Between Politics and Markets
Firms, Competition, and Institutional Change in Post-Mao China

This book examines the decline of central planning in post-Mao China.

Yi-min Lin (Author)

9780521771306, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 December 2001

270 pages, 3 b/w illus. 17 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.57 kg

'Between Politics and Markets makes a seminal argument about the dynamics of China's transition from a centrally planned economy to a market-oriented system … Lin's focus on the interaction of economic and political markets represents a significant challenge to existing accounts of China's economic transition.' Perspectives on Politics

Between Politics and Markets examines how the decline of central planning in post-Mao China was related to the rise of two markets - an economic market for the exchange of products and factors, and a political market for the diversion to private interests of state assets and authorities. Lin reveals their concurrent development through an account of how industrial firms competed their way out of the plan through exchange relations with one another and with state agents. He argues that the two markets were mutually accommodating, that the political market grew also from a decay of the state's self-monitoring capacity, and that economic actors' competition for special favors from state agents constituted a major driving force of economic institutional change.

List of tables and figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Economic market and political market
1. Chinese factories: organization, institutional change, and performance variation
2. Central planning and its decline
3. Survival of the fittest in power-leveraged competition
4. Referee as player: menaces and opportunities for industrial firms
5. Hierarchies and markets in the 'Local Inc.': a tale of two localities
6. Favor-seeking and relational constraints
7. Competition, economic growth and latent problems
Conclusion
Appendices.

Subject Areas: Economics [KC], Sociology & anthropology [JH], Regional studies [GTB]