6 - The Enterprises and the Entrepreneurs

Summary

THIS chapter examines the characteristics of returnee enterprises and of the entrepreneurs themselves. The returnee enterprises are discussed in terms of their scale, type of business activity, and form of ownership. The smaller-scale businesses arrange their operational structure according to the familial petty commodity mode of production, whereas the larger-scale businesses adopt more of the formalized management and production features of urban factories. Returnee business activities are concentrated in the manufacturing and service sectors, with only a few businesses engaged in specialized agricultural production. The ownership structure of these enterprises varies: returnees establish private-sector entities and they also purchase or contract the running of collective and state enterprises.

Analyzing the characteristics of the entrepreneurs facilitates an understanding of the migrants' capacity to obtain resources both in the cities and at home, with implications for the scale and strength of the businesses that they create on their return. These characteristics include the duration of their absence in the cities, age on return, level of educational attainment, and reasons for return. Although most of the returned migrant entrepreneurs are men, women returnees receive separate in-depth discussion because gender-specific considerations affect their decisions to return as well as the scale and type of businesses that they create. The chapter shows that, while the returnees in south Jiangxi differ from each other in terms of their characteristics and hence in the kinds of businesses they create, they share a goal in common with returned migrants all over the world: that of becoming their own bosses, free from both agricultural work and the control of an employer.