Chapter 9: China and State Dominance

The dominance of the state is a defining feature of modern China. The Chinese state is the biggest surviving totalitarian state in the twenty-first century where almost nothing should exist outside state control. It is no wonder that SBLR in the country represent a good example of the state-dominance mode.

The presence of a dominant state in China is not supported by some of its institutional factors. Yet, the impact of the two institutional factors that do foster this outcome is extremely powerful. As Table 9.1 reveals, urbanization in the first half of the 1960s included less than one fifth of the population. The rapid industrialization and urbanization of China were not possible without massive state intervention. Such intervention is matching the second relevant institutional factor that boosted state dominance, communist rule. Despite substantial changes in the economic system, the Communist Party of China is still successfully and profoundly controlling the whole country and society. The party-dominated state was and still is leading the industrial development process that transformed the country in few decades into a world industrial power. In comparison to the previous cases, China was by far the last industrializer and the role of the state in such process is comparable only to Russia, with the exception that, unlike China, pre-Communist Tzarist Russia was partly industrialized and the Communist Party rule seized to exist in Russia since the early 1990s.