About my research

My research explores the previously untold history of illicit entrepreneurship in socialist China (1950’s–1980’s). Beginning in the 1950’s, with the enactment of systems of rationing and distribution, there emerged in China vast, underground networks operating in circumvention of the state plan. Within these networks a broad class of specialists, referred to by communist officials as “speculators and profiteers,” colluded to profit from inefficiencies in the socialist economy. Ranging from petty traders of ration coupons to underground factory bosses, these entrepreneurs were branded as the economic enemies of socialism and were made the recurring targets of anti-capitalist campaigns. For three decades they were subjected to the violent apparatuses of the state— interrogation, humiliation, imprisonment, and (in exceptional cases) execution— all the while continuing to facilitate the functioning of the Maoist economy. Most centrally, I argue that while capitalism was actively suppressed by the Maoist state, it was never marginal to Chinese socialism. Drawing upon an array of non-traditional sources, from contraband archives, to oral histories, to the self-criticisms of capitalists, I show that illicit capitalism was a fundamental organizing logic that touched all realms of economic life. From ordinary farmers to high level officials, socialist citizens in all level of society engaged in illicit activities to increase their material well-being and, more generally, to make things work. In the absence of “good institutions,” they formed networks that subsumed the ordinary functions of markets (ex. coordination, information aggregation, risk sharing, lending) and thus enabled the productive assemblage of capital, labor, and knowledge. In a highly stultifying political environment, they continued to innovate and create the conditions for China’s subsequent economic success.