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      The epistemic evolution of market authority: Big data, blockchain and China’s neostatist challenge to neoliberalism

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      Competition & Change
      SAGE Publications

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          Abstract

          Neoliberalism initially invoked the authority of competitive markets as the ideal epistemic mechanism for socio-economic coordination. Yet, the rise of neoliberal ‘market society’ in Western advanced economies since the 1970s has been underpinned by a normative political theory that advocates the reconfiguration of society and politics around the authority of economic theory and knowledge in both production, but especially finance. Conversely, the reform-era development of China’s ‘socialist market economy’ has been underpinned by an insistence on retaining centralized political power over the allocation of financial capital. This article argues that the rise of digital algorithmic technologies constitutes one means by which these contrasting politico-economic visions are being more closely reconciled. It investigates the ways in which China’s ongoing construction of an explicitly authoritarian capitalism is being facilitated by the deployment of complementary financial technologies that enable the Chinese Communist Party to embrace the micro-level epistemic coordinative function of markets without relinquishing macro-level political power and juridical sovereignty over these markets. Following a comparative historiography of the praxis of ‘neoliberal’ and ‘neostatist’ political theory in contemporary capitalism, two case studies of blockchain-enabled currency and big-data driven credit scoring in China illustrate the emergent Fintech foundations of Chinese authoritarian capitalism. The findings contribute to our understanding of how markets are being reshaped by new algorithmic technologies, as well as illuminate some of ideological contradictions in existing conceptions of markets as (neo)liberal institutions at the centre of capitalist political economy.

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          Most cited references78

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              Variegated neoliberalization: geographies, modalities, pathways

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Competition & Change
                Competition & Change
                SAGE Publications
                1024-5294
                1477-2221
                October 2021
                October 22 2020
                October 2021
                : 25
                : 5
                : 580-604
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
                Article
                10.1177/1024529420965524
                912b4b52-8fc8-4179-aada-6f7c65f0140a
                © 2021

                http://journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license

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