analysis of historical change that takes into account targeted human action. As illustrated below, this is of major importance, not least when examining the strategic reform projects of state and party elites.
• A perception of institutional complementarities that goes beyond the VoC approach, where complementarity is seen as stemming from coherence or structural similarities among institutions. Höpner claims that this argument cannot be applied to every empirical case examined. Incoherent settings can also have productive consequences: “Complementarity can exist without coherence, and coherence without complementarity” (Höpner 2005, 356). Some authors thus use the concepts of positive and negative “externalities” (Streeck 2009, 93–146) or use the term “productive incoherence” to describe institutional side effects not originating from a coherent basis (Crouch, Schröder, and Voelzkow 2009).7
• Finally, the knowledge that studies on national economies must include a transnational focus (Bohle and Greskovits 2009; Nölke and Vliegenthart 2009; ten Brink 2014b). In the case of China, this is particularly important—here, to stay with the complementarities theme, productive transnational “cross effects” have come about over the course of reform. China has been able to benefit more than any other country from the favorable global economic conditions and advantageous circumstances in East Asia.
Taking these insights as a starting point, a more comprehensive social theoretical basis for the study of capitalist systems will be developed below.
Capitalist-Driven Modernity
In the social sciences, the latest macrotheories draw largely on the concept of “modernity” or rather “multiple modernities,” with capitalism playing a lesser role. In contrast to this, in this work I argue that capitalism, as an all-encompassing social order, has sustainably and comprehensively shaped the numerous paths to modernity across several continents over the past hundred years.
Modernity is the result of a growth in human capacity for action and reflection and is characterized by a qualitatively higher degree of autonomy —or potential autonomy—than premodern or early modern societies. Modernity is a network of relations permeated by tendencies toward independence, essentially characterized by institutions for the accumulation of wealth and power, and then expanded to include dimensions such as the normative. In advanced social science theories, such a circumstance is usually gathered into a cluster of autonomous power sources including the juxtaposition of more or less independent institutions. Discussion over the diversity of modernity results in the assumption that different legacies of civilization and macroregional or national paths have come to shape the face of each individual form of modernity (see Arnason 2003a; Eisenstadt 2006; Knöbl 2007; overview: Schwinn 2009).
Studies have been conducted on the diverse dimensions of modernity that can be found in contingent combinations. The most common of these dimensions include the processes of secularization, individualization, pacification, democratization, economization, and bureaucratization. Consequently, the analytical framework developed here is clearly limited, the main focus being on processes of economization and bureaucratization, with only occasional reference to other modernization dynamics.
I argue that economization and bureaucratization processes, interpreted in the current work as driven by capitalist imperatives, are particularly important in this context. This argument is in opposition to broad contingency assumptions. The assumption here is that capitalist institutions are preeminent forms of association in modern societies. Recently, authors convincingly fleshed out this supposition by identifying various empirical characteristics of modern social orders as capitalist dimensions (Callinicos 2006; Deutschmann 2009b; Dörre, Lessenich, and Rosa 2009; Jessop 2007; Schimank 2009; Streeck 2010b).8
The following drivers and fundamentals of capitalism are vital to this study:
• Profit orientation and a boundless and excessive imperative to accumulate9—combined with legitimate greed and mythical utopian promises—which, unlike traditional, subsistence-oriented societies, help to unleash innovation dynamics and directional dependencies of institutional change
• The role of competition, logics of acceleration, and competitiveness in market and nonmarket social relationships, which threaten to permanently destabilize modern social orders because they prioritize competition over solidarity-oriented behavior
• Structural differences between the strategic capacity for action among the actors, which results from inequality in terms of access to resources or class positions
• The dependency on noneconomic institutions, including the modern state, which plays the predominant role (and also displays a structural interdependency with the economy)
• A fundamental tension between market expansion and social coherence, which in turn affects the social, political, and ideological conflicts in modern societies
• Finally, the drivers of capitalism including both characteristic expansion dynamics and an associated tendency among actors to subvert or bend the rules,10 as well as the potential to integrate and restructure noncapitalist or precapitalist structures
Against the backdrop of my assumption of a universal efficacy of drivers of capitalism as well as of their divergent outcomes, the aforementioned points will function as a “heuristic checklist” (Streeck 2010b, 10) to determine whether and to what extent these can be traced back to phenomena in recent Chinese history.11
In order to fend off any charges of reductionism, I would like to emphasize that this study is not an attempt to describe all modernization processes currently under way in China. At the same time, it does not support the argument that all noncapitalist forms of action or independent interpretations are eliminated in the processes of capitalist-driven modernization. A modern world predominated by capitalism does not indicate in any way that all noncapitalist autonomous social practices are lost. Rather, there is evidence of recombinations of institutions and ideas, making an examination of variances in modernization processes an absolute priority. However, historical cultural traditions and interpretations are reshaped through capitalist modernization processes. Notably, it is not only the musings of Marx or the hypotheses of his apostles, but also Weber who stresses the notion of capitalism as the “most fateful power in our modern life” (Weber 1991, 12, my translation).
The overlapping of noneconomic institutions or spheres with drivers of capitalism (e.g., housework, family, cultural phenomena, natural relations, social antagonisms and oppressive relationships, which are not directly the result of capitalism) can be expressed using the term capitalist-driven society. As overarching factors linking social, political, and economic processes with one another, the drivers of capitalism exercise a long-term effect on other dimensions of society, without being subject to them to the same extent when the tables are turned.12
In order to understand the overarching driving forces of capitalism and their specific national and/or regional manifestations, a multistep examination into the macro-, meso-, and microdynamics of the implementation and reproduction of such forces is required. The historical varieties of capitalism are viewed as multiple outcomes of a global overarching mode of association, which also demonstrates significant variation in the different historical phases of capitalism (such as the state-interventionism phase beginning in the 1930s or the liberalization phase from the 1970s onward). National economies do not simply converge to form a homogeneous economic unit. The global system comprises a network of different yet interlinked forms of capitalism characterized by continual adjustment and differentiation processes.
In order to avoid the dangers of economic functionalism, ahistorical equilibrium models, and political voluntarism, I have integrated the following assumptions and concepts into my analytical framework:
(1) I work under the assumption of
