ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the economic policies that have sustained China's economic growth and distills from them an economic model of Chinese capitalism. This model is argued to assume the forms of unique institutional social structures and a novel cultural ideology. Based on archival and policy analysis of China's economic history from 1978 to present, this chapter argues that China represents a unique variety of capitalism that distinguishes it from liberal and coordinated market economies around the world in terms of industrial relations, training, corporate governance, interfirm relations, and employee relations. This chapter then conducts topic modeling analysis on the comprehensive corpora of Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping's speeches to identify their convergence across four ideological themes: reform and economic development, domestic affairs, diplomatic strategy, and party building. These features of China's capitalist governance ideology are partially rooted in the guanxi networking culture that enables all transactions in the country. Against popular depictions of this ideology as political repression, this chapter innovates by systematically unpacking this ideology in terms of its subject matter as the world-at-large rather than politics, its function as integration rather than repression, and its cognitive structure and goals as hierarchy and stability rather than bare-faced domination.
