Markets with Bureaucratic Characteristics How Economic Bureaucrats Make Policies and Remake the Chinese State

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Uncovering the complex interplay between organizations and individuals that have influenced China’s policy shifts, Yingyao Wang, in Markets with Bureaucratic Characteristics: How Economic Bureaucrats Make Policies and Remake the Chinese State (May 2024, Columbia University Press) presents a detailed analysis of the Chinese bureaucratic system, showing it as a dynamic and diverse network shaped by various career paths, regional influences, and generational changes. This significant work enhances the understanding of economic decision-making in China’s reform and opening-up, providing a rare look into the inner mechanisms and social dynamics among technocrats in critical industrial and financial sectors. Wang’s sociological lens reveals the intricate social environment where career paths converge, networks are established and transformed, and the Chinese state continually evolves and adapts.

In contrast to the narrative that China’s economic reform simply “crossed the river by feeling for the stones,” this book shows that Chinese reforms were not as ad hoc as the existing literature suggests. Instead, several major policy currents emerged and carried China’s economic reform toward the other bank of the river on currents and cascades built up over time. The most pronounced shift concerns the genesis of economic reform itself in the late 1970s, which unraveled the planned economy and introduced the market as a major mechanism for allocating resources. The socialist economy did not appear to be collapsing near the end of the Cultural Revolution. The beginning of economic reform was a function of power struggles in the state bureaucracy, and how and where these struggles started were associated with the socialist bureaucrats’ ideas about markets. Other paradigm shifts have received less attention and are less frequently recognized as such. Market reform in the 1990s, for instance, profoundly reversed the decentralization approach to market development prevalent in the first decade of reform and reasserted the role of the central state in economic management. This round of state rebuilding and deepening market reform was associated with a technocratic movement in the Chinese state following the 1989 Tiananmen incident and a recognition of the need to advance economics and demobilize politics.

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