by Yingyao Wang*

The technocratic project, which once captured political imagination with its potential to manage society and the economy through rationality and scientific knowledge, seems to be in decisive decline. Democracy has reasserted its dominant value, and recent populist attacks on expertise have sounded a death knell for technocraticism. If anything, the technocrats have retreated to only a few administrative enclaves, such as central banking or budgeting, for instance, and are no longer a potent political force.
China stands out as a country where the technocratic project remains alive, viable, but also severely underexplored and undertheorized. In China, the formulation of economic policy has been dominated by central government bureaucrats, many of whom boast their graduate degrees, and most likely in engineering or economics. Their policy arguments and justifications are based on rationalities focused on national economic growth, macroeconomic stability, and unapologetically, market expansion. The dominance of bureaucrats is possible importantly due to the absence of social forces that traditionally influence economic policymaking. The private business class in China has been historically weak and remains so; labor is co-opted into the paternalist state; local interests are occasionally assertive but essentially part of an increasingly centralized polity. In their places, bureaucrats’ power is securely attached to an autonomous, and comparatively speaking, high-capacity state, allowing ministers and bureau chiefs to observe the economy from their own vantage points on the commanding height.

Zeroing In on Bureaucrats: Opening the Black Box of the Chinese State

The centrality of bureaucrats and technocrats in steering the country’s development direction is often obscured in the existing literature. Two conventional understandings shape the narrative of China’s economic reform. The first is the strong-man argument, which is, after all, too tempting to forgo when it comes to speculating about the allocation of decisions in an authoritarian context. This view foregrounds political charisma and leadership wills in directing China’s economic policy, marginalizing the bureaucracy, which, in fact, is one of the world’s oldest and is often aspired to be Weberian. The second view holds that China’s economic reform has been driven by bottom-up innovation and local experiments, famously described as “feeling for the stone while crossing the river.” Neither narrative leaves space for recognizing or theorizing the middle-level bureaucratic power in the polity. How economic policy is formulated (vs implemented) in the ministries, departments, and bureaus remains largely a black box.

Economic Ideas with Chinese Characteristics

My book, Markets with Bureaucratic Characteristic (Columbia University Press, 2024), deciphers the operation of bureaucratic power in economic policy in China. It provides new insights into technocracy, developmental state, and globalization. The Chinese economic bureaucracy occupies a unique position in the world-historical spectrum of economic policies, combining known policy practices and economic thinking with Chinese characteristics. Along with Vietnam, China is among the few countries that allowed a bureaucratic machinery from a planned economy to handle market transitions. The planner’s mindset casts a long shadow on economic policymaking today and has evolved into various updated preferences for systemic thinking. Market reform, industrialization, and development can be equally “top-designed” to ensure systemic and sequential rationality.
Unlike Latin America, which was subject to structural adjustment programs and other neoliberal coercion, Chinese bureaucrats have voluntarily sought out pieces of global economic ideas and localized them to support the national project of state-led marketization. At the heart of this indigenization is the combination of market efficiency formulas with state-based solutions, ensuring that the Chinese state is rejuvenated, not diminished, in the process of market building. For instance, Milton Friedman’s anti-inflation economics was integrated into a state-building project aimed at strengthening macroeconomic control. Concepts of shareholder value and corporate control were adapted to modernize state ownership, manage state assets, and cultivate China’s financial markets. Additionally, the economy of scale and market integration were used to legitimize Chinese-style conglomeration. Chinese bureaucrats selectively absorb foreign ideas from different parts of the world, filtering them through the lens of their own career experiences, aspirations, and interests.

