Description: Commodifying Communism is an ethnographic study of the role of personal ties between private entrepreneurs and local officials in the organization of China's emerging market economy. It is based on almost two years of fieldwork in Xiamen City, Fujian, one of China's five special economic zones. A close examination of how private business is conducted through these ties sheds light on the dynamism of China's market economy and its political consequences.
Review Quotes: "The most important book yet to appear on China's emerging private sector, David Wank's Commodifying Communism is also a major contribution to comparative economic sociology. Drawing carefully on extensive fieldwork among China's new urban entrepreneurs, Wank shows how private entrepreneurship emerges from within the social and political relationships of an earlier period. His carefully conceptualized analysis takes on a range of popular ideas about the transition to a market economy and has clear implications for the analysis of all market economies emerging from the Soviet model." Andrew G. Walder, Stanford University