On The Chinese Socialist Market Economy And The “New Projectment Economy”

This article aims to show that the Chinese development process over the past four decades is not a self-explanatory fact. It is a process that may have revealed the ultimate limitation of the current capacities for interpretation represented by both orthodox and heterodox approaches. This limitation is due to two objective facts: 1) the transformation of the “socialist market economy” into a new socioeconomic formation (NSEF), a process that has accelerated since the financial crisis of 2008—the emergence of this NSEF results from a series of institutional innovations designed to accommodate a myriad of modes of production, all of them under the leadership of the public (socialist) sector; and 2) the continuous technical progress achieved by the state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Following the successful implementation of proactive industrial policies, the above-mentioned developments led to the appearance in China of new and superior forms of economic planning. This process can be understood as the re-emergence of Ignacio Rangel’s “project economy,” now under the title of the “new projectment economy.” In our view, perceiving and understanding this change in the mode of production in China, and the theoretical resources involved in it, represents the greatest challenge before today’s social science.