Local capitalism and neoliberalization in a Shenzhen former lineage village

Abstract

Th is article examines the process of neoliberalization in the Shenzhen special economic zone in Guangdong Province, China. Building on the case study of a former peasant and almost single-lineage village that has become a part of the city of Shenzhen, I show how neoliberal principles aimed at advancing the transition to capitalism are combined with and countered by other ethical traditions. Owing to the long-standing conception of the lineage as an enterprise, the maintenance of the lineage structure in the transformation of the rural collectives has off ered fertile ground for the emergence of a local capitalist coalition. Yet the current discourses on the necessity of obliterating the remains of the collective economy and introducing individual ownership run counter to the collectivist values of the lineage village community and the embeddedness of its economy in kinship and territorial ties. I further illustrate this discordance by the way in which the villagers managed to save their founding ancestor's grave site following government requests to clear the land by removing tombs. Th ese policies form a complex blend of state interventions in the economy, neoliberal governance, and Confucian principles.

Entrepreneurs and ritual in China's economic culture

“…Entrepreneurial activity can result in the creation of hybrids that can be traced all the way back to Maoist times. In Guangdong this is manifest in the specific institution of the ‘shareholding cooperative company’ (compare Trémon, 2015). This institution emerged from de-collectivization and goes back to the informal merger between socialist collectives and lineages in People's Communes (Potter and Potter, 1990).…”

Scales of Change and Diagnostic Contradictions: Shifting Relations Between an Emigrant Community and Its Diaspora

“…The contradictions emerged between statements held by persons belonging to the same local community, and at times also between statements held by the same person, from one conversation to another, or even during the same conversation. Tensions and contradictions in the process of social reproduction are central to Marx's understanding of society as a historical process in which social forms emerge dialectically, and such a reading forms the backbone of my research on the way "local capitalism" (Smart and Lin 2007) has taken shape, at the "critical junction" (Kalb and Tak 2005) of China's insertion in world capitalism and the reconfiguration of the former agricultural collectives in Shenzhen's urbanized villages (Trémon 2015). Here I focus on how contradictions in the field materials collected are telling signs of accelerated change that is generating conflicts of scale.…”

Exploring Extended Kinship in Twenty-First-Century China: A Conceptual Case Study

“…The performative role of qin springs to the eye, as this is predetermined neither by zong nor by biological relatedness. As many authors, such as recently Trémon (2014Trémon ( , 2015a have argued, what binds a local kin group together are certain claims and manifestations of a shared moral economy which is rooted in certain feelings of closeness. Indeed, the Huang villagers at Xiasha have expressed their concerns about violations of this moral economy by their leaders.…”

“…The shareholding cooperatives are directly responsible for planning, funding, and implementing these ritual activities and architectures. In fact, they bear much resemblance with traditional lineage corporations, to the extent that one can say that the corporation is congruous with the lineage (compare Trémon 2015a; Zhou, 2014). In the context of single-lineage villages, this also means that village administration is partly merged with the business structure.…”

“…This phenomenon is salient in research on "urban villages" in the context of the political economy of urban governance (Bach, 2017;Cheng, 2014;Chung and Unger, 2013;O'Donnell, 2017a;Tang, 2015). Research is rare that focuses on the phenomenon of kinship and lineages in the first place and elucidates how exactly the revival unfolds (Trémon, 2015a(Trémon, , 2015b. Although Chinese researchers noticed this early (Dai and Zhang, 2014), in-depth research in the context of urban villages is mostly lacking, with notable exceptions such as Zhou (2014) who discusses the transition from lineage-based economic organisation to modern corporate forms in Guangzhou.…”