Household Strategies

When inquiring into the social significance of small-scale private business, the basic unit of analysis is evidently the Chinese household (hu ). Focus on the domestic group instead of on individuals will provide a different perspective on basic ideologies; there is profoundly less variation among households in their collective aspirations than among individuals in this respect.

Practically all businesses in Bin Shen involved several household members and largely duplicated the organization of the household itself. However, the new market opportunities allowed the household to aggregate its individual members' social and economic capital. The strategies adopted clearly sought to maximize the use of every member's position in the simultaneous pursuit of both new material wealth and maintenance of social status, and if possible social ascendence, thus bridging several sectors of employment.

The continuing value of state employment is emphasized in one widely adopted practice. Many households with both husband and wife in official employment had difficulties making ends meet, and thus considered opening a private business to supplement their income. To maintain the status and security of the household in the transitional period, they started business with only one household member registered, frequently the wife or an unemployed son. Letting the wife run a private business while the husband maintains his position in a state unit has been extremely common; in fact, half of the locally registered business managers in Bin Shen are women. Yet this has also proved problematic, since the wives' incomes rapidly come to exceed the husbands', threatening the status of the male household heads, and thus prompting them sooner or later to take the leap into private business in order to reestablish "harmonious relations" within the

household.^[8] In the late 1980s, when private business seemed secure, a number of such husbands in the local area chose to leave their state work units in order to become managers of household businesses (by 1991, the average number of registered household members participating in business had risen to approximately 1.6). They were, however, mainly people in ordinary state jobs, often in workplaces with dwindling bonuses. Through the 1980s, the leap into private business continued to bring a marked decline in social status, something evidently compensated for only by a severalfold increase in income.

Thus, although private business became increasingly lucrative and secure, it did not threaten the superior security and status of state employment, and there was still a strong incentive to have one household member placed in a secure state job, particularly the household head, which granted social esteem to the entire household. In the outlook of ordinary families, private business provided an opportunity for increasing material welfare, and also for some more freedom, but it never replaced official employment as a provider of basic services, security, and social respectability.

Another common way of bridging the benefits from official and private employment is making use of connections with state units in order to create advantages in business. Retired cadres^[9] are numerous in private businesses, usually being the true managers pulling the strings behind registered wives, sons, or daughters-in-law. Having lifelong pensions, they are legally barred from doing business, but street committees frequently grant them permission for a fee. Their guanxi with former colleagues enables them to establish profitable niches in production or specialized services, including signboard production for a large state unit, delivery of equipment, brokerage services, and translations. A few former craftsmen who had retired with cadre status had easy teaching jobs in state units while also running private businesses.

Connections can also be essential in obtaining restricted materials from the storerooms of public firms—for instance, rare metals for highly specialized production—or deliveries of goods in short supply—for instance, cooking oil and sugar, or the best brands of clothing, cigarettes, and liquor.

[8] Numerous field accounts mention that maintaining "harmony" necessitates a higher male contribution to household income. In Chen village, for example, the men insisted that no man should be allowed to slip below any woman in the scale of prestige as defined by work points in the commune (Chan, Madsen, and Unger 1984, 92). In Sandhead, women could never reach the number of work points assigned to men, in spite of their often harder work. Attempts at equal pay were met with resistance from the men, who were afraid of losing face (Mosher 1983, 204-5).

[9] The term cadre tends to be misleading, however, since only workers, peasants, and the jobless are not cadres; its derivations, such as cadre entrepreneurs , tend to present an especially distorted picture of what is usually small cadres' transfer to private enterprise (see Song Bing 1992).

Merchants with good connections gained an enormous advantage over those who could only obtain the popular brands from the state wholesale departments by accepting "compensation purchases," implying the additional purchase of loads of unpopular goods, which were otherwise left in the warehouse forever. In fact, a large number of small businesses in the neighborhood were established with such personal connections as their main assets. Connections to state units also have advantages in regard to stability in business. In several cases, the local authorities were reluctant to close down businesses that did not comply with regulations if they flaunted powerful connections: for example, a local smithy that the City Reconstruction Bureau wanted removed from the city area could point to the unique repair jobs he did for an adjacent army unit.

Another aspect of the household's optimization of resources concerns its internal organization. In all spheres of social life, formal principles are coupled with an informal social reality. The domestic organization among the private entrepreneurs is often highly pragmatic, with flexible arrangements allowing for considerable adaptation to economic circumstances (Bruun 1993, 59). In order to restore the household as an economically viable unit, an estimated 15 to 20 percent of local business households had incorporated distant relatives or even nonkin—mainly young but in a few cases elderly people—as full "family members." For example, a number of elderly couples without children at home brought in adolescents to help in their shops who lived in as family members.

Enterprising households tend to be more fragmented and incomplete in relation to Chinese ideals than other sorts of families—for instance, they frequently consist of lonely elderly couples; families containing individuals without spouses; or entrepreneurial, freedom-loving young people, for whom a major advantage of individual business is the opportunity to break free from the control of family elders. In terms of basic ideologies, however, such variation does not express differing social values; neither is it seen to characterize particular social identities or professions. Rarely, if ever, is deviation in domestic organization openly displayed or emphasized in the household's identity. On the contrary, serious deviation tends to be hidden—for instance, in the application of kinship terms to newly incorporated members—and in all respects tends to be made up for whenever possible in order to restore "completeness" according to Chinese family ideals. There is only a tenuous link between household identity and a concrete profession. Even though dress, consumption, and modes of speech may contribute to distinguishing present social positions—for instance, between business people and bureaucrats—these individual expressions are not indicative of the long-term aspirations of the household as such.

On the whole, we may regard the present state and position of a given household as a point of departure in the pursuit of commonly shared values,

far more than denoting a specific set of values. It goes for all aspects of life that quick moves are attempted whenever circumstances inspire them —as illustrated by the unstable business environment, with the constant abandoning and launching of businesses that came to prevail after the reforms.^[10] Few households are content with their current status, as is evident from the unwavering pursuit of divorce from manual labor^[11] and social ascendence, which is true of almost all households. Strong competition is seen for what is perceived as a common pool of limited resources: against the background of an unpredictably changing political situation, a higher position is sought in order to increase both the status and the security of the household, since these are perceived to coincide. Moreover, all groups also put great emphasis on the accomplishments of the next generation, a value the reforms have left intact, usually aiming at official employment.