ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to understand China's specific development regime through reviewing the origin of market-oriented reform and its pathway, through which a new space of accumulation has been created. The Chinese characteristics are not idiosyncratic practices resulting from an authoritarian state. The understanding of “state entrepreneurialism” has two pivotal premises: commodification and monopolization. The change in China is not a post-Keynesian shift but rather the creation of market means to expand the space of accumulation. The study of state entrepreneurialism is thus different from that of governmentality, because attention is not paid to individualization, market choices and the market itself but rather to how these choices are structurally conditioned and made. Market-oriented reform in China did not originate in an ideological shift. The policy of marketization and an open door to the global economy was adopted to create a new space of accumulation. The regime of accumulation under state socialism was based on state ownership of production factors.
