ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a comparative analytical framework to understand the dynamics of economic transformation and its impacts on the political regime by focusing on the type and nature of the dominant coalition and the role of the state in transition process. It examines the Chinese case as a benchmark. The chapter offers an in-depth examination of the Vietnamese and North Korean cases. A dominant coalition is defined as a loose social collective aligning the common political and/or economic interests of powerful individuals and groups that include the ruling political elites. The nature of a dominant coalition as well as state capacity and behaviour plays a vital role in shaping the dynamics of economic and political transition in Asian authoritarian countries. Fence-breaking was rather quite common in many centrally planned economies including pre-reform China and the former Soviet bloc countries. The North Korean path of post-communist transition is in stark contrast to Vietnam and China.
