WEAPONS OF THE RICH. STRATEGIC ACTION OF PRIVATE ENTREPRENEURS IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA

This book provides a fresh perspective on the political agency of private entrepreneurs in contemporary China. Most Chinese scholarship describes this group as being politically acquiescent due to systematic co-optation by the party state. This book, however, argues that private entrepreneurs should be understood, and analytically conceptualized, as a 'strategic group' that makes use of different formal and informal channels to safeguard and expand its interests, though so far it has not challenged the current regime.

State-business relations in contemporary China should thus be understood not in terms of mere clientelism, but as a dynamic symbiosis in which private entrepreneurs contribute substantially to policy and institutional change. This book is based on several years of comparative empirical fieldwork across China. With its rich and unique qualitative data and insights, this volume contributes significantly to our understanding of the political behaviour and impact of private entrepreneurs in contemporary China.

Readership: Undergraduate students of Chinese studies, Asian politics and society, and economics, as well as entrepreneurs.

Thomas Heberer is Senior Professor of Chinese Politics and Society at the Institute of Political Science and the Institute of East Asian Studies at the University Duisburg-Essen in Germany. He is specializing on issues such as political, social and institutional change, entrepreneurship, strategic groups, the Chinese developmental state, urban and rural development, political representation, corruption, ethnic minorities and nationalities' policies, the role of intellectual ideas in politics, fieldwork methodology, and political culture. Heberer is conducting fieldwork in China on almost an annual basis since 1981.

Gunter Schubert is Professor of Greater China Studies at the Department of Chinese Studies at Eberhard Karls University Tübingen in Germany. He is also the founder and director of the European Research Center on Contemporary Taiwan (ERCCT) at this university. His research covers local governance and policy implementation in the PRC, the reform of China's private sector and state-business relations, cross-strait political economy including Taiwanese entrepreneurs operating in mainland China, and Taiwan domestic politics. More recently, he also focuses on immigration policy in East Asia and on a changing regional order in Asia under the impact of China's rise. He conducts annual fieldwork in the PRC, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.