China's Decentralized and Inegalitarian Developmental State

Abstract

This article investigates China's market reforms and rapid economic development from the late 1970s. The following questions are posed: (1) How did the Chinese ‘peasant revolution’ and the rural policies and institutions of Mao China influence the market reforms and subsequent economic development? (2) How does China's development after the market reforms relate to Marxist and Polanyian notions of proletarization and commodification of land and labour as preconditions of capitalist development? (3) To what extent and why does China's development after the market reforms diverge from East Asian growth with equity? (4) How does China's ‘decentralized developmental state’ influence its growth model and distribution? (5) The present Chinese government tries to promote greater equality and more domestic consumption. Is this a Polanyian ‘double movement’ in response to commodification of land and labour? How likely are these policies to succeed? These questions are addressed through historical–comparative analyses with comparisons of long-term rural dynamics of Mao China and the former Soviet Union. China after the market reforms is compared with England during its transition to agrarian capitalism and industrial capitalism from the sixteenth century through the early nineteenth century and with Taiwan and South Korea from the late 1940s until the 1980s.

Keywords:

• China
• political economy
• developmental state
• distribution
• class relations

Notes

¹The number was assessed at 45 millions by Dikötter (2010), but the empirical evidence for his estimate is weak. See Gráda (2011, pp. 195–197).

²Arrighi related accumulation without dispossession in China and East Asia to a labour-intensive ‘industrious revolution’ with roots back to the early-modern period as well as to egalitarian land reforms.

³On this point, I differ from Wu (2010, pp. 59–61), who wrote about ‘post-Speenhamland citizenship’ after the Chinese market reforms.

⁴Before 1998, children inherited their mother's hukou, and thereafter they could inherit the hukou of either of their parents. When both parents have a rural hukou, their children will still be deprived of urban hukou rights.

⁵This figure is not directly comparable with the figures for hourly wages of production workers within manufacturing that were cited earlier.

⁶While Polanyi discussed the rise of the liberal market economy with reference to England, he analysed double-movement responses across Europe. Thus, there is no singular ‘paradigmatic country case’ to draw on from this part of his analysis.

⁷In the words of Polanyi (1957), ‘[t]he Ten Hours Bill of 1847, which Karl Marx hailed as the first victory of socialism was the work of enlightened reactionaries’ (p. 174).