With the end of the Cultural Revolution and the downfall of the Gang of Four in 1976, China entered the “Golden Age” of reform, which ended tragically within a decade in 1989. Deng’s Southern Tour launched economic reforms without its political counterpart, and created huge interest groups that have benefited from the authoritarian system, further hindering political reform. The Initiative for Building Consensus on Reform advocated comprehensive constitutional reforms to be taken for China to return to healthy economic development. Without political reform that makes the ruler accountable to the ruled, no matter how much freedom, wealth or half-baked rule of law enjoyed by the ruled, it can be taken away from them overnight, as the zero-Covid policy showed in 2020– 22.

Chapter 3 starts the chronological review by looking at the role of law during the Early Reform Era (1978–1989). In this era, the Party-state vested economic decision-making authorities with its local governments, giving them a relatively free rein to experiment with and administer economic activity by limiting central law-making. The chapter tracks how such political–economic relations were bolstered by the Party-state’s choices with respect to the use of law. It also shows how, as the era progressed, the law was used to carve out and legitimize politically palatable forms of market activity.

Chapter 1 introduces the main theme of the book, that is, challenging the conventional wisdom that the existing WTO rules are inadequate to address China’s state capitalism and demonstrating that China’s WTO-plus obligations, coupled with the general rules on subsidies, do provide ways to address the problem. It also provides summaries of the chapters to explain the structure of the arguments in the book.

In this chapter, I examine the evolution of US democracy aid in Egypt through the eyes of the diplomats, practitioners, and bureaucrats engaged with such efforts in Egypt. I focus on the practical construction of democracy aid on the ground and the struggles undertaken by different actors to implement aid programs in an authoritarian state. I examine how ideas, interests, and institutions engaged in such aid evolved since 1990s to shape a kind of reform more attuned to the commercial and economic interests of the US and Egyptian governments rather than those of citizens in the country. In the first section, I focus on the nature of authoritarianism in Egypt, tracing its origins since the Nasser era to describe how power has since been exercised and maintained. In the second section, I examine how US democracy aid evolved in Egypt, focusing on the debates and discussions at the inception of USAID’s programs.

December 1978 was a political, economic and social turning point for China. As the balance of power within the top leadership shifted, a search for new policies began that deepened into what came to be called “reform and opening” and culminated decades later in a multistranded transition to a market-based economy. This new policy orientation was accompanied by a shift in development strategy that permitted China to take advantage of its factor endowments and structural conditions and dramatically accelerate economic growth. Thus 1978 marks not only the beginning of “reform,” but also the start of the Chinese “economic miracle,” a remarkable thirty-two-year period, through 2010, during which GDP grew at an annual rate of 10 percent. Chinese economic structure and Chinese society were utterly transformed. An extraordinary distance separates the vibrant upper-middle-income, predominantly market-based, economy that is China today from the troubled, isolated low-income country that was China at the end of the Cultural Revolution. This chapter builds its narrative around the systemic and structural changes that transformed China, especially in the thirty years between 1978 and 2008.

In chapter five, we argue that the economic collapse and famine of the 1990s profoundly transformed North Korea’s political economy. North Korea’s population increasingly turned towards market activities for their survival. North Koreans have continued to rely on markets for food and everyday goods, though marketisation has since expanded to the services, transport and housing sectors. While much of the existing literature has presented state and market as situated in a zero-sum relationship, we challenge the ontological separation between state and market to argue that the rise of the market in North Korea has been closely intertwined with the state. State officials have increasingly become involved in market activities, and the growing entrepreneurial class have entered into partnerships with officials as a means of negotiating the lack of clear property rights. The state has also taken a leading role in furthering the process of marketisation through the creation of new economic sectors, such as the mobile communications sector, for example.

Political opening, romantic freedoms, economic reforms, and such moderate political leaders as Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang sparked happiness for many people in China during the 1980s, but their high hopes created heightened expectations that would be dashed by the end of the decade.

Between 1985 and 2018, Brazilian economic well-being stagnated, with lackluster growth and regressive public policies destroying citizens’ life opportunities. There is considerable consensus about the sources of this low-level economic equilibrium, including low savings, low investment, and modest human capital improvements. Despite this consensus, and despite decades of reform, however, the overall institutional equilibrium changed only marginally. Drawing on the study of varieties of capitalism, this chapter describes how institutional complementarities drove actors’ incentives toward a collectively suboptimal equilibrium. Complementarities within and across five domains sustained the equilibrium: 1) the macroeconomy of a middle-income developmental state, 2) the microeconomy of firm organization; 3) the coalitional presidential political system; 4) the weak control mechanisms this political system set in place; and 5) an autonomous bureaucracy that permitted incremental reform but in consequence, may have moderated demands for more dramatic reforms while deepening fiscal constraints and impelling policymakers to preserve the tool kit of the developmental state.

Chapter 11 examines the stock market bubbles which occurred in China in 2007 and 2015. Between the end of 2005 and October 2007, the stock market soared by over 400 per cent. One year later, the market had fallen by 70 per cent. Similarly, in the year before June 2015, the stock market had increased by more than 150 per cent. It then collapsed by more than 50 per cent in under three months. The chapter discusses how, in the space of 20 years, China went from having almost no marketability to having heavily controlled marketability, and then near-free marketability. China also went from having virtually no middle class to having the world’s largest middle class, which then became the new speculating class. Thanks to margin lending, they were able to borrow heavily to finance their investments. Both bubbles are very clear examples of how and why governments engineer bubbles in the first instance. In 2007 the Chinese authorities needed to stimulate privatisation and in 2015 they needed to unwind the largest economic stimulus in history.

Chapter 4 analyzes the political dimension of the HECS framework in the context of Syria, contending that ideology played a key role in creating Syria’s vulnerabilities in the lead-up to the uprising. The chapter focuses on two key ideologies – Ba’athism in the 1970s and neoliberalism in the early 2000s – and their economic and agricultural policies. The Ba’athist regime under Hafez al-Assad effectively securitized food production to justify agricultural reforms designed to maintain the support of rural agrarian constitutiencies. The author shows that these Ba’athist policies, which included intensive irrigation, food and fuel subsidies, and large-scale hydroprojects, led to unsustainable water and agricultural practices and poor governance. Finally, the chapter examines the liberalizing reforms under Bashar al-Assad, which culminated in a 2005 shift to a social market economy, and concludes that they increased the vulnerability.