3 - China and Sectoral Variation

Summary

The Strategic Value Framework explicates the dominant sectoral patterns of market governance in China today. Historical process tracing from sectoral origins of labor-intensive textiles and capital-intensive telecommunication in this chapter shows how Chinese state leaders intersubjectively respond to objective economic and political pressures. The perceived strategic value of national security and national technology base took root during foreign interventions and internal upheavals from the Qing dynasty to Chinese Communism and the 1978 Open Door Policy and beyond. The joined imperatives interacting with sectoral structures and organization of institutions shape the central state coordination of predominately state-owned and state controlled economic actors of the centralized governance of strategic sectors with application for national security and contribution to the national technology base, represented by telecommunications. Contrary to open economy politics, this is reenforced after China joins the World Trade Organization and enhances authoritarianism under Xi Jinping. The decentralized governance and private governance characterized by market coordination by local governments and nonstate actors and variegated property rights arrangements of nonstrategic sectors, such as textiles, reveal the limits of regime type and state capitalism explanations. These dominant sectoral patterns have given rise to Chinese-style bifurcated capitalism shaped by techno-security developmentalism in China today.