Petty Capitalism and Kinship

Where commodity production is common, social arrangements and ideological responses form that reflect and enable it. In Chinese societies at least, people who are deeply engaged in petty-capitalist production (petty-commodity production by firms organized by kin ties) experience and re-create kinship differently from those who are not simultaneously capital owners and labor providers in an active market. The ideologically more salient model of "traditional Chinese kinship," or "the Confucian family," differs in a number of ways from petty-capitalist versions of kinship. The idealized model, which I will refer to as "the tributary kinship model," is derived from the operation of a tax-and-tribute sphere of production and circulation that in late imperial times assumed most of the population living an uncommoditized, agrarian life. This assumption was wrong for most Chinese even in late imperial times; it is certainly wrong for people living in contemporary Taiwan and urban China. But tributary kinship continues to be reproduced in partial form through a variety of practices.^[6] The very considerable continuities in Chinese kinship observable throughout China's experiment with socialism and Taiwan's engagement with capitalism have been generated by these practices. Commoditization, where and when it has been strong, encourages people to act out a much wider range of

[6] Tributary kin relations are still maintained in China through such legal requirements as that obliging adult children and grandchildren (since the Marriage Law of 1980) to support their parents economically; through the inheritability of state-sector jobs; during the period of People's Communes, through the frequent congruence of production teams and brigades with lineage segments; and by a number of other mechanisms. In Taiwan, the Guomindang government has consistently made its version of neo-Confucianism central to education, and has done mothing practical to discourage strict patrilineality in inheritance. This complex issue is discussed further in my manuscript "China's Motor: The Petty Capitalist Mode of Production."

kinship behaviors, many of them considered heterodox outside the communities that develop them.^[7]

Petty-capitalist kinship behavior remains partially constrained within the limits of the tributary model. The latter has greater prestige and more legal protection and is continuously re-created by households in some other classes. Like tributary kinship, petty-capitalist kinship is thus organized around patri-corporations made up of a line of male agnates working and transmitting a body of productive property. It stresses hierarchy, patrilineality, and partible equal inheritance of means of production. Kinship behavior that departs from these principles has been punished historically by colluding officials and patriarchs whose interests lie with the continued congruence of patriliny and control of major means of production.^[8]

People immersed in highly commoditized environments, however, constantly manipulate tributary constraints. The selling of goods, of labor, and occasionally of people influences decisions about marriage, divorce, adoption, and child rearing; the constant calculation of costs in the marketplace accustoms people to, obliges, and ultimately legitimates the calculation of costs within the household. Popular morality comes to commend the accumulation or maintenance of productive "capital" even at the expense of household members not essential to the preservation of the agnatic line.

Where petty capitalism is strong, households are shaped by contracts and market transactions, not only by "blood and bone." Those seeking heirs buy sons when agnatic nephews are not available, and sometimes when they are. Men, at times, transform kin ties into the cement of great landowning and trading corporations, or, lacking the appropriate kinsmen, construct lineages by agreeing to be coparceners in a joint estate.^[9] Daughters, and women generally, are especially likely to be commoditized, marriages take many forms, and brideprices may come to wholly outweigh dowries. Women may long to bear many sons who will later support them, or may prefer only one or two children so that they may better support themselves. The connection of individual family members with the wider political economy can differ greatly. A woman may be a wage-earning silk-reeler or factory worker; a homebound mother, housekeeper, and unpaid hand in a family shop; or the owner-manager of a frame-knitting factory or a restaurant. Each job will position her differently in her household, espe-

[7] A good prerevolution example of heterodox but locally normative kinship behavior is what Janice M. Stockard calls delayed transfer marriage in her 1989 book, Daughters of the Canton Delta (Stanford: Stanford University Press).

[8] Judith Stacey (Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China , Stanford University Press, 1983) and Margery Wolf (Revolution Postponed: Women in Contemporary China , Stanford University Press, 1985) have argued this case convincingly for the post-1949 period.

[9] See Jack Goody, The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive , 52-92, for a recent and hardheaded summary of the literature on Chinese lineages.

cially if members of that household have already accustomed themselves to market models of capital and labor.

The petty-capitalist model of kinship is characterized, then, by its subordination to the patrilineal principles of tributary kinship; by looser criteria for adoption; at some times and places by the development of large and economically powerful lineages; by the contractualization of relationships; by wide variation in treatment of women and forms of marriage; and by market-driven demographic tendencies. To survive and flourish in such a social environment, women obey its rules when they must, but are sharply attuned to what is negotiable in the bundle of kinship rights and duties incumbent on a daughter, a daughter-in-law, a wife, a mother.

Particularly important for this study was the assumption I shared with many of my subjects that ownership of means of production creates power within the sphere of kinship in a commercialized environment. Women who owned most of the capital that founded their businesses had very considerable decision-making power vis-à-vis relatives who might also be shareholders. Such women actively sought to limit their childbearing and childcare tasks, and used the cultural patterns discussed below to rationalize and legitimize birth limitation to their husbands, their parents-in-law, and themselves.

Implicit in women's statements about childbearing are two expectations. The first is that if a woman marries, she agrees at least to try to have children, preferably a boy. The bearing of children in return for a permanent home is the core of tributary Chinese kinship for women; a relationship of long-term generalized reciprocity is assumed to exist among family members. A woman's principal contribution to the family is the children she bears.

