China’s development path, 1949–2022

China’s path is conceived as a transition from an economically underdeveloped and semi-colonised country of the Global South into a modern socialist country in a multipolar world where successive steps (modes of regulation) were shaped by China’s external environment (uneven and combined development) and a succession of contradictions and crises encountered along the way. Three phases are examined: a turbulent phase of socialist construction in a context of capital shortage and US embargoes; a phase of reform and opening up in an era of neoliberal globalisation, whose early roots lay in the early 1970s’ rapprochement with the US; and a New Era dating from 2017. In each phase, crises and contradictions saw waves of reform, involving successive joint transformations of economic structures and institutions, while each phase was anticipated in the years that preceded it, so opening up started in the early 1970s with the rapprochement with the US, and aspects of the New Era concern with innovation, green development, common prosperity and an equitable global order started to emerge earlier.