2024-07-16 17:54:45
go through Yingyao Wang*
The technocratic project, which once captured the political imagination with its potential to manage society and an economy that might be managed with reason and scientific knowledge, now seems to be in decisive decline. Democracy has reasserted itself as a dominant value, and the recent populist attacks on expertise have sounded the death knell for technocracy. If anything, technocrats have retreated to only a few administrative enclaves, such as Central Bank or budgets, etc., and is no longer a strong political force.
China is a country where the technocratic project remains alive and well, but where exploration and theorizing are also severely lacking. Economic policymaking in China has been dominated by central government bureaucrats, many of whom hold graduate degrees, most likely in engineering or economics. Their policy arguments and rationales are based on a focus on national economic growth, macroeconomic stability, and unapologetic market expansion. The dominance of the bureaucracy is possible largely because of the absence of social forces that have traditionally influenced economic policymaking. China’s private entrepreneurial class has historically been weak and remains so; the labor force is subsumed into the patriarchal state; and local interests occasionally assert themselves but are essentially part of an increasingly centralized politics. Instead, bureaucratic power is firmly attached to an autonomous and relatively capable state, which enables ministers and directors to observe the economy from their own vantage point.
Spotlight on bureaucracy: Opening up the black box of Chinese government
Existing literature tends to obscure the central role of bureaucrats and technocrats in guiding the direction of national development. Two traditional understandings shape the narrative of China’s economic reform. The first is the strongman theory, which is, following all, too tempting to abandon when speculating on the distribution of decision-making in an authoritarian context. This view emphasizes the importance of political charisma and leadership will in guiding China’s economic policies, while marginalizing the bureaucracy. In fact, the bureaucracy is One of the oldest buildings in the world, it is often considered to be WeberianThe second view is that the driving force behind China’s economic reform is Bottom-up innovation and local experimentationdescribed as “crossing the river by feeling the stones.” Neither narrative leaves room for recognizing or theorizing the power of mid-level bureaucrats in the polity. Formulate The implementation by various ministries and bureaus remains largely a black box.
Economic Thought with Chinese Characteristics
my book, A bureaucratic market (Columbia University Press, 2024) reveals the workings of bureaucratic power in China’s economic policy. It offers new insights into technocracy, the developmental state, and globalization. China’s economic bureaucracy occupies a unique position in the field of economic policy in world history, combining known policy practices and economic ideas with Chinese characteristics. Like Vietnam, China is one of the few countries that allowed a planned economy bureaucracy to handle market transitions. The planners’ mindset has had a profound impact on today’s economic decision-making and has evolved into a variety of newer systems thinking preferences. Market reforms, industrialization, and development can also be “top-down designed” to ensure systematic and sequential rationality.
Unlike Latin America, which was subject to structural adjustment programs and other neoliberal coercion, Chinese officials voluntarily sought out fragments of global economic ideas and localized them to support a state-led, market-oriented national project. This localization, at its core, combined market efficiency formulas with national solutions, ensuring that the Chinese government thrived, rather than withered, in the market-building process.For example, Milton Friedman’s anti-inflation economics was incorporated into state-building projects aimed at strengthening macroeconomic control; concepts of shareholder value and corporate control were applied to modernizing state ownership, managing state assets, and nurturing China’s financial markets; and economies of scale and market integration were used to legitimize Chinese-style groupization. Chinese officials selectively absorb foreign ideas from around the world, filtering them through their own professional experience, ambitions, and interests..
Similar to many policy paradigms
Another strength of the book is that it shows that the bureaucratic project of economic policy is not static. The incoherence of the bureaucracy is essentially the basis for the ambiguity and difficulty in summarizing the so-called Chinese model. This book reveals The inheritance, competition and contradiction of China’s economic policy paradigm. Ironically, in China, state autonomy also condones the expansion of the bureaucratic state, leading to internal divisions and competition. Developmental States in Japan and South Korea, Far from promoting corporate cohesion, Chinese bureaucrats’ pursuit of national causes has exaggerated collective ambition and intra-bureaucratic competition. Each bureaucratic type, formed by generations, social connections, and career trajectories, competes with one another to see whose diagnosis and prescription for the Chinese economy is correct. This reasoning is far from a trivial technical debate; its successful implementation brings career prospects and executive power to those who advance it.
