The Economic Implications of Kinship: Small Entrepreneurs in Guangzhou Garment Industry

Abstract

Over the past decades, the anthropological study of Chinese kinship has tended to emphasize its sociocultural functioning in organizing and structuring Han Chinese society. Among the few studies of Chinese kinship and Chinese entrepreneurship, the presence of, and preference for, kinship connections in Chinese businesses is usually considered as the immediate product of long-standing kinship traditions in Chinese culture or as the response to certain social constraints. It seems that the economic benefits and returns of the inclusion of kinship relations in business affairs are underestimated and even neglected. This study focuses on why, how and to what extent kinship is involved in concrete and ongoing business processes and explores how the mobilization of kinship brings competitive advantages for small entrepreneurs. The ethnographic data collected shows that the businessmen tend to re-conceptualize kinship with reference to economic rationality and to exploit the economic potential of kinship purposefully. In so doing, economic interests are highlighted and included in the explanations of the deep involvement of Chinese kinship in business affairs.