"Wrapped up in Cotton Wool": Political Integration of Private Entrepreneurs in Rural China

The emergence of private entrepreneurs as a new social stratum during the reform era has received considerable scholarly and political attention in China as well as abroad. The growing importance of the private sector in the economy may well be considered a challenge to a Party-state which still defines itself as socialist. Earlier research has shown that private entrepreneurs have the potential to act as a strategic group which might affect considerably the course of political change in the future. ' Furthermore, there is evidence that the Chinese political leadership shares a sense of urgency in reaching out to this new stratum in order to prevent any open challenges to the existing political order. The logic behind these moves is that political integration into the Party-state will pre-empt possible threats because it brings political attitudes more into line with official discourses and, by establishing channels of political participation, helps to solve potential conflicts within the system.2 From the entrepreneurs' point of view there are also compelling material as well as cultural reasons to participate in politics.3 This article focuses on the following questions. Is this strategy of organizational inclusion successful in integrating private entrepreneurs politically? How do local patterns of state-economy relations interact with the inclusionary strategy of the central state? What will the consequences of this transformation be for the present political system and how will it adapt? These questions will be pursued using the cotton industry in two rural counties as casestudies. This sector was chosen for two reasons: first, it has been liberalized only recently and I have been able to examine its transformation first hand. second, by confining the study to entrepreneurs in one sector it is possible to control for extraneous factors. In-depth knowledge of this sector will provide clues for understanding how entrepreneurs perceive local politics.4 The remainder of the paper is divided into four sections. The first puts the relationship between Party-state5 and private entrepreneurs into a broader theoretical context. The second introduces the fieldwork sites and their different state-society relations at the local level. Borrowing Kellee Tsai's terminology, it argues that the "orientation of the local government toward the private economy" is a crucial variable in explaining the outcome of political integration. " The third section measures political integration in the study-locales in terms of the degree of involvement on the part of private entrepreneurs in officially sanctioned organizations. The final section examines the success of this integration with regard to the degree of congruence in opinions of entrepreneurs and local officials on political issues. It will be shown that the Party-state has been successful in politically integrating rural entrepreneurs where the local state had a more developmental and supportive attitude toward the private sector, but not where local states were more ambivalent and less supportive toward the private economy. In sum, the success of private entrepreneurs' political integration is not solely determined by the Party-state's efforts at organizational inclusion, but is also mediated by the particular local patterns of state-society relations. Viewed in this light, political integration is an interactive process rather than a onedimensional political program implemented from above. The Party-state and Private Entrepreneurs Researchers generally use either civil society and corporatist models or the clientelist paradigm to study relations between the Party-state and entrepreneurs.7 Authors adopting civil society or corporatist approaches have often focused on business associations. Associations are viewed as possible vehicles of enhanced societal autonomy in a civil society perspective, and as mechanisms of political co-optation and control by authors advocating corporatism. …