InstitutionClaim Cited
China’s reform-era party-state capitalism
Between 1978 and 2022, China repeatedly redrew the boundary between political command and economic initiative. Farm households, local officials, state-enterprise managers, migrant workers, private founders, and foreign investors reorganized production at extraordinary scale, while the Communist Party retained authority over political purpose, strategic sectors, senior appointments, and the permissible limits of experimentation.
How did China make decentralized economic initiative useful to a ruling party that never surrendered final political authority—and what changed when the center tightened the terms of permission?