The second expectation relates to the role of kin seniors in childcare; it assumes that family members have rights based not on kin position, but on direct contribution to the household. It assumes as well that, to some degree at least, money and children are interchangeable contributions. Many women feel that their duty to bear children is a contingent one. Women working to earn income cannot bear and care for many children alone. If Mother-in-law wants lots of grandchildren, she must help care for them. If she will not, the working daughter-in-law's duty is fulfilled after one child or one son. A daughter-in-law can expect a direct, immediate return—the mother-in-law's work in childcare—for what the younger woman gives to her husband's agnatic line through her earnings. Short-term exchanges evaluated in terms of the known costs of childcare characterize kin relations.

These two expectations are contradictory. They speak to the operation in Chinese life of two concurrent models of kinship expressing different economic logics. These models are based on and congruent with the two historically significant modes of production that have governed relations of

production and distribution in Chinese life for many centuries. In Taiwan, and in China for the class of women I interviewed, the petty-capitalist mode was much emphasized in the 1980s. Implicit bargains within the family were struck not only on the basis of kinship status—daughters-in-law sometimes obey mothers-in-law because of their positions in a kin hierarchy —but also on the basis of precisely quantifiable contributions, because mothers-in-law will contribute childcare .

Power over material resources was always a principal source of patriarchal and parental authority in China, along with the law and custom that enforced filiality. The greatest prerevolution enemy of that authority has been expansive commoditization, which sometimes enabled women and the young to slip the leash by supporting themselves and families of their own choice. Two informants, a Shandongnese in her sixties and a Taiwan Hakka in her forties, told me recently of literally buying themselves free of their father's power by paying their own brideprices to him. Wages from a Qingdao textile mill and earnings from tailoring bought these women a chosen life rather than a dictated one.

We should remember that the Chinese economy has encompassed both a long secular trend toward commoditization since the Song, and many temporary or regional bursts of commoditization that bloomed and faded over that time. Taiwan's unusual developmental history and the 1949 revolution in China brought women more income-earning possibilities than ever before because of their regular and systematic inclusion in the agricultural work force and their more limited participation in large-scale enterprise and, when policy permitted, in petty capitalism.

Fujianese petty capitalists pioneered the commodity production of rice, sugar, tea, forest products, fertilizers, and timber in Taiwan in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the early 1990s, small-scale family firms are still immensely important in its highly productive and only partially capitalist economy. In China, the official post-1949 position on petty capitalism (seen inaccurately as capitalist by Stalinist theoreticians) has oscillated wildly from the limited acceptance of the early fifties and early sixties to the near-extirpation of the late fifties and sixties to the Dengist free-for-all that began in 1979 in Chengdu and lasted until July 1989—the month after Tiananmen.^[10] Experience and memory have maintained the assumptions and expectations of the market as elements in kinship practice in Taibei and Chengdu. Nearly ten years of observing or participating in private production had taught or reaccustomed the women I interviewed in 1988 to an increasingly classical market. Such women bargain hard, in kinship as in sacks of Sichuan pepper or bolts of polyester suiting.

[10] For a post-Tiananmen follow-up on the women petty capitalists of this sample, see my "Eating for Revenge: Consumption and Corruption in Chengdu," Dialectical Anthropology 16, nos. 3-4 (1991): 233-50.

Charlotte Ikels's chapter for this volume explores intergenerational contracts in reform-period China; Susan Greenhalgh has argued for the utility of positing an implicit family contract that explains differential parental expectations of their daughters' and sons' contributions to their natal families in contemporary Taiwan.^[11] According to Greenhalgh, parents characteristically require that daughters turn over more of their premarital earnings than sons because (a) children should repay parents for the expense of rearing them, and (b) daughters have only the years until they marry to repay this debt. Sons will remain with parents for life and can thus be given more leeway in repayment. The distinction points up the precise calculations made possible and then smuggled into kin relations by immersion and participation in a thoroughly commoditized economy. Her position complements a view of implicit intrafamilial contracts derived from petty capitalism.

Informants from both Taibei and Chengdu often described their childbearing plans, or their experiences with children, in what can only be described as highly economizing ways. A young Taibei fish-stall keeper rejected further childbearing on the grounds that one loses at least two months of work time after a birth, which is a lot of income to forgo. A Chengdu mother wanted a boy because "it's easy to find work for them. Only one-quarter of girls find suitable work." Some reasoning was convoluted: a Taibei flower-arranging teacher was pressed by her mother-in-law to have a third child (after two sons) to give to her husband's childless brother. Because the brother was rich, and they themselves had become poor, she refused "because I didn't want to be accused of doing it so our family could make a claim on his property."

The women I interviewed in 1988 were directly exposed to a secondary model for kinship because of their occupations. They illustrate petty-capitalist influence well, metaphors and explanations deriving from its logic flowing trippingly from their tongues. They plan their childbearing with care (now that contraceptive methods are available). They abort frequently and pragmatically. They often calculate precisely the costs of bearing and rearing children, seeing them as trade-offs against other purchasable satisfactions or uses of time. Their discussions of their marital obligations to bear children are grounded on the idea that other things—the income from a flourishing business, for example—can substitute for a large number of children in the eyes of their husbands' families. And women attribute their ability to resist pressures for more children to money that is absolutely their own.

[11] Susan Greenhalgh, "Sexual Stratification . . . in East Asia," Population and Development Review 11, no. 2 (1985): 265-314.