The Capitalists, the Workers, and the Communist State

Abstract

With China’s economic reforms has come a fundamental change of the nation’s social structure. Broadly speaking, we can say that China has followed two paths of privatizing the national economy. The first path is to allow and later encourage people to set up their own private businesses. Previously living in perhaps one of the most egalitarian societies in the world and calling each other ‘comrade’, the Chinese population has diversified: many of them have started their own businesses by employing their former ‘comrades’, subsequently forming a new generation of capitalists.¹ The second is to transform small and medium sized state enterprises into private companies by selling off their assets to either foreign investors or former managers of these enterprises, or other business owners (Ma, 2010; Yusuf, Nabeshima and Perkins, 2006).