Private Commerce Research Articles

Private law framework for blockchain

Current attempts to regulate blockchain technology are mainly based on securities law framework, which considers crypto tokens and digital assets as either securities, currencies or derivatives thereof. The main limitation of such approach lies in its inability to accommodate the diverse legal rights, obligations and assets that blockchain technology can virtually reproduce. Already in 2017–2018 there were attempts to tokenize rights outside of securities law framework, these initiatives served more as makeshift solutions to circumvent securities regulations than as thorough frameworks for managing real-world assets and commercial activities. This article conducts a comparative and historical analysis of blockchain regulatory initiatives in Europe and the US, positing that the regulation of blockchain technology through a securities law lens is driven by reactionary opportunism. Such a basis is deemed inappropriate and insufficient, as securities laws being a field of public law were not designed to govern real-world assets and commerce, which fundamentally rely on the principles of laissez-faire and freedom of contract inherent in private law. A regulatory stance focused solely on public law overlooks the full potential of blockchain technology, and risks stifling innovation and practical applications. To illustrate this, the article presents case study of tokenization of contractual rights demonstrating that securities law-focused legal regulations, such as the EU Regulation 2023/1114 on Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) and Regulation 2022/858 on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), inadequately address the field of private commerce. Based on the analysis, the article concludes that comprehensive legal framework for blockchain technology shall combine public and private law regime akin to the regulation of traditional rights, obligations and assets.

Tremoring transits: railways, the Royal Observatory and the capitalist challenge to Victorian astronomical science.

Britain's nineteenth-century railway companies traditionally play a central role in histories of the spread of standard Greenwich time. This relationship at once seems to embody a productive relationship between science and capitalism, with regulated time essential to the formation of a disciplined industrial economy. In this narrative, it is not the state, but capitalistic private commerce which fashioned a national time system. However, as this article demonstrates, the collaboration between railway companies and the Royal Greenwich Observatory was far from harmonious. While railways did employ the accurate time the observatory provided, they were also more than happy to compromise the astronomical institution's ability to take the accurate celestial observations that such time depended on. Observing astronomical transits required the use of troughs of mercury to reflect images of stars, but the construction of a railway too near to the observatory threatened to cause vibrations which would make such readings impossible. Through debates over proposed railway lines near the observatory, it becomes clear how important government protection from private interests was to preserving astronomical standards. This article revises our understanding of the role of railway companies in the dissemination of standard time and argues that state intervention was essential to preserving Victorian British astronomical science.

정전 후 북한의 사회주의 개조와 민간 상업의 몰락

This study examined whether the private commerce of North Korea were absorbed into the socialist economic system or liquidated, by analyzing private commercial policies at the time of the socialist transition.BRDuring the Korean War, private commerce grew steadily despite the suppressions by North Korean authorities. At that time, the policy direction of the Korean Workers’ Party(KWP) and the government were to restrain and eliminate private commerce rather than accepting it into the cooperative system. For this purpose, in January 1953, the income tax law, which applies a progressive tax rate of up to 74%, was amended. From November 1954, private trade in grains was banned. By these measures, private commerce shrank considerably, so that the socialist transformation of private commerce and industry could be promoted smoothly without intense class struggle. From the end of 1956, the North Korean government began to fully promote the socialist transformation of the private commerce and industry, declared its fulfillment in August 1958.BRPrivate merchants during this period were not ‘transformed’ into socialist workers by joining consumption cooperatives or production cooperatives. Many private merchants have been deprived of their economic basis and have fallen by imposing high rate of income tax, the blocking supply of goods and market.

DESCENTRALIZACIÓN: ¿UNA HERRAMIENTA DE PRIVATIZACIÓN?

<p>A pesar de las críticas sobre el tamaño del Estado, la descentralización sirvió para la creación de un gran número de entidades públicas, las cuales, sin embargo y con el paso del tiempo, perdieron su rumbo y se quedaron como fortín político y centros burocráticos. Sin embargo, desde la reforma introducida por la Ley 489 de 1998, la descentralización se acentuó mediante la creación de personas jurídicas indirectas, o sea, asociaciones de entidades públicas, que se rigen por las normas del derecho privado. Su finalidad fundamental fue seguir la operación de aquellas empresas estatales que fueron disueltas, pero ahora siguiendo las normas del derecho privado y la consecuente participación de particulares, por lo cual se afirma que este tipo de organismos se constituye en una forma de privatizar el Estado.</p>

A Cross-sectional Study of the Pattern of Body Image Perception among Female Students of BBM College in Vijayapur, North Karnataka.

