Constructing China's capitalism, connecting Shanghai's urban and rural industries

Most studies of China's industrial development focus on either urban, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) or rural, township- and village-owned enterprises (TVEs), overlooking the mutual constitution of the urban and the rural. I employed a unique commodity chain approach considering processes within each "production node" while highlighting the linkages between nodes, drawing attention to power relations between places. Through on-site interviews with 140 factory managers I followed the spatial evolution of networks over time in six industries.; I found that SOE-TVE linkages were one of the most important sets of networks to emerge in the reform period, but also one of the most consequential axes of economic and power relations between urban and rural China, and one of the most important institutions linking peasants to national and global markets. Tracing the development of these linkages in the 1980s, and their violent reconfiguration in the 1990s, I map two shifts in urban-rural relations, each constituting a fundamental turning point in China's ongoing transition from socialism to capitalism.; These findings contribute significantly to our understanding of the TVE sector. A robust literature already explores how TVE surpluses are divided intra-locally; I find that how they are divided inter-locally is just as crucial to the rising and falling fortunes of rural peasants, enterprises, and localities.; They also question path dependent explanations of change. Incremental changes in property rights and markets, even the phasing out of the planned economy, did not engender market-oriented shifts in network behavior. The proximate cause for these transformations was the onslaught of new market forces in the mid-1990s, which in turn was driven by deeper structural forces, particularly the logic of accumulation of capital.; Finally, I argue that the two successive regimes of the urban-rural division of labor are analogous to the formal and real subsumption of labor to capital, respectively. Mediated through networks formed during the first round of geographical industrialization in the 1980s, rural labor was incorporated extensively; it was only with shifts engendered by the second round in the 1990s that crucial social relations were reworked, bringing rural labor into a more intensive relationship with urban capital.