Philip C. C. Huang

The peasant family and rural development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988

Method and apparatus for detecting insecurely glued closure flaps on wrap-around paperboard cartons and for diverting defectively sealed cartons from the packaging line. A striking device in the form of an impact roller strikes the leading edge of each carton as it moves along a conveyor belt. Loose or insecure flaps opened by the impact are detected as the carton passes through a photocell station. Upon identification of an open flap condition a pivotal eject chute forming a part of the conveyor table is actuated downwardly to divert the rejected carton to a remote location for inspection and resealing or replacement.

China's Neglected Informal Economy: Reality and Theory

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.

Civil law in Qing and Republican China

This pioneering volume shows that contrary to previous scholarly understanding, the courts in Qing (1644-1911) and Republican (1911-1949) China dealt extensively with civil matters such as land rights, debt, marriage, and inheritance; and, moreover, did so in a consistent and predictable way. Drawing on records of hundreds of cases from local archives in several parts of China, it considers such questions as the relation between codified law and legal practice, the role of legal and paralegal personnel, and the continuity in civil law between Qing and Republican China.

The Paradigmatic Crisis in Chinese Studies: Paradoxes in Social and Economic History

a paradigmatic crisis. By that, I do not mean merely the questioning of the major analytical constructs that have informed past scholarship. Those, it seems to me, never commanded the complete allegiance of more than a minority of scholars, especially not in the diverse and critical world of Western scholarship on China. Rather, I am referring to the crisis of confidence in underlying, yet unspoken, assumptions that are shared by opposing constructs. Those have had a greater influence in our profession than the articulated constructs themselves, and have carried the true force of paradigmatic assumptions, in the original sense intended by Thomas Kuhn (1970 [1962]). It is the undermining of those assumptions by accumulated research that has brought the field to its present point of crisis, in which not just the old constructs but even the debates between them no longer seem relevant. There is a general sense that something different is needed, but there is as yet no clear articulation of what that something might be. It is time for us to take stock of this crisis and to attempt to move toward new categories of understanding. The field need not retreat into

China’s New-Age Small Farms and Their Vertical Integration: Agribusiness or Co-ops?

The future of Chinese agriculture lies not with large mechanized farms but with small capital-labor dual intensifying family farms for livestock-poultry-fish raising and vegetable-fruit cultivation. Chinese food consumption patterns have been changing from the old 8:1:1 pattern of 8 parts grain, 1 part meat, and 1 part vegetables to a 4:3:3 pattern, with a corresponding transformation in agricultural structure. Small family-farming is better suited for the new-age agriculture, including organic farming, than large-scale mechanized farming, because of the intensive, incremental, and variegated hand labor involved, not readily open to economies of scale, though compatible with economies of scope. It is also better suited to the realities of severe population pressure on land. But it requires vertical integration from cultivation to processing to marketing, albeit without horizontal integration for farming. It is against such a background that co-ops have arisen spontaneously for integrating small farms with processing and marketing. The Chinese government, however, has been supporting aggressively capitalistic agribusinesses as the preferred mode of vertical integration. At present, Chinese agriculture is poised at a crossroads, with the future organizational mode for vertical integration as yet uncertain.

Capitalization without Proletarianization in China’s Agricultural Development

Marxist as well as classical and neo-liberal theories expect that the development of capitalist agriculture will be accompanied by the spread of an agricultural proletariat. That was what happened in eighteenth-century England; it is also what is happening in contemporary India. This article asks, first of all: just what is the size of China’s present agricultural proletariat? And how do we understand and explain those dimensions? Our finding is that, contrary to our own initial expectations, hired agricultural year-workers in China today total only 3 percent of all labor input in agriculture (and short-term workers another 0.4 percent), in sharp contrast to India’s 45 percent, this even while the past two decades have seen very substantial “capitalization” (i.e., increased capital input per unit of land) in agriculture. We term the phenomenon “capitalization without proletarianization,” perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of recent Chinese agricultural development.

Chongqing Equitable Development Driven by a “Third Hand”?

