Markets with Bureaucratic Characteristics

This book opens the black box of bureaucracy to reveal the agency of the men and women who designed and redesigned Chinese economic policy in the post-Mao era. A fascinating story that tells us something new about China’s rise, as well as the role of technocrats in economic development. -- Sarah Babb, author of <i>Managing Mexico: Economists from Nationalism to Neoliberalism</i> It's often too easy to treat the state as a solid and coherent behemoth. Yingyao Wang’s book opens up the black box of the Chinese bureaucracy and provides a wonderful analytic narrative of how organizations and individuals shape each other. Instead of seeing only a homogeneous mass of party cadres, we can now understand the career, geographical, and generational diversity behind the shifting Chinese policy paradigms. -- Miguel A. Centeno, coeditor of <i>State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain: The Neoliberal State and Beyond</i> A major contribution to our knowledge of economic policymaking in post-Mao China, this book offers a rare look into the bureaucratic inner workings of the technocrats in major industrial and financial arenas. Wang uses a distinctive sociological lens to make sense of the social world in which those technocrats’ career trajectories intersect, social networks are formed and reconfigured and, in so doing, the Chinese state evolves and is remade. -- Xueguang Zhou, author of <i>The Logic of Governance in China: An Organizational Approach</i>