Enterprise Reforms and Innovation as Key Drivers of The Socialism With Chinese Characteristics

This article synthetically presents the key arguments and finding of a recent book of mine (Enterprises, Industry and Innovation in the People’s Republic of China: Questioning Socialism from Deng to the Trade and Tech War, Springer, 2020) on the gradual evolution of enterprise forms since the inception of rural and industrial reforms and the development of a modern innovation system in China. The book focuses mainly on the multi-causal processes of change occurring in the underlying socioeconomic relations of production and exchange, which cannot be adequately interpreted as a pure manifestation of the simple State–Market opposition. In fact, the complex and evolutionary interactions between state-led industrial and other development-oriented policies, on the one hand, and (relatively) automatic market mechanisms working in a quasi-by-default manner, on the other hand, constitute the essence of China’s distinctive economic model. From an epistemological perspective, the conceptual foundations of my work are those of the Classics and of the Marxian tradition, with the twin categories of the mode of production and socioeconomic formation as basic starting points. I try to partly re-interpreted these foundations taking into account the lessons of historical experience, as tools that can help—along with other ones—to understand twenty-first-century complex socioeconomic systems.