What Made It Booming Before Makes It Fail Today

Why did a Chinese herb medicine market thriving in government discourse and news reports suddenly declined? By answering this question, I analyzed the impact and crisis of marketization during social transformation in western China, which implied from the holistic approach to understanding the plight of development. Through doing field work and searching for documents, we find that this market was built concerning to specific historical and geographical conditions. However, its a brief boom was not because of effective use of these advantages. In the process of operation, most of venders neither have legitimate qualification, nor their products meet with requirements from CFDA. Besides, a large number of people engaged in tax fraud through VAT invoices in name of investment. Managers of the market did not perform the contract in accordance with national law. In this condition, the market not only can not withstand the impact of hoarding and speculation, but also unable to cope with campaign style law enforcement execute by the state. Only operating for four years, the market transformed into a shopping mall.This article reveals Chinese economic development led market transformation is the crucial cause behind the rise and fall of the market. The market is not a platform for free trade. It twisted the emotional relationship between people, power of regulators, contractual relationship based on law into are commodities, which could be pricing. The case of the Chinese herb market is not isolated. We can see a lot of stories based on the script of "flourish exposing striking" repeatedly staged. The relentless pursuit of the development of the market cultivated this simple and fast commodity logic. However it eventually led to the opposite of development, of national interest, of the society and the public formed by each of us as well.In this sense, we should not only account for government regulation, but also need to rethink the dominant logic of Socialist market economy and its limits in modern China behind the absence of government.