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State-Building as Market-Building in China*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 May 2007

Junmin Wang
Affiliation:
New York University, Department of Sociology, New York, USA [[email protected]]
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Abstract

By examining the history of the development of the tobacco industry, a key state industrial sector in China's reform era, this article shows how market-building processes and state-building processes have produced and reproduced each other in economic transitions from planned toward market economies. First, the market competition between state-owned tobacco firms and non-state tobacco firms in the early 1980s resulted in the establishment of a vertical bureaucracy, through a statemonopoly institution. Second, new market dynamics resulted in the transfer of monopoly power from the central government to the local governments. During this process the horizontal bureaucracies governing the tobacco industry in localities were driven into market competitors, while the vertical bureaucracy was greatly undermined. The evidence from the Chinese tobacco industry shows that the project of market-building for postcommunist countries is not a unilateral process. To obtain a complete understanding of transitional economies of postcommunist countries, I suggest that the key is the interaction between state-building and market-building, with a focus on how the specific market dynamics have rebuilt the state structures.

Avec pour champ d'étude, l'histoire de l'industrie du tabac en Chine, l'auteur montre comment des processus marchands et des processus étatiques ont eu une histoire mêlée. Ils ont pu s'entretenir mutuellement pendant la période de transition de l'économie planifiée vers l'économie de marché. Au début des années 80, la concurrence entre manufactures étatiques de tabac et manufactures privées a conduit à la création d'un monopole d'État. Peu après sa segmentation décentralisée a généré une concurrence commerciale entre bureaucraties régionales, échappant au contrôle centralisé. Dans les sociétés post-communistes, le mouvement vers le marché n'est pas un processus linéaire et pour vraiment comprendre la transition, il faut étudier l'interaction entre État et marché en se demandant comment les dynamiques du marché façonnent à neuf les structures étatiques.

Am Beispiel der chinesischen Tabakindustrie zeigt der Autor auf, inwiefern Handelsprozesse und staatliche Eingriffe eine gemeinsame Geschichte haben. Sie haben sich während dem Übergang zu einer Marktwirtschaft gegenseitig unterstützt. Zu Beginn der 80er Jahre hat das Nebeneinander von staatlichen und privaten Tabakmanufakturen zur Schaffung eines staatlichen Monopols geführt. Kurze Zeit darauf hat die Dezentralisierung zur Konkurrenz regionaler Verwaltungsapparate beigetragen, die der Zentralverwaltung entglitten. In postkommunistischen Gesellschaften ist der Übergang zur Marktwirtschaft nicht linear. Es ist deshalb notwendig, das Zusammenspiel zwischen Staat und Markt zu untersuchen und sich zu fragen, wie die Marktdynamik die staatlichen Strukturen neu gestaltet.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 2006

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References

* This study, as part of my dissertation work, is supported by an NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant of the United States in 2005. I sincerely thank Raymond B. Anderson for his extensive and helpful editorial comments on this paper. I also thank Wang Jiayun and Liang Yueyou for supplying numerous official documents and helping me throughout the data-collecting process.