Neopatrimonial politics is often deemed incompatible with high economic growth, as officials usurp public resources for personal gain. China, however, has managed to achieve high growth despite the presence of neopatrimonial practices. This article examines the Chinese bureaucracy as a new generation of leaders takes the helm, uncovering the sources of its neopatrimonial characteristics during the transition from a socialist regime to a market-based economy, and attributing its economic success to the specific nature of its rent extractions. China's development offers lessons for other countries with neopatrimonial politics that seek alternative agendas to growth.

Development lessons from China: a political-economic perspective on how neopatrimonial states may achieve high economic growth

From a national strategic development perspective, statism and state administrative apparatus may be functional and thus desirable in the course of development of some nation-states. Continual monitoring of the development trajectory, however, is necessary to ensure that the respective state is prepared to address a critical question as raised by Nobel Laureate Prof. Joseph Stiglitz: development for what? Basing on literature review and field interview, this paper aims to underscore the basic problems that negatively affect China’s effort to enhance substantive rationality in its present course of development. Singled out are the logic of administration and state cadres’ dominant logic that have a direct bearing on the search for a substantively rational administrative state. Policy and research implications are discussed.

In Search of a Rationalized Chinese Administrative State

China’s economic dynamism. Chinese flexibility at the territorial level is certainly influenced by the inheritance of a very incomplete urbanisation and statesocialist economy, and by the present day local state corporatism, which combines public intervention with market-oriented growth.’ However, these positive and dynamic aspects of decentralisation coexist with growing inequalities, corruption, criminalisation and insecurity at the local levels, all tendencies which have an important impact on everyday life and the perceptions of rural as well as urban Chinese.

Guilhem Fabre

Papers

Decentralisation, Corruption and Criminalisation: China in Comparative Perspective