"Informal Credit and Rural Women: Micro-Financial Crises in Reform-Era China"

The credit crises that swept through southeast coastal China in the 1980s and 1990s have often been interpreted as by-products of post-Mao market liberalisation and speculative excess. This paper argues instead that these crises exposed the enduring importance of hui, rotating savings and credit associations, as informal microcredit mechanisms linking ordinary households, small entrepreneurs, and local officials during a period of profound financial transition. Revived after decades of suppression, hui networks re-emerged as vital sources of capital and trust in rural and semi-urban communities, particularly among women who had long sustained underground finance throughout the socialist decades.
Drawing on county-level archives from the People’s Bank of China, local government reports, and oral histories, the paper examines how hui participants and private lenders navigated a volatile landscape of partial deregulation, speculative opportunity, and periodic crackdowns. Local authorities oscillated between toleration and prohibition, as hui operated in a legal and ideological grey zone — part mutual-aid association, part profit-seeking enterprise. While policymakers sought to channel capital through formal banking institutions, rural households and small business owners continued to rely on hui for liquidity, debt management, and social reciprocity.
By foregrounding the gendered and grassroots dimensions of informal finance, this paper reconsiders financial reform not as a linear or top-down process but as a negotiated and contested one. The experience of hui participants demonstrates that state agencies, business actors, and communities together produced new forms of financial practice and crisis under conditions of uncertainty. The paper situates these dynamics within the wider history of reform-era entrepreneurship and explores their role in shaping the foundations of China’s market economy.