INFORMALITY · Re-Imagining Informality: Theorizing Informal Entrepreneurship and Economic Change in Transition Era China (1970s–1980s)

Re-Imagining Informality: Theorizing Informal Entrepreneurship and Economic Change in Transition Era China (1970s–1980s)

This project intervenes in a central debate regarding the fundamental character of China's economic transformation. For decades, the dominant narrative has credited China’s economic rise to a powerful, pragmatic developmental state that orchestrated a gradual and controlled transition to market capitalism. This state-centric view suggests that markets were created from above during the Reform Era (post-1978). However, this project challenges that perspective by investigating the ‘bottom-up’ forces of the informal economy. It advances the argument that the true roots of China’s private economic dynamism run far deeper than previously assumed, beginning not in the Reform Era but during the Maoist period itself. The primary motivation behind this research was to explain a historical paradox: how a vibrant market economy re-emerged within a totalitarian system explicitly designed to eliminate it. By focusing on the vast ‘parallel economy’ that developed when the state attempted to subordinate all economic life to a central plan, the project aimed to reveal how the Maoist state inadvertently created an incubator for a particularly tenacious form of capitalism. To resolve this paradox, the project pursued three specific research objectives. First, it sought to map the structure of informal networks to understand how capital, labor, and knowledge circulated outside official channels. Second, the project aimed to discover and categorize the collusive practices—the hidden partnerships between state officials and private actors—that allowed these activities to survive in a hostile environment. Third, the project analyzed the enforcement patterns of local administrators to understand the ‘subtle insurrection’ within the bureaucracy, where local implementation increasingly diverged from central directives. The project concluded that the foundations of China's market economy were built incrementally through the actions of informal entrepreneurs and locally embedded administrators during the Maoist period, well before the post-1978 reform era. Three principal findings emerged. First, networks of state and non-state actors created a functioning parallel economy that reallocated capital, labor, and knowledge outside the state plan. Second, collusive relations between entrepreneurs and state enterprise managers were structurally embedded in the socialist system rather than episodic or marginal. Third, local administrators systematically under-enforced central directives, creating institutional space for market activity to persist and expand. These findings revise prevailing accounts of China's economic transition and offer new theoretical frameworks for understanding informal entrepreneurship in hostile institutional environments.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union