Thomas Heberer

Longlisted for the 2009 ICAS Book AwardMountainous Liangshan Prefecture, on the southern border of Sichuan Province, is one of China's most remote regions. Although Liangshan's majority ethnic group, the Nuosu (now classified by the Chinese government as part of the Yi ethnic group), practiced a subsistence economy and were, by Chinese standards, extremely poor, their traditional society was stratified into endogamous castes, the most powerful of which owned slaves. With the...

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...