Deliberative Bureaucracy and the Making of China’s Markets

Book workshop held in November 2025

My book manuscript, Deliberative Bureaucracy and the Making of China’s Markets, offers a new interpretation of China’s economic rise—one of the most transformative development stories of our time. It challenges the conventional view that attributes the “Chinese miracle” solely to Beijing’s 1980s reforms and instead highlights endogenous institutional change that emerged under central planning.

Drawing on extensive local archival sources (1949–1984) and in-depth interviews, I show that in the southern regions that later spearheaded China’s post-reform boom—and produced globally competitive firms such as Alibaba—market practices had persisted throughout the Mao era. Nor were they confined to a marginal “second economy.” Despite political risks, provincial and local governments preserved, legitimized, and coordinated market and semi-market activities. These policies, in sharp contrast to orthodox socialist approaches elsewhere, laid the institutional foundations for the regions that became the heart of China’s entrepreneurial capitalism.

Using a subnational research design and process tracing, my work explains why some Chinese local states—but not others—adopted market-oriented policies that defied party orthodoxy. Variations in bureaucratic character, rooted in the Communist Party’s mass line and pre-Communist institutional legacies, were key. Central policy ambiguity created space for local adaptation, and deliberative bureaucracies—those that relied on internal debate, grassroots feedback, and selective experimentation—were far more likely than orthodox socialist bureaucracies to issue market-oriented policies under political constraints. Developed through pragmatic responses to local governance challenges, these practices laid the groundwork for China’s later market success.