China today has the largest communist political regime and one of the most dynamic, fastest-growing, and largest economies in the world. Using a case study of China’s tobacco industry, this book analyses how the Chinese government was able to cultivate big state-owned firms that have successfully embraced the global market.

The success of the Chinese economy and the many state-owned firms within it have given rise to a ‘Beijing Consensus, ‘ challenging almost every principle enshrined in the so-called ‘Washington Consensus’ that espouses private ownership, free markets, and democracy. By examining two important political processes in contemporary China, ‘local state competition’ and ‘global-market building’, the book argues that the first process serves as a crucial basis for the second. It illustrates how the local governments involved themselves in building and shaping the tobacco market throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and how these domestic market dynamics created conditions for China’s recent embrace of the international market.

Offering an in-depth exploration of the political-economic processes in a key Chinese state industry, the book emphasizes that the key to understanding China’s political transition is to look at how the state has been shaped by its market-building projects both domestically and globally. It presents an important contribution to studies on Chinese Business and International Political Economy.