“From Tractors to Automobiles”: Household Economic Management

Abstract

Chapter 4 showed just how important the administrative village collective and the villagers’ groups are for the individual inhabitants of Yantian. The former provided diverse public goods and services as well as the year-end dividends. The latter, depending on performance and development, offered some welfare to villagers in the group. However, the current village collective differs significantly from the village collectives of the commune period and although individuals enjoy the public services and welfare offered by the village or group collective, individual villagers do not give up their independence to conduct their own economic activities. On the contrary, we can witness the coexistence and complementary interaction of economic, political, and social development at all three levels—the administrative village, the villagers’ group, and the individual family household. The social and political issues are taken up in subsequent chapters while in this chapter we focus on economic management at the family household level.KeywordsMigrant WorkerPoor HouseholdConsumption ExpenditureHouse RentalHousehold AssetThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.