State Socialism and the Rural Household: How Women's Handloom Weaving (and Pig-Raising, Firewood-Gathering, Food-Scavenging) Subsidized Chinese Accumulation

TL;DR — A historian argues that Maoist China’s rapid capital accumulation was quietly subsidised by rural women’s unpaid household work such as weaving cloth.

Published open access (CC BY) in the International Review of Social History in 2022, in a special theme on primitive accumulation under socialism. Jacob Eyferth teaches Chinese history at the University of Chicago.

He notes that accumulation in Maoist China ran faster than in Stalin’s Soviet Union in a much poorer country, and argues that the state could extract so much from agriculture because rural households, mostly women, made their own cloth and gathered fuel and food outside the planned economy, absorbing costs the state did not pay.

What it is: a peer-reviewed open-access journal article in social and economic history.

Where this came from

• A copy saved in October 2026.
• Cambridge University Press, open access: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859021000717
• Archived copy (Google Drive): Google Drive

19 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.