Friday, November 20 2-4pm
Jonathan Lassen - China’s
Post-1998 Developmental State
Scholars of China’s post-1978 economic reforms have virtually unanimously argued that the reforms of the past thirty years have been at the expense of the state. It has become a stylized fact that China’s economic growth – and in particular its industrial growth – has followed from China’s policies of decentralization and privatization. Most argue that the state has played a virtuous role in this process by allowing private actors greater freedom, fostering competition, and implementing these changes in a gradual fashion. In this dissertation, I contend that this narrative is convincing from the period from 1978-1998, but invalid since. I propose that since the late-1990s, China’s central government has attempted to forge a ‘developmental state,’ by recentralizing economic controls, expanding the state’s capacity to coordinate and discipline firms (both state and private), and establishing key bureaucratic agencies that can carry out economic interventions with the goal of rapid industrial growth. I will trace the outline of this project and evaluate its implementation. Special attention will be paid to post-1998 state-capital relations, in particular the state’s strategy to impose discipline on capital, and firms’ reaction to this discipline.