New policy ideas are combined with resource mobilization, organizational support, and constituency building to develop into Peter Hall calls the policy paradigmThese are frameworks of ideas and standards that dictate not only policy goals and the means that can be used to achieve them, but also the nature of the problems that policies are meant to address. China’s policy changes remain at the paradigm level. This book, therefore, offers new explanations that challenge the belief that China dodged shock therapy. China may have avoided the path taken by Russia and Eastern Europe, but this does not mean that China’s market reforms have been entirely incremental and ad hoc, lacking any systematic approach. If the river metaphor still applies, a more apt metaphor to draw from this book is that paradigm policy movements create the current that allows boats to flow downstream as they cross the river. Rather than attributing the rise of new policy paradigms to coercion, global policy fads, or structural pressures in the economy, this book argues that policy movements are fundamentally regarding policy and how they are structured. This book proves their inherent connection with bureaucracy, and Just like the country.
Financialization or industrial competitiveness: an example
A striking example of policy contradiction is the coexistence of financialization and industrial competitiveness. Both models were developed by bureaucratic forces in different parts of the state that matured at different times and used different parts of the state to exert influence. The rise of financial thinking stemmed from the fusion of the central bank’s PBC Graduate School and the Comprehensive Reform Institute, which was composed of researchers from national think tanks. This intellectual alliance eventually developed into an independent bureaucratic force that reshaped China’s public finances according to the needs of asset management, debt-driven development, and financial market efficiency.
In parallel with the financialization of the state, a new way of defining economic success emerged, one centered around manufacturing competitiveness and indigenous innovation. Techno-industrial thinking initially developed on the margins of the state, in the shadow of the comparative advantage approach to industrial development. Capabilities and voices supporting manufacturing competitiveness were initially scattered across the country; it was only later, in the early 2000s, that they coalesced and eventually seized upon a platform—the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), established in 2008 to advance the competitiveness agenda. I noted that it was the ministers and bureau chiefs of MIIT who initiated the now well-known Made in China 2025attempting to establish the policy position of young institutions in the competitive field of economic policy making in a Bourdieusian way. In essence, this bureaucratic interpretation reveals There are two unexpected findings regarding China’s industrial policy: first, despite the perceived government’s ability, China did not develop a systematic technology industrial policy until the early 2010s, driven by bureaucratic interests and entrepreneurial spirit; second, contrary to conventional wisdom, Made in China 2025 It must be a strategic plan from the top leadership, which is the product of departmental or even bureau-level planning and internal competition within the bureaucracy..
In a similar analytical spirit, Book Survey It delves into the origins and development of alternative policy paradigms and situates them within the development of the state at the intersection of ideological, professional, and institutional transformations. It shows that policy movements associated with the rise of macroeconomic control, the creation of Chinese “national champions,” and the beginnings of economic reform itself must be analyzed in the context of how Chinese bureaucrats and technocrats interpreted and responded to changing economic conditions and global opportunities.
Looking ahead
With the rise of populism and the return of great power competition, it is once once more interesting to revisit the relationship between bureaucracy and political charisma. While charismatic leaders and populist movements have captured much of our attention, how the administrative state responds to them remains understudied. The bureaucratic state has evolved, fueled by its own politics and entrepreneurial spirit, and has withstood the test of various political movements and determined leaders. As long as there are groups committed to maintaining control of the commanding heights of the state and cognitive authority that is distinct from a mere political power grab, there is reason to believe that the administrative state will continue to develop on its own while absorbing filtered inputs from outside forces. In a geopolitically insecure world, despite populists’ distrust of the technocratic state, investment in such authority is likely to persist.
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* Yingyao Wang Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. His current research interests include industrial transfer in Asia, China’s world knowledge structure, corruption, and the relationship between finance and the frontier of capitalism.
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