Jiepai Jianghu Chinese Economy, Industry & Commerce Series: Household Agriculture, Commercial Intermediation, and Township Industrialization in Jiepai, Southern Jiangsu, China

This series-level record provides an annotated Chinese-language primary-source introduction to the Economy and Business Series within Jiepai Jianghu, Volume I of the Chuanyue Archive. Based on household memory, direct observation, long-term lived experience, and native-insider knowledge, it traces approximately four decades of economic and commercial change in Jiepai, Danyang, Jiangsu, China, within the broader regional contexts of Southern Jiangsu, Jiangnan, the Lower Yangtze, and the Yangtze River Delta. The narrative begins with small-scale household agriculture, grain production, and the delivery of public grain. It then follows the Archive Author’s father through long-distance itinerant sales, locally described as “Pao Yewu” (跑业务), motorcycle passenger transport, and market vending. The account proceeds through the growth of streetfront lighting stores, early encounters with foreign buyers, the filling of waterways and construction of roads, factory expansion, factory-residence integration, automotive aftermarket clustering, and the maturation of local consumer and service businesses. A central contribution of the record is its documentation of changing forms of commercial intermediation. During the early reform period, itinerant salespeople connected buyers and sellers who lacked reliable information about one another. Streetfront stores, locally described as “Men Shi Bu” (门市部), later became visible points of product display, business contact, and regional exchange. Regional wholesale and auto-parts markets, trade fairs, fixed distribution channels, supplier relationships, and internet platforms subsequently assumed overlapping market-making functions. The source therefore provides locally grounded evidence on distribution-channel transition and the coexistence of physical, relational, and digital commercial channels in a specialized township manufacturing economy in China. The record also connects household economic history with spatial and industrial transformation. Waterways were filled to create roads, factories were built along new transport routes, production and residential space were combined within factory compounds, and industrial buildings expanded toward neighboring Xinqiao. These observations document rural spatial restructuring, local infrastructure transition, industrial clustering, factory-residence integration, changing product reputation, industrial upgrading, and the development of formal supply capacity in a Southern Jiangsu township. The source further records intergenerational changes in labour, skills, and commercial competence. The father’s generation relied heavily on bodily mobility, long-distance travel, face-to-face selling, and the direct discovery of buyers. The following generation encountered foreign customers, language-based commercial work, more formalized manufacturing, trade fairs, established distribution networks, and digital communication. The record does not treat these changes as a complete model of social mobility, but preserves their household-level and township-level manifestations. As a Series-level Record, OA_V3 maintains the public structure of the Economy and Business Series while making its formal Jiepai Jianghu Series identity explicit in the main title. It currently has two published component items: “Ye Fandian, Supplier Networks, and Business Sociality in a Southern Jiangsu Township” (OA_V1, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21148161) and “Molds as Guns: Productive Assets, Relational Credit, and Production Resource Allocation in Chinese Township Manufacturing” (OA_V3, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21205674). Completed but unreleased texts, planned texts, and two supplemental “East End Shop” narratives belonging to the Memory, Space, and Transformation Series are identified separately. The main source text is in Chinese and includes Author Annotations on composition, narrative uncertainty, local concepts, confidence, and provenance. Local terms include “Pao Yewu” (跑业务, long-distance itinerant product sales), “Yin Wan” (银碗, the local term for a reflector bowl), “Men Shi Bu” (门市部, a streetfront or market-based sales outlet), and “Qianming” (缱命, locally pronounced qi3; the written character remains provisional), referring to the effort of repeatedly overcoming hardship and barely sustaining life. The record may support research on China and in economic anthropology, business anthropology, industrial anthropology, economic sociology, rural studies, microhistory, human geography, China studies, digital humanities, community archives, vernacular economy, alternative data, household economic history, township industrialization, commercial infrastructure, industrial clustering, and distribution-channel transition. It should be read as locally grounded series-level Chinese-language primary-source documentation from China rather than as a comprehensive study of the Sunan model, Chinese industrial policy, Chinese manufacturing as a whole, or the national economy. This is the OA_V3 Series-title and source-text wording update, dated July 14, 2026.