Yi Zhou
American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 2024
Abstract: Many Chinese small business owners often say their success “comes from bitterness,” yet few studies explore the nature of such bitterness and its moral and symbolic dimensions. Focusing on the bitterness narratives of Yiwu merchants, through the analysis of oral history materials of 123 interviewees, the research reveals (1) “Trading chicken feathers for sugar” as a “bitterness” event stemmed from the collective economic crisis during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s era. (2) The core of “bitterness” revolves around the merchants’ “disembedment” and “(re)embedment” with the social structural relationship. However, (3) Yiwu merchants perceived their fluctuating relationships with structures (village collectives, family relatives) as “bitterness.” These judgments of bitterness and happiness were formed under the governance of moral values and deeply embedded cultural ideals. In their view, the key to business success is consistently aligning with mainstream moral culture. On the one hand, they value traditional Chinese concepts such as “the association of hardship with success” and “loyalty and attachment to institutional authority.” On the other hand, they also prioritize neoliberal values, emphasizing individual competitive abilities and the results they achieve, particularly in the global marketplace. (4) Yiwu merchants’ rags-to-riches inspirational stories are accompanied by the symbolic sublimation of “chicken feathers for sugar” from secular to sacred. This sublimation is the result of the multi-agent participation. Focusing on the moral-symbol cultural factors of these small business owners’ structural and economic behavior underlying their bitterness narratives, this study echoes the Strong Cultural Program that calls for cultural relative autonomy.
About the author: Yi Zhou was a HYI Coordinate Research Scholar from 2007-08 and 2023-24.