ABSTRACT
One of the outstanding features of the Chinese transition from plan to market is the coincidence of widening regional disparities with an astounding regional diversity of institutions and policies. The gradualist strategy of crossing the river by groping the stones was a policy that left much leeway for regional experiments, which in later stages contributed to the evolving knowledge base for defining national strategies. In the following, I would like to analyse this aspect of Chinese transition through a particular theoretical lens which presents a blend of recent approaches in economics and political science. I posit that the diversity of regional patterns of transition is the result of the interaction between economic development and political constraints, with the latter being and becoming partly endogenous to the process of change. With ‘political constraints’ I refer to constraints on economic policies which result from autonomous processes in the political system, and which are normally taken as exogenous in economic analysis, such as, for example, the constitution of a country or the electoral system.