Chongqing’s experience suggests that while Janos Kornai is surely correct about shortage in a planned economy, he is mistaken that market signals may only be employed under an economic regime of private property. Chongqing has called instead on government-owned firms, and their market earnings and appreciation, to fund social equity programs and infrastructural construction. This “third hand” is different from Adam Smith’s “invisible” first hand, which, on the basis of rational individuals pursuing their own interests, supposedly generates a self-regulating and optimizing market economy; it is also different from the second hand, by which the state engages in a variety of interventions in order to perfect the functioning of such a market economy. Its main actors are state-owned and not privately owned enterprises but, unlike earlier state enterprises, it strives not for the profit of the enterprise but rather for social equity and public benefit. It in fact at once challenges and utilizes the other two ha...Chongqing’s experience suggests that while Janos Kornai is surely correct about shortage in a planned economy, he is mistaken that market signals may only be employed under an economic regime of private property. Chongqing has called instead on government-owned firms, and their market earnings and appreciation, to fund social equity programs and infrastructural construction. This “third hand” is different from Adam Smith’s “invisible” first hand, which, on the basis of rational individuals pursuing their own interests, supposedly generates a self-regulating and optimizing market economy; it is also different from the second hand, by which the state engages in a variety of interventions in order to perfect the functioning of such a market economy. Its main actors are state-owned and not privately owned enterprises but, unlike earlier state enterprises, it strives not for the profit of the enterprise but rather for social equity and public benefit. It in fact at once challenges and utilizes the other two hands. Though state-owned, in the context of China’s current political-economic system and the globalized economy, this third hand does not behave like a monopoly; rather, it must compete against the other two hands, and not only against other localities within China but also other nations and economic entities outside China. Only if it succeeds in driving economic development under such competition can it become a “model” with wider application in China as a whole. And only thus can it, in a globalized economy dominated by capitalism, establish equitable development as a realistic alternative. Thanks to the Chongqing “experiment,” the question is no longer just a theoretical or ideological one, but one of observable and evolving realities.

Court Mediation in China, Past and Present:

What is called “mediation” in China today includes a wide variety of actions, ranging from the purely facilitative to the substantially adjudicative and yet still mediatory (those that are mainly adjudicatory and imposed regardless of the will of the litigants should be excluded). They show that contemporary Chinese court mediation as it has been practiced is very different both from Qing court practices and from current alternative dispute resolution (ADR) in the West. Qing courts generally did not mediate, despite the Confucian ideal of resolving disputes through (societal) mediation and despite the official ritualistic requirement that court actions always be voluntarily accepted by litigants. Contemporary Chinese courts, however, routinely mediate, a legacy not from the Qing but from the Maoist period. If mediation fails, arbitration or adjudication—under the same judge—will almost always follow. That makes the process very different also from current ADR in the West, where mediation is generally separate and distinct from court trials and mediators do not operate with nearly as much discretionary power as Chinese judges. For better or for worse, the contemporary Chinese approach to court mediation is predicated on an implicit epistemological method that contrasts sharply with the formalist ideal (which characterizes modern Western Continental law): instead of starting from universal premises about rights and then applying those by legal (deductive) logic to all fact situations, Chinese judges start instead from the nature of the fact situation and then decide to mediate or arbitrate or else adjudicate, as appropriate. In placing the concrete and the practical ahead of the abstract, they still share a good deal in legal reasoning with judges of the Qing.

The modern Chinese family in light of economic and legal history.

Most social science theory and the currently powerful Chinese ideology of modernizationism assume that, with modern development, family-based peasant farm production will disappear, to be replaced by individuated industrial workers and the three-generation family by the nuclear family. The actual record of China’s economic history, however, shows the powerful persistence of the small family farm, as well as of the three-generation family down to this day, even as China’s GDP becomes the second largest in the world. China’s legal system, similarly, encompasses a vast informal sphere, in which familial principles operate more than individualist ones. And, in between the informal-familial and the formal-individualist, there is an enormous intermediate sphere in which the two tendencies are engaged in a continual tug of war. The economic behavior of the Chinese family unit reveals great contrasts with what is assumed by conventional economics. It has a different attitude toward labor from that of both the individual worker and the capitalist firm. It also has a different structural composition, and a different attitude toward investment, children’s education, and marriage. Proper attention to how Chinese modernity differs socially, economically, and legally from the modern West points to the need for a different kind of social science; it also lends social–economic substance to claims for a modern Chinese culture different from the modern West’s.

Divorce Law Practices and the Origins, Myths, and Realities of Judicial “Mediation” in China

Using archival records of 216 court cases, this article argues that divorce law practices lie at the core of the tradition of “Maoist justice” that remains profoundly influential in the present-day Chinese civil justice system. These practices were born of a distinctive set of historical circumstances: the need to steer a middle course between an early radical promise of divorce on demand and the reality of peasant opposition, and the merging of peasant practices with Communist Party methods and doctrines. They must be understood in terms not of an either/or binary—modernity and tradition, party and peasant—but rather of the interaction between them. They involve on-site investigations by judges and aggressive efforts at “mediation,” as well as the formulation of ganqing (emotional relationship) as the basis for marriage and divorce. They have in fact been centrally important in shaping the civil justice system as a whole.