By investigating the nexus of relationships between urban and rural factories in the Shanghai region of China, this book shines light on an overlooked part of China's massive industrial growth since the 1980s.

China has been growing at over ten per cent annually since 1978, but this has only come to very widespread notice in the past decade. This received wisdom about China has been largely of two types, both of which – more or less – understand China in the context of neoliberalism. The more business- or business studies-oriented literature seems to argue that if China does not adapt the rule of clear and distinct property and contract law – in short, of Western institutions – its economy will stall. The second set of voices is more clearly from the left, arguing that the Chinese economy, and city, is neo-liberal. For them, China does not diverge widely from the Anglo-American model that, from 2008, has brought the world economy to its knees. China Constructing Capitalism takes issue with these analyses. The authors argue that it is not Western neo-liberalism that is constructing the Chinese economy, but instead that China is constructing its own version of capitalism. The two central theses of their argument are: economic life – neo-liberal economic life is individualized and disembedded, while the China model is relational and situated urban change – China has created a form of ‘local state capitalism’ which stands in contrast to neoliberal versions of the city. This book analyses China as a 'risk culture', examining among others Chinese firms and political ties, property development, migrant urbanisms and share trading rooms. It scrutinises the ever-present shadow of the risk-averse (yet uncertainty-creating) state. China Constructing Capitalism is a must-read for social scientists, policy makers and investors.

This book depicts the revival of Protestant Christianity among diverse groups of people in the commercially prosperous coastal city of Wenzhou, and shows how resurgent and innovated Christian beliefs and practices in the reform era reveal emerging patterns of power formation, place making and morality building in the context of a market-oriented, modernizing China..

Even as relations between Taiwan and the People's Republic of China continue to be strained, investment by Taiwanese businesses in China is growing every year. Between 1978 and 1994, Taiwan businesses invested $10 billion in China, 10% of the total foreign investment during that period. This study describes the magnitude and importance of this investment. Hsing demonstrates the role of a shared cultural heritage and language and the role of Chinese local government in building networks of firms in the two countries.

This book attempts to establish an inter-disciplinary discourse evaluation framework to analyze multi-dimensional discursive features along 4 dimensions in Chinese and American banks’ CSR reports: sentiment, readability, CSR keyword, and visualization. It analyzes Chinese and American banks’ different discursively constructed CSR images via the employment of various discursive features in CSR reports within their different contexts. Lastly, it examines the effects of Chinese and American banks’ discursively constructed CSR images on capital markets, with an inter-disciplinary approach of linguistics, management, and economics. Theoretically, this book contributes to the development of institutional identity’s cross-disciplinary research. Additionally, it reveals the problem-solving function of discourse. This sheds light on theoretical research into both corporate governance and business discourse. Practically, this book contributes to the improvement of Chinese banks’ awareness in CSR disclosure and the establishment of Chinese banks’ international images. Since more and more Chinese companies in different sectors are choosing overseas listings, findings in this book also have practical implications for their information disclosure, international images construction, and corporate value enhancement through corporate narratives, such as annual reports and IPO prospectuses.

News headlines warn of rivalries and competing nations across Asia and the Pacific, even as powerful new cross-border relations form as never before. This book looks behind the Asia-Pacific curtain: at the new forms of social, economic, and political integration taking place through a global capitalism that is rife with contradictions, inequality, and crisis. We are moved beyond traditional conceptualizations of the inter-state system with its nation-state competition as the core organizing principle of world capitalism and the principal institutional framework that shapes the makeup of global social forces. These important studies examine and debate over how there is a growing transnationality of material (economic) relations in the global era, as well as an emerging transnationality of many social and class relations. How does transnational capitalist class fractions, new middle strata, and labor undergird globalization in Asia and Oceania? How have states and institutions become entwined with such processes? This book provides insight into a field of dynamic change.

This book offers an analysis of China's growth from 1949 to the present day. The authors rebuild time-series databases (capital, education, R&D...), mobilize modern tools of statistics and econometrics, and use various methodologies (mainly Marxist) to carry out this research.

Since the renaissance of market politics on a global scale, precarious work has become pervasive. Divided into two parts, the first section of this cross-disciplinary book analyses the different forms of precarious work that have arisen over the past thirty years. These transformations are captured in ethnographically orientated chapters on sweatshops; day labour; homework; unpaid contract work of Chinese construction workers; the introduction of insecure contracting in the Korean automotive industry; and the insecurity of Brazilian cane cutters. The editors and contributors then collectively explore trade union initiatives in the face of precarious work and stimulate debate on the issue.