In times of geopolitical tension generated by great power rivalry, ordinary politics and policies are often attributed to “grand strategy,” a centrally coordinated master plan for achieving hegemonic aims. This is especially so if the policymaker in question is an authoritarian country with significant economic and military might, such as China. For instance, Made in China 2025, an industrial policy that aims to enhance the international competitiveness of China’s manufacturing sectors , is widely seen as a top-down industrial strategy driven by China’s supreme leaders and embodying the national will.
My book, Markets with Bureaucratic Characteristics, traces the origin of economic policies that have propelled China’s economic growth. It reveals the meso-level genesis of what are taken as “grand strategies”: they are formulated by ministry- and bureau-level bureaucrats who have a stake in developing policies that advance their careers in a competitive bureaucracy. Without understanding this bureaucratic source of modern politics, we fail to appreciate the backstage machinations that explain what policies emerge on the front stage.
The major economic policies of the past four decades can be traced to these bureaucratic actors, with supreme leaders often taking second-row seats, or retrospectively justifying policies developed by lower-level bureaucrats. These policies include: the centralization of fiscal basis, which greatly strengthens the central state’s ability to achieve macroeconomic objectives vis-à-vis the powerful localities; the construction of “national champions,” which fosters the merger of disconnected SOEs to integrate supply chains and achieve economy of scale; debt-driven development, which relies on credit for industrial projects and urban construction; financialization of public finance, which ties the management of public coffers to asset management and financial market performance; the rise of techno-industrial policy, which aims to inject technological competitiveness into China’s manufacturing sectors. Even the introduction of markets that brought the era of economic autarky to a close can be traced to a bureaucratic origin.
In many national contexts the administrative state evolves at its own pace, distinct from political climates, shifts in top leadership, and public opinion. Prevailing populist politics often obscure the bureaucratic state, the business of bureaucrats, technocrats, and experts in general. Yet, precisely because of recent attacks on the so-called “deep state” scholarly inquiry into the fate of the administrative state is particularly urgent. In particular, how do these complex and longstanding organizations respond to environmental changes and maintain their autonomy and dynamism?
China’s economic bureaucracy, the focus of the book, has endured drastic political economic transformation—from Mao’s planned economy and Cultural Revolution, to Deng’s economic reform and globalization, as well as the recent rise of nationalism and intensified geopolitical rivalries. Sailing through many a revolutionary tide, the hull of the bureaucratic ship remains well-sealed, with mostly gradual evolutionary changes internally. Economic policymakers in China are all career bureaucrats, promoted and rotated on regular schedules. Yet, it is within the routines of this staid bureaucracy, among its faceless functionaries, that paradigmatic changes in China’s economic strategies originate.
Studying the state through the movement of its bureaucrats
To explain how a seemingly sclerotic organization generates large-scale and dynamic outcomes in the Chinese state Markets with Bureaucratic Characteristics adopts a novel methodology. Instead of studying the walled organizations and immobile structures, it focuses on the bureaucrats who move across organizations, examining their career trajectories and lived experiences.
Bureaucrats’ crisscrossing career pathways are dynamic representations of state structures. State organizations are like fixed ditches, while bureaucrats are the water running through them. At important junctures, the moving water forms currents that can change the direction of the ditches, even carving new paths, leading to new economic thinking and policy approaches. In the Chinese case, these springs take the form of generations, career trajectories, and social networks, which form the social bases upon which bureaucratic interests and policy dispositions arise.
To capture these social movements within the organizational state, I employ a novel dataset comprising CV’s of all elite-level economic bureaucrats (281), detailed biographies (34), policy documents (over 200), and interviews (32). Together, these sources form the basis for an explanation of China’s economic policymaking, challenging the conventional narrative of China’s economic reform driven by great leaders. Instead, I show that it is the central bureaucrats who drive policy through forming coalitions, seizing ministries, and entrepreneurially expanding their authority as they climb bureaucratic ladders.
Chinese history meets Western ideas in the economic bureaucracy
As a result, both China’s historical development strategies and global economic ideas have had to filter through bureaucrats to gain traction. Elements of socialist production and the planned economy have been preserved through evolutionary bureaucratic turnover, with planning readapted for reform-era market development and state building. Foreign economic ideas have also entered the Chinese state, but through bureaucratic backdoors as well. Foreign models—most prominently from the U.S., Korea, Japan, and Germany—are often taken up by specific groups of bureaucrats who selectively adopt them, adapting them to local exigencies, often transforming them in the process.
Thus, financial reformers utilized ideas of corporate control and shareholder value to modernize state-controlled enterprises. Policymakers built conglomerates in the public sector to simulate market coordination among state enterprises. Macroeconomic managers borrowed from Milton Friedman’s economic prescriptions for controlling inflation. However, this is nothing new: In China’s ancient bureaucracy, history and global influences converged, creating unexpected novelties and hybridities through the fusion of unlikely elements, marrying Western mechanisms of motivation and legitimation, statist solutions, and a historical habits of planning and control.
Outcome? Policy paradigm incoherence
The net outcome? Policy change in China is not incremental but occurs in waves, recognizable as “policy paradigms.” Paradigm shifts involve not just policy instruments and means, but also goals and fundamental ways of thinking about the economy, its definition of competitiveness, sectoral priorities, and its relationship with the state and society. While the literature often portrays policy paradigm shifts as crisis-driven and externally validated by market institutions that have global legitimacy, Markets with Bureaucratic Characteristics presents an endogenous explanation, rooted in bureaucratic evolution and competition.
Because bureaucratic types are heterogenous, policy paradigms are multiple. My book demonstrates that the China Model is plural and incoherent. Throughout the reform era, different paradigms succeeded, co-existed, and contradicted each other, further fragmenting the Chinese state and exacerbating intra-state competition.
The Chinese state may be developmental, autonomous, and powerful, but it is not as synchronized and top-down as the other prototypical developmental states. The sources of policy programs are largely shielded from public view. Organizational scholars and economic sociologists have unique tools to unpack the evolution (and silent revolution) of the administrative state, despite, and perhaps because of, the populists’ premature claims on its demise.
An important implication of the book is that political leaders who want to effect change should consider a career in the bureaucratic apparatus, where they can potentially be part of policy transformations. Analysts who want to understand the country’s policy changes should focus on the work of bureaucrats, who actually formulate policies. Analyzing shifts in personnel and the convergence in career trajectories within the administrative state provides predictive power in identifying new sources of policy energy and interest. Foreign actors interested in engaging with countries should also find value in meso-level diplomacy—engaging with career bureaucrats who are keen on absorbing foreign ideas and instituting change from within.
Author
Yingyao Wang
Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Virginia
Selected Publications：
Yingyao Wang. 2024. Markets with Bureaucratic Characteristics: How Economic Bureaucrats Make Policies and Remake the Chinese State. Columbia University Press.
Yingyao Wang. 2021. “Policy Articulation and Paradigm Change: The Bureaucratic Origin of China’s Industrial Policy.” Review of International Political Economy. 28 (1):204-231.
Yingyao Wang. 2015. “The Rise of the Shareholding State: Financialization of Economic Management in China.” Socio-Economic Review. 13(3): 603-625.
Image: Helen Freeman via Flickr (CC by 2.0)