Body image is an essential aspect of young girls' self-definition and individual identity which is influenced by various biological, psychological and social factors. Excessive concern about body image, body image misconception are leading to dissatisfaction, disturbed eating patterns, affecting the nutritional status and also leading to depression and anxiety disorders. This concept of body image has been less explored in Indian context, especially among young girls. The objectives of the study were to assess the body image perception among young college going girls, using a visual analog scale and to compare body image perception and satisfaction with their BMI levels and weight changing methods adopted. An exploratory cross-sectional study was conducted among 63 female students studying BBM course at a private commerce institution in Vijayapur city. Data was collected using a self administered questionnaire containing details of basic socio-demographic information and a validated visual analogue scale. Height was measured by Seca Stadiometer, weight was measured using Digital weighing machine and Body Mass Index levels were calculated. Percentages were calculated for descriptive variables. Chi-square test was applied for analysing categorical variables. Spearman Rank correlation test was applied for analysing ordinal data. A 39.7% of participants were underweight and 15.9% were overweight/obese. Majority of underweight and overweight girls (72% and 89%, respectively) perceived themselves as normal weight. Body image satisfaction of participants was found to be significantly associated with their body image perception, mothers' educational status and also with relatives' and peer group's opinions about their body weight. Unhealthy weight changing patterns like skipping meals (13%), increasing quantity and frequency of meals (17%) were reported among study participants. This exploratory study highlights the gap between young girls' body image perception and their BMI levels, indicating body image misconception. Lower literacy level of mothers and opinions of relatives and friends significantly influenced body image satisfaction among study participants. Higher percentage of underweight (39.7%) coupled with unhealthy weight changing patterns reportedly adopted by participants (30%) indicates need for further research on this issue, to help inform public health nutrition programmes.

‘Buy 20 Years’

In 1956 the Chinese authorities accomplished the socialisation of private industry and commerce and handicrafts through the implementation of peaceful redemption and through taking charge of the original private management personnel. In January 1957, Shanghai industrialist Li Kangnian criticised the form of the redemption. He suggested extending the payment term of the fixed rate of interest (dingxi) from 7 years to 20 and changing the mode of payment to bank deposit receipts. In spring 1957 his proposal provoked a lively debate in commercial and industrial circles, whose members hoped to establish their relationship with the state on a contractual basis; they rejected the pressure exerted on them in the name of class conflict and asked for equal citizenship. However, these legitimate demands were severely suppressed during the anti-rightist campaign. The ccp’s propensity to instrumentalise policies made it impossible to achieve the original intention of using precious human resources, while it led to discrimination based on class and shaped a hierarchical society. In fact, the controversy over Li Kangnian’s proposals demonstrated a real confrontation between the patriarchal authoritarian culture of the Chinese Communist Party and the modern contractual culture of industrialists and merchants.

State Property or Cultural Property?

In recent years, the state has evidenced a dedication to preserving our documentary heritage not only by maintaining archival repositories, but also by attempting to remove particularly notable and valuable historical documents from public circulation. North Carolina's efforts to regain its official copy of the Bill of Rights, a downright caper featuring a sting operation directed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is perhaps the most notable recent example of the phenomenon (Goss, 2010). In recent decades many such cases have been handled much more quietly, but in initiating suits to pursue contested historical documents and when relying heavily on particular legal strategies for their recovery, the public sector has decisively shaped this debate. The ubiquity of the term among relevant parties is one sign of success: in the councils of state archivists, among the professional organizations of both state and academic archivists, and throughout the community of private manuscript collectors, in conference sessions and journal articles, and in informal conversation, serves as a pervasive shorthand descriptor of conflicts involving the ownership of public documents. A common law remedy for parties seeking the return of stolen or otherwise unlawfully held property, and largely concerned with proof of title, replevin is the central feature of most individual state laws created to defend the property rights of governments in their official records (Bain, 1983). Replevin's stringent requirements, have, much to the detriment of informed and reasonable dialogue, lent a consistently acrimonious tenor to an otherwise episodic string of conflicts over public records. Relations between state archives and private collectors have only deteriorated in recent years, and at this point it would be helpful to develop alternative approaches to the analysis and mediation of these contests.The Private Market and Archival Preservation in the United StatesRecognizing the priority and influence of the private sector in preserving American archives is a necessary step in beginning to understand the complexities of this issue. American documentary preservation efforts have always been pursued within a mixed economy of public and private activity. At one time or another, either of the two sides might have been said to be dominant. Institutional archives, including government repositories and university special collections, are now the primary actors, but for much of our history governments have been imperfect guardians of the documentary heritage embodied in their inactive records. Only at the turn of the 20th century did state-funded archival institutions emerge as dedicated organizations to protect these records. And for years the state archives were alone; there would be no national archives until the 1930s. In terms of archival preservation, the 19th century belonged almost wholly to the individual collector of historical manuscripts. Private historical societies and private individuals served notably as archival custodians during this period, assembling manuscript collections through auction and catalogue sales, private commerce, and by personally seeking the items out where they were stored. Amidst the private letters they sometimes saved public papers: federal, state, or local government records, which at this time were usually kept in a variety of generally poor, dirty, and fire-prone accommodations. This material was sometimes pilfered, sometimes rescued from officially-sanctioned destruction, from the paper mill or the dump, maybe wheedled from the custody of a public official, or taken home by a public official, or otherwise chanced upon in unexpected ways. In this manner, notable portions of state, local, and federal archives entered the private autograph trade, afterwards lying quietly in wait and only in recent decades emerging as a divisive public policy issue.While the money involved was quite modest until at least the 1910s or 1920s, there existed sufficient competition between private collectors to bring about an increasingly robust private market for some varieties of historical documents. …

