"China's economic development over the past four decades has been marked by several consequential policies. In the early 1990s, the Chinese state centralized its fiscal base and boosted the power of the central government; in the late 1990s, "national champions" in the state sector were constructed and swiftly made headway into the Fortune Global 500 list. Since the early 2000s, credit expanded dramatically in the economy and debt-driven growth became a norm rather than an exception. Towards the end of the 2000s, ...
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"China's economic development over the past four decades has been marked by several consequential policies. In the early 1990s, the Chinese state centralized its fiscal base and boosted the power of the central government; in the late 1990s, "national champions" in the state sector were constructed and swiftly made headway into the Fortune Global 500 list. Since the early 2000s, credit expanded dramatically in the economy and debt-driven growth became a norm rather than an exception. Towards the end of the 2000s, nationalist techno-industrial policy took center stage and redefined the meaning of competitiveness. In Markets with Bureaucratic Characteristics, Yingyao Wang argues that these policies were not discrete or isolated events. Instead, they were part of systematic approaches developed in the Chinese state. These "policy paradigms" were aimed at reorganizing the Chinese economy and resetting state-market relations. Wang explains that the emergence and shifts in China's economic policy paradigms are contrary to conventional wisdom that any strategic plan coming from the Chinese state must reflect top leaders' intents. Instead she shows that attempts at restructuring began in the middle, within the Chinese bureaucracy. Paradigms worked their way out from second-tier economic bureaucrats, who played critical, yet unacknowledged roles in instituting large-scale transformations in the Chinese economy via their contentious bidding for career mobility and bureaucratic authority"--
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