New Wine in an Old Bottle

Abstract

Since the economic reforms that began in the late 1970s, family businesses have reemerged in China. In general, social scientists have treated the Chinese family firm as a cultural and economic phenomenon. However, Chinese culture and family have usually been taken as an independent variable. Against the grain of this literature, this article treats the family as a social construct, whose boundary is constantly negotiated by family members. Based on an ethnographic study of a family firm in Zhejiang, China, this article argues that as the institutions of the family and lineage evolve, a new type of family firm is emerging in China.