Deliberative Bureaucracy and Market Development: The Rise of Competing Local Political-Economic Orders in Maoist China, 1949–1978

My book project, Deliberative Bureaucracy and Market Development: The Rise of Competing Local Political-Economic Orders in Maoist China, 1949-1978, explores the origins of the widening prosperity gap between northern and southern China that opened up at the onset of the market reform in 1978. Existing theories often attribute successful market transition to the revitalization of deep-seated pre-Communist commercial norms and networks or alternatively, to recent policies of economic liberalization and political decentralization. In contrast, I make the argument that even at the height of Maoist Communism and Leninist planning, what I call local embedded deliberative governance helped preserve markets and foster market institutions in support of local collective goods.

I trace the evolution of local market institutions driven by local welfare-enhancing political institutions in two carefully selected Chinese provinces along the eastern coastal region following a most similar system design. Local governments kept detailed records such as correspondence between local state bureaus and individual firms and residents, internal meeting minutes, and field investigation reports. Drawing on more than 10,000 original county-level archival documents (1949-1980s) collected during two years of fieldwork as well as more than 60 in-depth field interviews, I reveal novel findings of persistent substantial variations in market development driven by distinct local economic policies throughout the pre-reform era.

I find that competing components of Maoist governance techniques created subnational variation in state policies and actions during the socialist planned era. In particular, local states practicing what I call embedded deliberative governance that stresses deep state-embeddedness, bootstrapping, and bottom-up civic participation are more inclined to and capable of implementing market-oriented approaches to meet immediate governance challenges, subsequently fostering local market development. By contrast, regions where local states govern through the rhetoric of class struggle and top-down mass campaigns are more likely to adopt radical anti-market policies to meet the same governance challenges, despite the persistent failures and unpopularity of such policies.