Contested Capitalism: Financial Politics and Implications for China

As China's economy grows and matures, is it developing institutional patterns that resemble those of other wealthy countries? I offer an innovative theory that deduces the structure of nations' capitalist institutions based on distributive welfare gains to those actors representing an economy's main factors of production (land, labor, and capital), using the structure of a nation’s financial institutions as a proxy for its capitalist institutions. Based on statistical and qualitative evidence across countries and time, I then draw implications for China. I find that China resembles continental European capitalism far more than Anglo-American capitalism, and that it is likely to remain this way for the foreseeable future.