3. From Varieties of Capitalism to Uneven and Combined Development: A New Perspective

This chapter considers how orthodox and heterodox comparative capitalisms research has approached the ‘China question’. It outlines how latent conceptual limitations have often fed into impoverished empirical research strategies, before suggesting why UCD (outlined at a high level of abstraction in the last chapter) may fare better as a means of both conceptualising contemporary Chinese capitalism in comparative fashion. The chapter first spells out a critique of Varieties of Capitalism theory, highlighting three distinct characteristics of China’s growth which pose major problems for VoC theory: ‘bad’ institutions, the significance of global production networks (GPNs), and profoundly uneven internal geographical development. Next, I consider heterodox ‘comparative capitalisms’ approaches (represented here by the most influential and theoretically coherent of these, ‘Variegated Capitalism’). While this work addresses most of the shortcomings of VoC theory, it also suffers from its own self-imposed ontological restrictions—most significantly, a simultaneous supranational and subnational bias, which successfully analyses local differences. Finally, I outline why I consider UCD an improvement on the other theories discussed at this lower level of concrete institutional political economy analysis, insofar as its careful deployment permits the study of subnational variegation without abandoning the analytical core of a historical materialist research programme.