Large-scale privatization did not emerge spontaneously in China in the late 1990s. Rather, the Chinese state led and carefully "planned" ownership transformation with timetables and measurable privatization quotas, not for the purpose of extracting the state from the economy, but in order to strengthen the rule of the Party. While it is widely believed that authoritarian regimes are better suited than democracies to carry out economic reform, this book provides a more nuanced understanding of reform in China, demonstrating that the Chinese state's capacity to impose unpopular reform is...