Corporate conquests : business, the state, and the origins of ethnic inequality in southwest China / C. Patterson Giersch.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The Muleteers -- Families -- The revolutionaries -- The excluded -- Mining -- The technocrat -- Corporations, the state, and ethnic difference.

"In spite of state-led measures to reduce poverty and underdevelopment, tenacious patterns of ethnic and economic inequality persist in certain areas of China -- especially the rural, largely minority regions of the northwest and southwest. Such gaps are commonly attributed to geography and access to resources. But in Corporate Conquests, C. Patterson Giersch points to a historical disempowerment of these regions to suggest that China's minority communities have been underserved by economic development as well as state perception and location. Focusing on corporations as an agent of development, and subsequent ethnic marginalization, in the borderlands, the book posits the inequalities seen there today as originating in commercial and political changes between the 1870s and the 1940s. Not only did these communities become more deeply engaged in trade networks during this time, they were also subjected to urban-oriented nationbuilding projects that fundamentally undermined minority leadership. This resulted in state-owned enterprises controlling large shares of rural economies. By examining the rise of the corporation within the framework of persistent ethnic inequality, the book reveals how important new concepts about modern state power were forged in the pre-Communist borderlands"-- Provided by publisher.

Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on March 18, 2020).

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