Piety, profit and the market in Cairo: a political economy of Islamisation

This article explores the dynamics of interplay, in Egypt, between the processes of Islamisation, on one hand, and economic liberalisation and privatisation, on the other. It investigates how forms and practices of Islamisation are shaped by the social transformations that accompanied the shift towards a free-market economy and the retreat of the public sector from the economic sphere. This shift, which began in the 1970s and accelerated in the 1990s, entailed an expansion of the private sector, especially in services and commerce, as well as a greater opening up of the national market to the globalised exchange system and, hence, the flourishing of a consumer market. An integral element of this transformation has been the growth and expansion of the informal economy, including informal markets. Closely tied with these processes of privatisation and expanded market informality is the production of symbolic and normative frames guiding economic transactions and the broader fields of social exchange. Forms and expressions of Islamisation, as this article will show, are part of this symbolic and normative production. As such, the article will examine that facet of the interaction of Islamisation and economic liberalisation which concerns the terms in which “Islam” becomes invested in modes of economic organisation that have been spurred on by the Egyptian economy’s greater integration into the global market and the adoption of neo-liberal policies. In this neo-liberal economy, and propelled by the policies of privatisation, private commerce of small and medium scale has acquired a large share of the national

Public Rights and Private Commerce

Tracing the history of a family across three generations, from enslavement in eighteenth‐century West Africa through emancipation during the Haitian Revolution and subsequent resettlement in New Orleans, then France, then Belgium, can shed light on phenomena that are Atlantic in scope. A business letter written in 1899 by the cigar merchant Edouard Tinchant to General Máximo Gómez in Cuba frames an inquiry that opens out onto a family itinerary that spanned the long nineteenth century. Rosalie Vincent’s achievement of freedom in the shadow of slavery in Saint‐Domingue in 1793–1803 can be seen as linked to her grandson Edouard Tinchant’s participation as a delegate in the Louisiana Constitutional Convention of 1867–68. Together, the experiences of the Vincent/Tinchant family illuminate an Atlantic and Caribbean rights‐consciousness that crossed the usual boundaries of language and citizenship. Uncovering these experiences suggests the value of combining the close focus displayed in Sidney Mintz’s Worker in the Cane with the Atlantic approach of his later Sweetness and Power.

