Quasi-Public, Quasi-Private Trends in Emerging Market Economies: The Case of China

Abstract

In explaining why nations adopt more or less liberal forms of economy, two broad perspectives about nature of state-society relations are important. The first, liberal and neoliberal perspective, which is centered around distinction between public and private, stresses historical, empirical, and normative clarity of boundaries between state power and private, individual interests in modern liberal state.1 The second posits fluidity of state-society boundaries, complexity of interactions between public and private actors, interdependence and mutual constitution of state and market, proliferation of hybrid organizations, and other features that point to blurred boundaries between public and private as core features of modem capitalism.2 These two perspectives are not diametrically opposed, but they nevertheless represent important polarities in conceptualizing state-society relations in modem capitalist states. The liberal perspective has been highly influential in shaping broad framework within which emerging systems have been perceived; its dominance is rooted in its hegemony in western thought. It is accountable for focus on civil society, (re)emergence of autonomous spheres of social and economic activity. Moreover, recent global resurgence of neoliberal economic theory that has supported policies of privatization and reduction of state regulation of markets suggests hegemony of liberal ideas.3 However, traditional liberal framework has failed to focus on, and is not best suited to explain, a core feature of emerging economies, broadly captured in notion of quasi-public, quasi-private phenomena. While transitions have contributed to emergence of new, relatively autonomous and social forces, they intersect with state in complex ways.4 States and markets are enmeshed; they overlap and interpenetrate in ways that make it hard to draw firm boundaries between them. Hybrid and mixed property forms proliferate.5 New social and economic associations range broadly in degree to which they are self-constituted or dependent on and linked to state.6 These features make it difficult clearly to draw boundaries of state and to say where state ends and society and the market begin This article attempts to synthesize some of most important components of an alternative framework that better focuses our attention on such quasi-public, quasi-

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