The discipline of form: why the premise of institutional form does not apply to Chinese capital, technology, land and labor

Abstract China is an intellectually overwhelming paradox within development thinking. On the one hand, it is regarded as an economic powerhouse pushing forward decades of sustained growth, which even during major global crises, such as the Corona-epidemic and the 2008 Financial Crisis, bounced back with significant resilience. On the other hand, it appears burdened with all of the ‘wrong’ institutions: informal, insecure, and autocratic. This collection of papers posits that the paradox is no contradiction when understood through an alternative, theoretical lens: the function of institutions precedes form when trying to understand institutional performance. Thus, whether institutions are formal or informal, public or private, democratic or autocratic, is of secondary importance to the manner in which they function over time and space. To examine this hypothesis, known as the ‘credibility thesis’, the collection examines China’s institutions that govern: 1) capital; 2) technology; 3) land, and; 4) labor; in effect, state-owned banks, collective firms, corporate law and securities, patents and intellectual property rights, environmental bans, and the civil registration or hukou system. In so doing, it not only falsifies the widely prevalent assumption that institutional form determines performance, but concurrently, validates the applicability of the credibility thesis over widely varying sectors and assets.