Edward S. Steinfeld

Market Visions: The Interplay of Ideas and Institutions in Chinese Financial Restructuring

In studies of transitional systems, negative economic outcomes are often associated with ‘partial’ or ‘stalled’ reform – a reform that signifies an institutional departure from standard market operation. Such departures are often traced to socio-political contestation or political preferences. Focusing on Chinas intertwined financial and enterprise reforms, this paper challenges that approach on two fronts. First, it argues that institutional change and resultant economic outcomes are driven less by contestation than by societally held assumptions regarding the nature of economic causation in market contexts. The analytical lenses that actors employ to understand their environment shape expectations about how markets function, influence the manner by which economic problems are diagnosed, and profoundly affect the ultimate institutional evolution of the system. Second, such lenses are necessitated by substantial uncertainties at the theoretical level regarding market function – uncertainties that make characterizations of economic behavior as ‘irrational’ highly problematic.

Response to Charles A. Kupchan's review of Playing Our Game: Why China's Rise Doesn't Threaten the West

While Charles Kupchan and I share common aspirations for a more flexible and inclusive global order, we clearly differ in our understanding of contemporary China. This difference is about far more than facts. Rather, it reflects a fundamental disagreement about the nature and identification of sociopolitical change itself.

No One's World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn . By Charles A. Kupchan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 272p.

In this provocative new book, Charles Kupchan issues a clarion call to the advanced industrial nations of the West. The global order they have built over two centuries—a system based on liberal democracy at home and free trade abroad—is meeting its demise, he warns. New nations have arisen that neither share the Wests historical traditions nor aspire to its contemporary values. The advanced industrial West, Kupchan argues, cannot logically expect nations like China, India, Brazil, and Russia to voluntarily comply with an existing order that is alien to their experiences and unaccommodating to their interests. Nor can the West realistically strong-arm such nations. The fulcrum of relative power has shifted too far to make coercion possible. But the West, he asserts, must not stand idly by. Historically, power transitions—save for a few rare exceptions—have tended to engender violent conflict. This time will be no different, says the author, unless the West moves aggressively to foster a new and far more inclusive global order.