| Abstract | Today, Chinese free enterprisers are positively brazen, and not just along the coast. Once restricted to conducting business outside the walls of Beijing's old city, entrepreneurs in the capital now hammer out deals within earshot of Mao Zedong's tomb. Gold told how the "party-state" gradually relented: when neighbourhoods first shunned private businesses - the so-called getihu or household enterprises - from local markets, the state ordered the shunning to stop. In the process, the state changed roles from free enterprise oppressor to legitimizer. It had, in Gold's words, delineated new "zones of indifference where they wouldn't manage people's lives" and refocused on a narrower set of socialist priorities to be protected from capitalist incursions. |
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