The emergence of the entrepreneurial state in contemporary China

Abstract As market reform has progressed in China, state bureaux have adapted and become entrepreneurial. This contradicts expectations that states will either simply retreat in the face of encroaching markets to play a minimal role in the economy, or obstruct market‐oriented change through bureaucratic conservatism or rent‐seeking. This paper describes the state entrepreneurialism that has appeared in the Chinese city of Tianjin in the early 1990s and explains its emergence as the consequence of both market‐induced structural transformation and the resultant changing incentives and demands on officials. It proposes the ‘entrepreneurial state’ as a model of state adaptation to marketization and assesses its implications for both our conception of the developmental state and for anticipation of rent‐seeking and resistance to market reform.