Saltiness and Power:The Market in Zigong Salt Industry

What is market? How to interpret market? This paper analyzes traditional Chinese market based on Zigong salt industry in history and proposes a compound broad-sense market theory by the view of substancialism,and criticizes narrow economic opinion and its discourse hegemony on market.This paper argues that traditional and current market of China were Broad-sense market,which includes the economic market,social market,political market,cultural and symbolic market,they integrated,nesting and reproduced with each other.The Broad-sense market is the universal market form of human society,while the modern free market economy system is just one kind of various markets.This theory helps to understand many problems in the market reform and avoid the limitation of single economic thinking.