Why would the removal of authoritarian institutions in some developing countries lead to sustained socio-economic crisis, while others experience explosive growth despite 'persisting' informal, insecure and rent-seeking institutional arrangements? A key to solving this enigma lies in understanding China, a country where the paradoxes of development are highly visible. Peter Ho argues that understanding China's economy necessitates an analytical refocusing from Form to Function, detached from normative assumptions about institutional appearance and developing instead a 'Credibility Thesis'. In this reading, once institutions endogenously emerge and persist through actors' conflicting interactions, they are credible. Ho develops this idea theoretically, methodologically, and empirically by examining institutions around the sector that propelled, yet, simultaneously destabilizes development: real estate - land, housing and natural resources. Ho shows how this sector can further both our understanding of institutions and issues of capital, labor, infrastructure and technology.

Why would the removal of authoritarian institutions in some developing countries lead to sustained socio-economic crisis, while others experience explosive growth despite 'persisting' informal, insecure and rent-seeking institutional arrangements? A key to solving this enigma lies in understanding China, a country where the paradoxes of development are highly visible. Peter Ho argues that understanding China's economy necessitates an analytical refocusing from Form to Function, detached from normative assumptions about institutional appearance and developing instead a 'Credibility Thesis'. In this reading, once institutions endogenously emerge and persist through actors' conflicting interactions, they are credible. Ho develops this idea theoretically, methodologically, and empirically by examining institutions around the sector that propelled, yet, simultaneously destabilizes development: real estate - land, housing and natural resources. Ho shows how this sector can further both our understanding of institutions and issues of capital, labor, infrastructure and technology.

Originally published: 1995. Paperback reissue, with a new preface by the author.

As China has evolved into an industrial powerhouse over the past two decades, a new class of workers has developed: the dagongmei, or working girls. The dagongmei are women in their late teens and early twenties who move from rural areas to urban centers to work in factories. Because of state laws dictating that those born in the countryside cannot permanently leave their villages, and familial pressure for young women to marry by their late twenties, the dagongmei are transient labor. They undertake physically exhausting work in urban factories for an average of four or five years before returning home. The young women are not coerced to work in the factories; they know about the twelve-hour shifts and the hardships of industrial labor. Yet they are still eager to leave home. Made in China is a compelling look at the lives of these women, workers caught between the competing demands of global capitalism, the socialist state, and the patriarchal family. Pun Ngai conducted ethnographic work at an electronics factory in southern China’s Guangdong province, in the Shenzhen special economic zone where foreign-owned factories are proliferating. For eight months she slept in the employee dormitories and worked on the shop floor alongside the women whose lives she chronicles. Pun illuminates the workers’ perspectives and experiences, describing the lure of consumer desire and especially the minutiae of factory life. She looks at acts of resistance and transgression in the workplace, positing that the chronic pains—such as backaches and headaches—that many of the women experience are as indicative of resistance to oppressive working conditions as they are of defeat. Pun suggests that a silent social revolution is underway in China and that these young migrant workers are its agents.

Over recent decades China has experienced massive change and development. China is the world's fastest growing economy, and has become a global superpower once again. But this development has thrown up a number of seemingly intractable contradictions, both political and economic. In this panoramic study of Chinese history in the twentieth century and its place in the development of global capitalism, Lin Chun argues that the paradoxes of contemporary Chinese society are not simply the product of the development of capitalism or modernity in the country. They are instead the product of the contradictions of its long revolutionary history, as well as the social and political consequences of its post-socialist transition. Published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, Revolution and Counterrevolution in China charts China's epic revolutionary trajectory in search of a socialist alternative to the global system, and asks whether market reform must repudiate and overturn the revolution and its legacy.

Over the last four decades, China has witnessed dramatic economic growth, transforming into an economic powerhouse with considerable consequences for its rural regions. In this timely book, Guy M. Robinson adeptly navigates the principal elements, key events and significant changes of the transformation of China’s countryside.