The New, Improved Water Cycle

IN 1993, the iconic corporation known as Coke assured its stockholders that prosperity and consumer captivity were closely related. All of us in the Coca-Cola family wake up each morning knowing that every single one of the world's 5.6 billion people will get thirsty that day. If we make it impossible for these 5.6 billion people to escape Coca-Cola, then we assure our future success for many years to come. (1) If the people in Coke's marketing department had a sense of humor, they would have named the next Coke product Ubiquity. The real thing has become so commonplace that it is almost invisible until its presence becomes particularly offensive, i.e., when its image serves as a backdrop to a tableau of child malnutrition in Africa, or when a crying baby is photographed sucking a bottle filled with dark brown stuff. Of course, this image/message/commodity could just as likely be associated with PepsiCo, Inc. Several years ago, was invited to appear on a television talk show to discuss the commercialization of schools. A puzzled young man called in with an unforgettable question. Well, Miss, he began, I went to a Coke high school, but now I'm at a Pepsi university. So what's the problem? According to my caller, as long as students could buy what they wanted and corporations shared in (or at least took turns at) profiting from them, then the conditions necessary to determine the playing field of the marketplace/school had been met. What point was trying to make? Indeed, unless the purposes of public education and private commerce are distinctly and intentionally different, my point is moot. It is difficult to measure the less tangible aspects of privatization, but logos littering the hallways and secret deals conferring exclusive pouring rights are usefully concrete indicators of the changing culture of schools. A recent research project undertaken by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), the Canadian Teachers' Federation (CTF), and the Federation des syndicates de l'enseignement (FSE) set out to measure the extent to which elementary and secondary schools across Canada had delivered their students--reluctantly or enthusiastically--over to corporations. (2) Marketing to kids is good business--great business if it has the blessing of schools. In Canada, children between the ages of 9 and 14 control approximately $2.9 billion of their own spending money, and they kidfluence at least $20 billion of their parents' spending. Advertising is expensive. Ensuring that students are routinely and inescapably exposed to a product or at least its logo is smart, cost-effective marketing. If it delivers community good will at the same time, so much the better. The CCPA/CTF/FSE survey relied on voluntary responses, and so its results are indicative rather than definitive. Still, nearly a quarter of all schools responded to a common questionnaire. Of this group, 28% of elementary and 55% of secondary schools reported that advertising appeared in their hallways and cafeterias, on team uniforms, on scoreboards, and on school websites. (3) Twenty-seven percent of responding schools had signed exclusive contracts with Coke or Pepsi, and those doing so were more common at the secondary level (60%) than at the elementary level (19%). Deals were more likely to be consummated in the Prairie provinces, at 40%, than in Quebec, where a mere 5% of schools had signed agreements. Yet sales of soft drinks through school vending machines constitute a very small slice of the global revenue of Coke and Pepsi. Years of brand loyalty, not quick profits, motivate corporations that see themselves as iconic. Starting earlier means profiting longer. By 18 months of age, toddlers can recognize logos and are forming primitive with products and images. (4) Properly nurtured, these relationships can endure for eight or nine decades. Contemporary marketing is all about making and deepening the relationship between customers and their brands. …

Medicalizing the Romantic Libido: Sexual Pleasure, Luxury, and the Public Sphere

Habermas argues that in the eighteenth century, private vices were translated into public virtues; from the intimate spaces of the conjugal family came the public virtues of companionate love, voluntary association, and self-cultivation; from private commerce came acquisitiveness, competition, and rational calculation. This essay uses Habermas to reexamine Foucaultian histories of sexuality, arguing that the enormous medical literature on pleasure--luxury, sexual pleasure, masturbation, nerves--polices this transition from private vice to public virtue, but in sometimes surprising ways. The key was to explain why certain pleasurable experiences (acquisitiveness for its own sake and sexual intimacy outside the normative middle-class family) were not legitimately or even empirically pleasurable, despite potential somatic evidence to the contrary.

From conflicting interests to collective consent in advanced vocational education: policymaking and the role of stakeholders in Sweden

This study considers the policymaking process of forming a new tertiary vocational education and training (VET) policy in Sweden during the 1990s, and the influence that external stakeholders played in that process. Since the late 1960s onwards, the VET system in Sweden has been mainly integrated with general and school‐based education. Due to the changes in working life VET has recently undergone a transformation process moving towards a more demand‐led mode of functioning. Following perhaps the most significant education policymaking process on the reform of advanced vocational education, the study by analysing requirements and policy recommendations made by the six largest employer, employee and public education bodies from 1995 to 2000, suggests that private industry and commerce managed to establish their requirements, while the employee stakeholders made the largest concessions from an ideological standpoint.

A practical experience in workspace separation for developing multiple storefronts on customized commerce engines

In this paper, we describe our experience in separating workspaces, using the IBM VisualAge for Java development tool, for multiple web storefronts development for several major IBM public and private commerce sites. There was a need to create multiple workspaces since different storefronts may be developed at the same time. In addition, we wanted to keep the completed software packages for compatibility checking. Instead of tuning the current program setting to a desired mixed-version environment for each project, we generate a dedicated workspace by applying dependency analysis. New icons are created to conveniently invoke the development tool under different software packages and workspaces. We also present a systematic approach to facilitate the generation of a plan with instruction steps to produce new workspaces for their dedicated and required resources.

