BOOK REVIEWS

Thomas Heberer, Xiaoming Ji and Arno Kohl, Unternehmer als strategische Gruppen: Zur sozialen und politischen Funktion von Unternehmern in China und Vietnam

Economic reforms in China and Vietnam and the drive for a “socialist market-economy” have resulted in, an in-turn been driven even further by a growing private sector. While there is a rapidly growing literature on the economics of this process, the sociopolitical consequences of the rise of a new social group—private entrepreneurs—have remained so far to be explored more deeply. Building on fieldwork conducted in collaboration with Xiaoming Ji and Arno Kohl in China and Vietnam respectively, Thomas Heberer offers a first comprehensive account of this emerging social actor in a thoroughgoing comparative sociological analysis.

The book is organised in three main parts: theoretical concept, empirical findings and theoretical implications. In the first part the author sketches privatisation processes in general and in his two country cases. He then elaborates his notion of private entrepreneurs as a nascent economic elite in Chinese and Vietnamese societies which is strategically important not only for economic transformation, but also for social and political transitions in these countries. The concept of a “strategic group” further entails a certain degree of organisation and strategy for the advancement of common interests on the part of a group which converges on the account of their economic, cognitive, symbolic, social and organisational capital. The main thrust of the argument is to show that private entrepreneurs in China and Vietnam have already become “strategic groups” in this sense.

The painstaking empirical analysis takes up more than half of the book and presents rich information on issues not addressed before in such a systematic way, e.g. social and professional backgrounds of private entrepreneurs, their sources of financial capital or motivations for establishing businesses, etc. In turn, Heberer explores factors of group cohesion and social differentiation, private entrepreneurs' use of social capital (guanxi and networks), their relations to the local state and organised interest articulation, personal interests and preferences as well as social and political attitudes. His research shows that a new social stratum is emerging in China and—to a lesser degree—in Vietnam. Despite considerable diversity in the size of their operations, their social capital and cognitive patterns, private entrepreneurs in both countries possess sufficient commonality and cohesion to be labelled a nascent social grouping.

Heberer finds a sizeable portion of new entrepreneurs in China and Vietnam being former public sector employees, managers or cadres, while the number of entrepreneurs coming from formerly “bad class backgrounds” tends to be small, with the obvious exception of southern Vietnam where until as recently as 1975 a free private economy existed. Public sector managers and cadres turned entrepreneurs are entrenched in personal relations and networks with their former colleagues of which they can make use to hedge against uncertainties inherent in the environment of transitional economies and authoritarian political systems. In that way they are already part of new local elites whose lifestyle, behaviour and attitudes start to influence other strata. On the other hand, retaining this social capital requires considerable re-investment (for gifts, wining and dining officials or outright corruption), so that large numbers of private entrepreneurs were in fact critical of local state and party organs. Here lies the impetus for demanding greater economic freedom, rule of law and for enhancing political participation through interest groups, albeit semi-official, semi-autonomous associations, not Western-style pressure groups.

Thus, in a broad sense comprising economic as well as social and political aspects, private entrepreneurs become “agents of change”. In the final chapter the author assesses their potential for transformation and concludes that they already begin to constitute a “strategic group”, although the process is clearly more advanced in China than in Vietnam. In his careful conclusion, Heberer stops short of proposing that a direct momentum for democratic change is building up among private entrepreneurs, but instead stresses that whatever actions they will take in the future will depend on their environment and that only a possible coalition between this one strategic group and another (possibly cadres) could lead to democratisation.

The study focuses on private entrepreneurs engaged in manufacturing, the largest segment of this group, and obviously excluded entrepreneurs officially labelled as belonging to the “individual economy”. However, this reviewer found no compelling reason given for the adoption of official categorisation—arbitrary and ideologically motivated as it is (p.80)—to exclude this small-scale private sector from discussion. And in fact this distinction is only inconsistently applied (e.g. p.148). In a similar vein, the author's classification of listed and limited liability companies as “segments of the private economy” (p.65) must be questioned since most of these companies underwent only scant restructuring while the state remained majority shareholder.

The bulk of the argument in this book is borne out by the data gathered through a standardised questionnaire plus semi-standardised interviews with private entrepreneurs chosen through conditional sampling in three localities per country, representing different levels of economic development (179 interviewees in China, 202 in Vietnam). The author acknowledges politically motivated constraints on fieldwork and questionnaire design in Vietnam that at times impinge on the comparative approach of the study. Nevertheless, this is an impressive data set which is consistently supplemented by extensive use of other (mostly Chinese) primary data and secondary sources. It is of special value for readers in that the data is well documented in 151 tables, because they might in some cases want to draw their own conclusions differing from the author's, as they at times struggles to interpret regional or other variations in his findings.

For instance, as partial explanation for the relatively lowly ranking of “higher income” as an aim in their lives by Chinese respondents Heberer advances that as private entrepreneurs already attain a relatively high income the importance of further increases might drop (p.318). On the other hand, the considerably higher ranking Vietnamese interviewees, according to Heberer (p.323), suggests that rising income levels compared with other social groups might have reinforced the longing for future increases. In another example, Heberer once stresses the traditional duties of better-off villagers in Vietnam and China towards other residents of the community, even invoking James C. Scott's “moral economy of the peasantry”, while in another context he states that especially among rural entrepreneurs in Vietnam the feelings of social obligations seem to be weak (pp. 304-5 and 324 resp.). That said, the combination of questionnaire research with more qualitative interviewing seems to ensure that interpretations by the author do not stray too far off the mark.

In sum, this study is a substantial contribution to the literature on social change in China and Vietnam. It's sophisticated application of social science theories to the country cases makes it valuable not only for area specialists but also for readers more generally interested in issues of social transformation. This reviewer hopes for an early English-language edition of the book to make it accessible to a wider readership.