn rendering them unable to parry market competition brought by the Chinese. The general picture is thus one of Kenyan entrepreneurs struggling to sustain both their enterprises and livelihoods. Such factors have thus far failed to enter studies on the implications of “China-in-Africa.” Yet it is precisely the rise of Chinese SMEs in Kenya and elsewhere that presents the most significant challenges for economic development in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the cross-border economic interactions between people in Blagoveshensk, Russia and Heihe, China, and the tension between the "translocality" developing at the border and efforts of the Russian government to strengthen the nation-state. The informal and translocal nature of this Russian-Chinese border economy is discussed, finding that the intertwined economic life of the two cities has developed independently of the hierarchical Russian social system. Other topics discussed include entrepreneurship and transnationalism.