Book Project

In 1989, as the Berlin Wall fell, the political consensus around the world was clear: both the Communist Party of China and the Communist World were facing a terminal crisis. Yet, in the following decades, China not only averted all forms of collapse but engineered the most dramatic economic ascent in human history while defying Washington’s prominent political prescriptions: transition to liberal democracy. How?

Marketization and Party-State Transformation: How the Communist Party of China Outmaneuvered the Washington Consensus moves beyond conventional explanations to offer a groundbreaking new answer. Dr. Kezhou Xiao argues that China’s success was not a rejection of Western economic tools but a strategic outmaneuvering of its fundamental political logic. This was achieved through a profound organizational transformation of the party-state itself into a Socialist Developmental State (SDS).

This book reveals the core instrument of SDS: not the industrial policy of its capitalist counterparts, but the strategic wielding of cadre policy. Through a multi-layered framework combining historical analysis, a formal political economy model, and data-intensive empirical research, Xiao unpacks the black box of the party-state in its Reform Era. He demonstrates how political line struggles through elite dynamics translated into specific rules for selecting and managing cadres, shaping the quality of market institutions, and driving the nation's transformative socialist big push.

From Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun's high-stakes leadership politics to the career trajectories of senior technocrats, this book presents a refreshingly new framework for understanding the mechanics of Chinese statecraft and the nature of authoritarian resilience. The same framework could help explain China's current challenges, interpreting its recent economic slowdown as a direct result of Xi Jinping’s backlash against the winning formulas that powered its rise in the past decades.