Modes of Production, Rules for Reproduction and Gender: the fabrication of China's textile manufacturing workforce since the late Empire

Abstract

Textile production by rural households has been a major component of political economies in China since at least the late Empire. The petty commodity production of textiles first developed within a pre-capitalist context, marked by the interaction of owner-operator peasant households with a tributary mode of production. Initially petty commodity production led neither to ‘industrialisation’ nor to the replacement of pre-capitalist forms of household-based production. Instead, it continued to be carried out by people as members of households to which they had unbreakable economic obligations, and over whom kin seniors could exercise state-sanctioned patriarchal power to operate gender transfers. As cheap imports of machine-spun cotton yarns threatened to undercut China's domestic textile industry in the late 19th century, capitalist investors began to operate factories employing the rural women who were the first proletarians to manufacture textiles outside the household, and the forebears of China's new working class of internal rural migrants.