Management and Organization Review 7:1 5-18 doi: 10.1111/j. 1740-8784.2011.00211.x Is It Capitalism? Marshall W. Meyer University of Pennsylvania, USA ABSTRACT I introduce the three articles in the MOR Editor's Forum on Chinese Capitalism. I then ask whether China's recent economic growth has been driven by a vibrant capitalism or instead has become an end in itself, supported by government: policies promoting high rates of fixed asset investment. There are two key observations. First, gross domestic product (GDP), measured and reported at four levels of government, has much greater salience than corporate profits, often undisclosed. Second, fixed asset investment accounted for more than 60 percent of China's 2009 GDP and nearly two-thirds of 2008-2009 GDP growth, levels unprecedented for a major economy. Rather than capitalism, I argue that institutionalized GDP growth today accounts for China's rapid economic development. KEYWORDS capitalism, China, economic growth, gross domestic product (GDP) INTRODUCTION WJitPiii Guo Jin, Min Tui (State advances, people retreat) This Editor's Forum on Chinese Capitalism includes three papers by pre-eminent scholars, Andrew G. Walder, Neil Fligstein with co-author Jianjun Zhang, and Nan Lin. All explore the contours of the contemporary Chinese economic and managerial systems although through somewhat different lenses. And all are extraordinarily articulate. However, the arguments made by these authors vary in familiarity and, by implication, the likely comfort of readers. I'll introduce the papers in order of familiarity — in myjudgment. I'll then move to even less familiar territory by asking whether China departs so far from the precepts of Western capitalism that it is something else entirely even if we don't fully grasp what it is. I'll take the further step of arguing that it is critical to frame the Chinese economic system as capitalist or something else, more likely the latter than the former, to anticipate how Western and Chinese economies will interact going forward. It is not clear that this interaction will be altogether amicable. The Western business © 2011 The International Association for Chinese Management Research https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1740-8784.2011.00211.x Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 54.162.69.248, on 08 Jun 2020 at 18:48:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at