Calculability and Budgeting in a Household Economy: A Case Study from Rural North China

Abstract

In Xiajia Village, northeast China, a villager has become renowned for keeping a detailed record of every economic transaction in his household for over 20 years. These transactions range from the purchase of a match (costing two cents) to the payments for his daughter’s education-several thousand yuan over several years. Known as ＂the bookkeeping man,＂ he is widely regarded as an especially gifted person by his fellow villagers and enjoys a high status in local social life. This is because, I will show in this paper, the skill of budgeting, and by implication, the ability to calculate in general, has long been admired by villagers as one of the most important factors in the prosperity of a household economy-so much so that many parents used it as a criterion to search for the ideal daughter-in-law or son-in-law, which in turn contributes to the social significance of calculation in village life. The first part of the paper reviews the villager’s bookkeeping practices in an attempt to understand the format, content, and functions of his account book. Then I examine how he learned and developed the art of calculating and budgeting, which is referred to locally as suanji 算計. The skill of suanji is interwined with folk symbolism, and it has to be learned as part of the local culture of reciprocity and moral economy. Suanji is therefore not merely a technique of budgeting and planning. In the concluding section, I argue that in the context of the rural household economy, economic agency is embedded in a complicated process of social practice and, as a consequence, calculating and budgeting are as social-cultural as they are economic.