Seeing Like Many Policy Paradigms

Another highlight of the book is its demonstration that the bureaucratic project of economic policy is not monolithic. Bureaucratic incoherence essentially underpins the ambiguity and difficulty associated with summarizing the so-called China Model. The book exposes the succession, competing parallels, and contradictions in China’s economic policy paradigms. Ironically, in the Chinese case, state autonomy also indulges the swelling of the bureaucratic state, leading to internal divisions and competitions. Unlike the Japanese and Korean developmental states, Chinese bureaucrats’ orientation towards a career in the state, instead of fostering corporate coherence, exaggerates a collective expression of careerism and intra-bureaucratic competition. Each bureaucratic type, formed based on the constellations of generations, social networks, and career trajectories, vies with others on whose diagnosis and, consequently, prescription of the Chinese economy is correct. Such reasoning is far from petty technical debates; its successful execution brings career prospects and executive power to those who advance it.
New policy ideas, in conjunction with resource mobilization, organizational support, and constituency building, developed into what Peter Hall would call policy paradigms. These are the frameworks of ideas and standards that specify not only the goals of policy and the instruments that can be used to attain them but also the very nature of the problems they are meant to address. It is at the level of paradigms that China’s policy changes have rested. Therefore, this book advances new interpretations that challenge the belief that China has dodged shock therapy. China may have avoided the path taken by Russia and Eastern European countries, but this does not mean that Chinese market reform was entirely incremental and ad hoc, lacking any systemic approach. To the extent the river metaphor still holds, a more suitable one derived from this book is that paradigmatic policy movements created currents that carried the boats while crossing the river. Instead of attributing the rise of new policy paradigms to coercion, global policy fads, or structural pressures in the economy, this book demonstrates their intrinsic association with bureaucratic politics and the expected plurality of the project of seeing like the state.

Financializaton or Industrial Competitiveness: An Example 

One prominent example of policy contradiction concerns the coexistence of financialization and industrial competitiveness. Both paradigms were developed by bureaucratic forces budding in different parts of the state, maturing in different periods, and seizing different arms of the state to assert influence. The rise of financial thinking resulted from the confluence of the central bank’s Wudaokou graduate school and the Comprehensive Reform School, constituted by state think tank researchers. This intellectual union eventually became a bureaucratic force of its own, reshaping China’s public finance based on the needs for asset management, debt-driven development, and financial market efficiency.

In parallel to the financialization of the state, a new way of defining economic success, revolving around manufacturing competitiveness and indigenous innovation, also emerged. Techno-industrial thinking initially developed at the margins of the state under the shadow of the comparative advantage approach to industrial development. Capabilities and voices sympathetic to manufacturing competitiveness were at first scattered around the state; only later, in the early 2000s, did they coalesce and eventually seize a platform—the new Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), established in 2008, for advancing the competitiveness agenda. I show that it was the ministers and bureau leaders of the MIIT who initiated the now widely known Made in China 2025, with a Bourdieusian attempt to establish the young agency’s policy niche in the competitive field of economic policymaking. Essentially, this bureaucratic explanation reveals two unexpected findings about China’s industrial policy: first, despite the presumed state capacity, China didn’t have a systemic techno-industrial policy until the early 2010s when there was bureaucratic interest and entrepreneurship advocating for it; second, contrary to the conventional belief that Made in China 2025 must be a strategic plan from the top leadership, it was a product of ministry- or even bureau-level programs and intra-bureaucratic rivalry.
In a similarly analytical spirit, the book probes into the origin and development of other policy paradigms and situates them in the evolution of the state at the intersection of shifting ideas, careers, and institutions. It demonstrates that policy movements associated with the rise of macroeconomic control (hongguan tiaokong), building China’s “national champions,” and the very beginning of economic reform itself, for instance, must be analyzed in the context of how Chinese bureaucrats and technocrats interpreted and responded to shifting economic conditions and global opportunities.

Looking Ahead

With the rise of populism and the return of great power rivalry, it is once again an interesting moment to reexamine the relationship between bureaucracy and political charisma. While charismatic leaders and populist movements have captured much of our attention, how administrative states have responded to them remains understudied. The evolution of bureaucratic states, driven by their own dynamics of politics and entrepreneurship, has weathered various political movements and strong-willed leaders. As long as there are groups vested in maintaining control over the state’s commanding heights and an epistemic authority distinct from mere political power-grabbing, there is reason to believe that the administrative state will continue to evolve on its own, while incorporating filtered input from external forces. In a world of geopolitical insecurity, investments in this authority are likely to persist despite populist distrust of the technocratic state.
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* Yingyao Wang is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. Her current research interests include industrial relocation in Asia, China’s knowledge structure of the world, and the relationship between corruption, finance, and capitalist frontiers.

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