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Title:
Bitterness Narrative: The Moral Foundation of Small Business Owners in Yiwu, China
Abstract:
Many small business owners in China attribute their success to their “bitter experiences,” yet there has been limited research investigating the nature and the moral foundation of this “bitterness narrative.” Based on oral history interviews with 123 Yiwu merchants, this study finds several facts about their bitterness narratives. First, the triple traumas of hunger, responsibility, and identity experienced during the decade of the Cultural Revolution, when the village collective economy collapsed, turned the narrative of “exchanging feathers for sugar” into a bitter one. Second, the bitterness narrative went through four stages of change: the “bitterness” of disembedding from the village collective economy and venturing alone as a peddler, the “bitterness” of seeking relationships and re-embedding in kinship networks, the “bitterness” of cutting off kinship networks when the business was about to expand, and the “half bitterness” of the accelerated kinship severance laid with the joy of returning to the institutional security provided by the government. The four bitterness narratives were all centered on relationship embedding or disembedding, so the nature of the bitterness was the relational structure. Third, their bitterness narratives were impacted by the ethical-moral concepts in the surrounding environment. Small business owners proactively aligned themselves with the dominant moral values, which contributed to their economic success. What they emphasized was not only Chinese traditional values such as “the affinity between suffering and success” and “the loyalty to the authority” but also neo-liberal values that people should be free in a globalized market. Focusing on the moral-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 the cultural accounts of the structure and the structural accounts of the culture.