The use of Call Centres by local public administrations

European local public administrations (PA) are rapidly adopting information and communications technologies often with a view to offering e-commerce. Call Centres (CCs) feature prominently in the technology mix used by private sector e-commerce, but as a survey in this paper shows, CCs are less often used in public sector. This paper analyses the differences between private and public sector commerce and their implications for public sector e-commerce and its prospective use of CCs over the next ten years. It outlines the evolution of CC technologies and argues that current developments make the technology increasingly appropriate for the public sector. A model of e-commerce featuring connectivity, interactivity and agility is developed in the paper. From this it is concluded that many of the advantages from the use of CCs by PAs, are in system integration and process re-engineering — attributes positioned in terms of bridging technology and acting as a learning organisation. From this perspective, the paper concludes that CCs are likely to increasingly feature in the information and communications technology-mix for e-commerce delivery of PAs over the next ten years.

Rethinking the Role of Law and Contracts in East-West Commercial Relations

Commerical law in Asia is outpacing Asian commercial practices by a wide margin. Even though Western insistence on the rule of law as a condition of cross-border commerce has been met by enthusiastic acceptance and lawmaking by Asian policymakers, it has not occasioned the pervasive change in individual attitudes and beliefs essential to a widespread change in the traditionally subordinate role of law and contracts in matters of private commerce. As a result, there is a significant normative gap throughout Asia between written commercial law and commercial behavior, with traditional expectations often still strong regarding the subordination of law and contracts to evolving circumstances and relational values. Moreover, there is every reason to expect this gap to persist for decades or longer, with its narrowing no more likely to herald the complete Westernization of Asian commercial practices than it is the evolution of entirely new principles for East-West economic exchange that incorporate and reflect fundamental non-Western values. An important challenge for East-West commerce in the meantime is to somehow account in the structure and governance of commercial relationships for traditions so different that law and contracts are determinative of performance and outcomes in one but subordinate to other values in the other. The likely trade-off, for those bold enought to attempt an accommodation, will be reductions in predictability for increases in commercial stability. In the context of dispute resolution and international commercial arbitration, this will require turning a deaf ear to demands for Westernizing control mechanisms and instead working to preserve inexact and flexible rules of procedure, elastic notions of relevance and evidence, significant presentational latitude and variance, arbitrator responsibilities inconsistent with Western notions of impartiality, and, an openness to decisional rules and outcomes inconsistent with Western notions of legal predictability and commercial justice. In the context of contractual choice of law, this will require the designation of unconventional decisional rules, such as the combination of equity and lex mercatoria, that would empower arbitrators to act contra legem, and in the process, to explore and articulate new principles of governance that transcend the fundamentally different understandings within the Western and non-Western worlds regarding the role and rank of law and contracts in commercial relationships. Finally, this will require new contract terms that blur the traditional distinction between dispute resolution and performance by embodying mutual executory promises to consider and adjust in good faith to evolving circumstances in a business relationship. Through all of these efforts, a shared understanding may emerge of a legal basis upon which East-West commerce successfully may proceed.

Anti-Ottoman politics and transit rights : The seventeenth-century trade in silk between Safavid Iran and Muscovy

Rudi Matthee, Anti-Ottoman politics and transit rights : the seventeenth-century trade in silk between Safavid Iran and Muscovy. Trade relations between Russia and Iran go back to pre-Islamic times. They remained intermittent, however, until the rise of Muscovy, its annexation of the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan in the mid-sixteenth century, and the consolidation of Safavid rule in Iran in the same period. The backdrop to their subsequent expansion was a shared Russo-Iranian interest in anti-Ottoman alliances, which led to intensified diplomatic relations following the termination of the Livonian War and the accession of Shah 'Abbas I to the Safavid throne in the 1580's. The Russo-Iranian diplomatic exchange never produced an anti-Ottoman agreement, but did contribute to enhanced commercial traffic and the gradual formalisation of trade relations, both in the form of managed royal trade and of private commerce. Among the wares transported to Russia was silk, Iran's main export commodity. The importance of silk lay in Shah 'Abbas 's search for alternative export channels to the Anatolian route to the Levantine ports in order to lessen his dependence on the Ottomans. Russia was one such alternative outlet, yet, due to political differences over the Caucasus and logistical problems, the possibility of a diversion of Iran's silk to the northern route was never fully explored. With Shah ' Abbas 's death in 1629, Safavid interest in managed trade decreased. The Safavid-Ottoman peace of 1639, moreover, obviated any Iranian interest in Russia as an anti- Ottoman partner. Official contacts leveled off as a result. Trade relations continued, however, with private merchants taking the lead. Indeed, the latter part of the seventeenth century witnessed a great increase in the flow of silk from Iran to Russia. Interested in the fiscal advantages and increasingly in need of raw material for their manufacturing industry, the Russians encouraged the trade by giving the Armenians, its mast active practitioners, a privileged status. The latter capitalized on this, yet never intended to shift their entire operation away from the Anatolian route. The Russian hope of a total redirection was thus never fulfilled and the flow of silk, though increasing, at no point reached the volume of the Levantine connection.

