Patchwork Capitalism: State, Market, and Hybrid Economies in China

Comparative political economy scholarship has paid insufficient attention to conceptualizing and analyzing hybrid economies that blend market forces with state interventions. Using China as a case study, this paper demonstrates how systematically scaling down to categorize regional hybrid economies enables a more holistic scaling up to understand a hybrid economy at the national level. With the aid of machine-learning clustering, I develop a new typology of China’s regional hybrid economies: dual-market, quasi-liberal, state-retreating, and state-dominated. I show how these regional hybrids aggregate into a national system of patchwork capitalism. Under this system, the central government strategically manipulates regions to pursue differentiated development goals at various stages of economic transition. This framework of patchwork capitalism can be applied more generally to hybrid economies in other parts of the world.