Uses the framework of 'market in state', to argue that the Chinese economy is state-centered, dominated by political principles over economic principles.

This is a study of peasant-state relations and village politics as they have evolved in response to the state's attempts to control the division of the harvest and extract the state-defined surplus. To provide the reader with a clearer sense of the evolution of peasant-state relations over almost a forty-year period and to highlight the dramatic changes that have taken place since 1978,1 have divided my analysis into two parts: Chapters 2 through 7 are on Maoist China, and chapters 8 and 9 are on post-Mao China. The first part examines the state's grain policies and patterns of local politics that emerged during the highly collectivized Maoist period, when the state closed free grain markets and established the system of unified purchase and sales (tonggou tongxiao). The second part describes the new methods for the production and division of the harvest after 1978, when the government decollectivized agriculture and abolished its unified procurement program.

Is corruption an inevitable part of the transition to a free-market economy? Yan Sun here examines the ways in which market reforms in the People's Republic of China have shaped corruption since 1978 and how corruption has in turn shaped those reforms. She suggests that recent corruption is largely a byproduct of post-Mao reforms, spurred by the economic incentives and structural opportunities in the emerging marketplace. Sun finds that the steady retreat of the state has both increased mechanisms for cadre misconduct and reduced disincentives against it. Chinese disciplinary offices, law enforcement agencies, and legal professionals compile and publish annual casebooks of economic crimes. The cases, processed in the Chinese penal system, represent offenders from party-state agencies at central and local levels as well as state firms of varying sizes and types of ownership. Sun uses these casebooks to illuminate the extent and forms of corruption in the People's Republic of China. Unintended and informal mechanisms arising from corruption may, she finds, take on a life of their own and undermine the central state's ability to implement its developmental policies, discipline its staff, enforce its regulatory infrastructure, and fundamentally transform the economy.

Charts the advance of the state in contemporary China through an analysis of state-market relations in the reform era.

The short essays in this volume, contributed by leading experts on Chinese economic policy, provide crisp and insightful analyses of the Chinese state's approach toward markets, the role of key actors and institutions, the evolving nature of industrial policy and the effectiveness of China’s international commitments to constrain such practices, and a preview of the likely contents and significance of China’s 13th Five-Year Plan.

In this major new study, Margherita Zanasi argues that basic notions of a free market economy emerged in China a century and half earlier than in Europe. In response to the commercial revolutions of the late 1500s, Chinese intellectuals and officials called for the end of state intervention in the market, recognizing its power to self-regulate. They also noted the elasticity of domestic demand and production, arguing in favour of ending long-standing rules against luxury consumption, an idea that emerged in Europe in the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. Zanasi challenges Eurocentric theories of economic modernization as well as the assumption that European Enlightenment thought was unique in its ability to produce innovative economic ideas. She instead establishes a direct connection between observations of local economic conditions and the formulation of new theories, revealing the unexpected flexibility of the Confucian tradition and its accommodation of seemingly unorthodox ideas.

This is the story of how the women's movement in China took advantage of the government's official efforts to position women in the rural economic reforms of the 1980s to achieve a significant and ever-increasing role in China's developing turn toward a market economy, which was not the state's intent.