Opening Speech at the Third National Rural Work Conference [Excerpt] (April 21, 1955)

[Deng began by listing five agenda items for the conference and noting some organizational details. The agenda items were: (1) the current situation of cooperativization and the policy of consolidation; (2) fundamental questions and plans of cooperativization; (3) revising the draft APC regulations; (4) the state monopoly purchase and marketing of grain, cotton, and other agricultural products and the transformation of rural private commerce; and (5) cooperation in forestry, animal husbandry, and fishery.]

Democracy, War, and Covert Action

It is well established that stable industrialized democracies do not use overt force against each other. But do democracies ever use covert force against other elected governments? This article confirms the US threat or use of forcible covert action against a series of elected non-European governments during the Cold War: Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Indonesia (1955), Brazil (1960s), Chile (1973), Nicaragua (1980s). There are other examples of US covert non-forcible action against elected governments. Three types of analysis are offered for this pattern. On the most obvious level, the US acted on the basis of an expansive conception of its perceived security interests, fearing future developments that would work to the advantage of the USSR, even though the US was not faced with clear and present dangers to its territorial integrity and political independence. A deeper unique explanation is that, as Michael Hunt has argued, the US was encouraged in these covert actions by an informal ideology entailing beliefs in US greatness, fears of social revolution, and racism. A deeper theoretical explanation is that the targeted regimes did not qualify as mature liberal regimes showing the characteristics of neo-Kantian liberalism: representative and specialized democracy, democratic alliance, and extensive private commerce. Moreover, the neo-Kantian reliance on representative decision-making to avoid major war did not affect secret decisions involving probabilty of few US deaths.

Changing horses in mid-stream: Job and life satisfactions for veterinarians

The differential nature of job activities related to four areas of veterinary work, club or private practice, industry or commerce, Animal Health and Meat Divisions of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, were investigated using a ten factor rating scale. The same scale was used to measure these veterinarians; non-job activities. Significant differences were found in average levels of job satisfaction. Meat Division veterinarians, for example, rated their jobs as offering little discretion or control over what, when and how they do things, lacking variety in activities, requiring less mental effort and giving them little control over the speed at which they work. These veterinarians also had the lowest level of job satisfaction. Non-job activities are seen to compensate for non-satisfactory aspects of a job, and levels of life satisfaction among veterinarians was not related to being in a specific area of practice. Certain job and non-job activities, however, are related to the degree of mental well-being in a veterinarian.

The Overseas Chinese in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, 1979-82

Since early 1980, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) and the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) have devoted considerable energy to developing instruments through which they could exert influence and authority over private commerce. These efforts are due largely to the regime's uncertainty over the possible revival of the Overseas Chinese (Hoa Kieu) role in commerce and distribution. The expropriation of Ho Chi Minh City businesses during 1978 was followed by a period of reformist economic policies and then in late 1980 by a supplementary round of controls involving registration for industrial and commercial enterprises in the City and the southern provinces. Hanoi, having initiated reformist policies in 1979, sought to assess profit and facilitate the collection of taxes from reviving commerce, much of which was in Chinese hands. It referred to these measures collectively in the same terms as in 1978-attempts to insure continuity of the socialist transformation of commerce. Throughout late 1980 and most of 1981, the SRV sustained a campaign against violations of socialist economic principles that urged vigilance against lax management, illegal sale and distribution of scarce commodities, and bribery. Though the Overseas Chinese rarely were singled out by name in this campaign, the categories of economic activities found in violation of state regulations were those in which the Chinese still had some influence or interest, for example, construction materials and the gold trade. At the same time, the reformist economic policies continued to be consolidated by the regime through 1982. Early that year the Council of Min-