As the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) set about reforming its centrally planned economy, it faced the thorny policy question of how to reform its state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Should it support a shift from public to private ownership of the means of production? Such a shift would challenge not only the CCP's socialist ideology but also its very legitimacy. Mixing the business of corporate restructuring with the politics of socialism presented nothing short of a policy nightmare.

With policy-relevant acuity, the contributors to this wide-ranging volume address the questions about reform programs that have plagued China—and East Asia more broadly—since the 1990s. While China, Japan, and South Korea have all been criticized for implementing reform too slowly or too selectively, this volume delves into the broader contexts underlying certain institutional decisions. The book seeks to show that seemingly different political economies actually share surprising similarities, and problems. While Going Private in China sheds new light on China's corporate restructuring, it also offers new perspectives on how we think about the process of institutional change.

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For the peasants in rural China, the harvest season is the occasion when several different worlds—the business world of large companies, the entrepreneurial world of middlemen, local elites and peasant households—are compressed into the same social space, thereby inducing intensive economic and social interactions and crystallizing social relations among villagers, local elites and markets. Based on ethnographic research on the autumn harvest in a township in northern China, this study sheds light on distinctive modes of market transactions across produces, and diverse interactions between markets and local institutions involving different co-ordination mechanisms, rhythms and social relationships. A more nuanced image of market transactions emerges from these observations, calling for a more refined conceptualization of markets and further research on their implications for institutional changes.

Drawing on insights from recent economic theories of incomplete contracts and property rights, we develop a theoretical model on authority relationships in the Chinese bureaucracy by conceptualizing the allocation of control rights in goal setting, inspection and incentive provision among the principal, supervisor and agent. Variations in the allocation of control rights give rise to different modes of governance and entail distinct behavioral implications among the parties involved. The proposed model provides a unified framework and a set of analytical concepts to examine different governance structures, varying authority relationships, and behavioral patterns in the Chinese bureaucracy. We illustrate the proposed model in a case study of the authority relationships and the ensuing behavioral patterns in the environmental protection arena over a 5-year policy cycle.

Focusing on the episodes of the government’s Paved Road to Every Village (PREV) project in an agricultural township in northern China, this article examines two research issues: First, the role of state policies, government bureaucracies, and village cadres in the provision of public goods, especially the unintended consequences that led to huge collective debts and the erosion of the collective basis of governance and second, the role of local institutions and social relations in resource mobilization, problem solving, and response to crises, especially in the aftermath of the PREV project. The episodes provide an occasion to rethink the role of governments in economic development and the lessons learned from, to borrow an expression by James Scott, “seeing like a state.”

China's protracted regional conflicts of 1967 and 1968 have long been understood as struggles between conservative and radical forces whose opposed interests were so deeply rooted in existing patterns of power and privilege that they defied the imposition of military control. This study of Nanjing, a key provincial capital that experienced prolonged factional conflict, yields a new explanation: the conflicts were prolonged precisely because they could not be characterized as pitting "conservatives" against "radicals," making it difficult for central officials, local military forces, or Mao Zedong to decide how to resolve them. Furthermore, Beijing officials, regional military forces, and local civilian cadres were themselves divided against one another, exacerbating and prolonging local conflicts. In competing for approval from central authorities, local factions adopted opportunistic and rapidly shifting political stances designed to portray their opponents as reactionary conservatives—charges that had no basis in fact.