The Gradual Revolution: Economic Ideas, Organizational Trajectories and Policy Elites in Contemporary China (1979-2014)

China's monumental policies of economic reform have transformed hundreds of millions of people's lives and forever altered the configuration of the world's political economy. However, few studies have systematically traced the origin of China's reformist policy ideas that ultimately inaugurated these changes. Existing studies either rely on the great-men-making-history explanations or deem that reform policies were mere responses to innate demands from the population or the lower level of the state bureaucracy. My research finds that the second stratum of the economic bureaucracy, consisting of ministers and bureau chiefs, steered the programmatic directions of China's ongoing economic liberalization. Consequently, this group of bureaucrats' changing backgrounds can significantly explain the changing focuses of China's economic reform in the past three decades.;Concretely speaking, I find that China's economic reform evolved through three phases, each seeing a new generation of career bureaucrats taking the helm in economic policymaking. In the first decade of reform, a generation of officials who matured as provincial leaders and generalists designed the decentralized approach to economic liberalization. They understood the economy through much closer contacts with producers on the ground than their rivals--the central technocrats--were able to establish. Beginning in the early 1990s, a second cohort composed of the "sent-down generation" with managerial experience in state-owned industrial factories began to assume the center stage and recentralized the state's capacity in rationalizing the nation's industrial structures and forging national champions. Finally, the past decade has seen the ascendance of a group of bureaucrats who share completely different career trajectories and intellectual networks from those of the industrial policymakers. The core of this macroeconomics-minded group emerged from the Comprehensive Reform School in the 1980s. Members of this School matured in State think tanks and moved into finance-related bureaucracies in a concerted fashion, pushing for the financialization of economic management of the Chinese state.;As a result, while policymakers in Latin America and East Europe during the same period of liberalization were carriers of Western economic ideas, their Chinese counterparts drew policy ideas from two mediating institutions--the "organizational state" and the "social histories" of the economic bureaucrats. Drawing inspirations from sociological studies of the state and organization theories, I define "organizational state" as a bounded bureaucratic institution where organizations are major venues of socialization for state actors and inter-organizational bid for authority in policymaking captured the major struggles in the state field. "Social histories" of economic bureaucrats refer to their career trajectories, generational characteristics, and social networks; all three ways of dissecting the social backgrounds of the policymakers converge into collective understandings of an increasingly complex economy and the role of the Chinese state in a market economy. Since policymakers' careers and visions for policy innovations molded within the space of the bureaucracy, their liberalizing policies were inevitably programs of reinventing the role of the state in economic management. I ague that this fact perpetuates the statist vision of China's economic policies against the global tide of economic neoliberalism.;In order to unpack the social and organizational history of the economic bureaucrats, this dissertation assembles an array of rarely accessed information on economic policymakers in China, including interviews of both retired and incumbent economic officials, their personal memoirs and journal articles, internal policy proposals submitted to the leadership, and the career histories of officials. I also use a mixed method approach that combines qualitative analysis of documents and interviews with sequence and network analysis to illuminate the impact of the career trajectories of economic officials.;Through delineating biographical, generational, and organizational mechanisms of policy learning and innovation, my dissertation provides an alternative explanation to the commonly acclaimed gradualist character of China's economic reform. I argue that Chinese economic reform is gradual because policymakers produced and transformed their economic ideas in a relatively autonomous state and a closed institution of elite turnover. These institutions allow the pace of social learning, generational adaptation, and organizational evolution to dictate the speed of economic liberalization. By detailing the Chinese case, this dissertation also attempts to illustrate a sociological theory of authoritarian political economy by drawing our attention to the organizational logic of elite production. Besides general societal goods and clientelist interests, I argue that historically grounded organizational identities can also serve as the major stake of state regulations. As authoritarian polities usually do not seek regularized input from the larger society, I argue that the production of state elites and their immediate institutional environment will be highly prominent in shaping how and what kinds of policies will be advanced.