Creating market socialism: Narratives and emerging economic institutions in the People's Republic of China

Since 1978, the leaders of the People's Republic of China have been transforming the economic institutions of Maoist socialism into the economic institutions of market socialism. My analysis indicates that market socialism has been a qualified success, and its practices are becoming increasingly institutionalized and legitimated in society, supported by an evolving moral order. This conclusion goes against the predictions of many China scholars, who have argued either that Chinese people do not have the right culture to develop successful market behavior, or that the weight of China's socialist institutions would drag down marketization. I argue that these two disproved predictions both ignore the roles of ordinary people and ad hoc solutions in the process of institutional transformation.; In this dissertation, these blind spots were mitigated through the use of narrative theory, which allowed me to examine the contribution of ordinary citizens and the relationship between new institutions and culture. I argue that new economic practices are shaped in part by the perceptions and participation patterns of ordinary citizens. These people negotiate practices and determine their strategies of action not by utilitarian calculation, but instead by emplotting their circumstances and choices into meaningful narratives. These narratives cannot be produced out of thin air, but instead are constructed in collective conversations with reference to a repertoire of cultural resources.; This dissertation is based on qualitative research done in 1997–8 in the city of Harbin. It examines the socialist institutions of cadre status, the market practices of private business and entrepreneurship, and the intellectual institutions of education and expertise. To see how people negotiate these practices, I interviewed them about their social mobility strategies. These strategies revealed how people experienced, analyzed, and judged economic practices and those who participated in them. This narrative approach revealed how creative and flexible people were in dealing with the new practices of market socialism. For from passively reacting, they actively synthesized narratives from their cultural repertoires in order to create a new moral order for market socialism.