At the first sight, I thought the author was teaching readers how to run a retail business. It turns out to be a book substantiated by a large amount of field surveys and interview transcripts, while the author plays an excellent role in observing the local people without the interference of intimidation as an intellectual. His role is rather a student working on his master thesis and living with the people. The last chapter has theorized all the data described in the previous chapters, and I quite like such arrangement.
Because my master’s thesis focuses on urban villages and informal settlements, I picked this up as a reference for Chinese scholarship on the topic. Many Chinese scholars try to theorize *guanxi* in the local context—Xiang Biao, for instance, traces how networks evolve from kinship circles to business circles and introduces the idea of “xi” (ties). That said, I’m personally not that interested in interpersonal relations as a research focus, so I ended up reading this more as a socio-economic history of the reform era.
What really drew me in was how people navigated the constraints of institutions in the 1980s–90s and carved out space for themselves bit by bit: renting counters, making clothes, working through consignment networks, building wholesale markets. These practices are completely outside my own lived experience, which made them all the more fascinating. The book also situates Zhejiang Village within broader structural shifts—rural-urban mobility liberalization, the collapse of the Soviet Union, VAT reform, the decline of the state sector, and periodic crackdowns on migrant populations. Seeing how these macro-level policies filtered down into everyday life was striking, especially anecdotes like going to the Northwest to work as a carpenter during the Cultural Revolution’s chaos.
As someone who also listens to true crime podcasts, I found the sections on crime and gangs unexpectedly interesting. The collaboration between Peking University’s Charity Society and Zhejiang Village was another detail I appreciated.
Theoretically, the book suggests that under a state logic of segmentation and extraction, the informal economy gradually becomes formalized—and that a degree of social autonomy outside the state has been crucial to the success of reform.
It was a hustling read for our monthly book club, especially we have to finish the book within 30 days since it's a 500 pages "thin" book. But It was such a pleasant read, Xiang wrote like a non-fiction writer than a boring sociology scholar, which he stated the reason behind a few times in the book. After the book read, our book club actually did pay a trip to DAHONGMEN, Beijing, where everything started, and, ended. One member bought a jacket from a Zhejiang shop owner, it was different, yes it was.
The romance of an unregulated market in a totalitarian society. Explained well the concept of capitalism with Chinese characteristics. Raw and mostly unscientific, but fascinating nonetheless.