By Dr. Elif KAYA from Turkey
I am Elif KAYA from Istanbul, Turkey, a scholar researching China’s economy.
My choice to focus my research on China stems from a clear reason: China has embarked on a highly distinctive path of development. Its growth trajectory, however, departs entirely from the standardized development model advocated by mainstream development theories since the 1980s.
The Chinese case therefore interested me not because it offered a model that could simply be copied elsewhere, but because it challenged the assumption that development necessarily follows a single institutional route. China combined markets with extensive state coordination, foreign investment with domestic industrial policy, international economic integration with selective protection, and private enterprise with a substantial role for public institutions. The balance between these components changed considerably over time, but the broader point remained: the Chinese development experience could not easily be reduced either to conventional neoliberalism or to traditional central planning.
For years, I studied China primarily through economic indicators, policy documents and academic literature: industrialisation, state capacity, technological upgrading, poverty reduction, infrastructure, trade, investment and institutional transformation.
Visiting China in June 2026 as part of a three-week seminar programme added another dimension to this research. It did not “prove” my previous conclusions, nor would a three-week visit provide sufficient grounds for making definitive judgements about a country of more than 1.4 billion people. What it did provide was an opportunity to observe some of the social and institutional mechanisms behind the macroeconomic indicators I had been studying for years.
Development is usually discussed through aggregate variables: GDP growth, productivity, investment, exports, infrastructure, technological capacity or poverty reduction. These indicators are indispensable, but they tell us relatively little about the everyday practices through which institutions actually function.
One of the issues that attracted my attention in China was precisely this relationship between macro-level capacity and micro-level behaviour.
Across very different settings, I repeatedly encountered a strong emphasis on completing tasks properly and on time. This was visible in the organisation of the programme, transportation, university visits, institutional meetings and many ordinary interactions. It would clearly be excessive to derive a general theory of Chinese society from such observations. Yet the consistency of these experiences made me think again about an issue that development economics sometimes underestimates: implementation capacity.
Policies do not implement themselves. Infrastructure does not operate itself. Institutions do not become effective simply because regulations exist on paper. Development ultimately depends on large numbers of people performing relatively ordinary tasks with a certain degree of competence, predictability and coordination.
Seen from this perspective, the distinction between macroeconomics and everyday working culture becomes less clear.
China’s high-speed railways, ports, industrial zones, universities and increasingly sophisticated technological sectors require capital and technical knowledge, but they also require organisational capacity. What interested me during my visit was the extent to which this capacity appeared to be reproduced at relatively mundane levels of institutional life.
The same observation made me think about meritocracy, although here too the concept needs to be used cautiously. Meritocracy is often treated as a formal institutional principle, but its importance lies partly in expectations. If individuals believe that education, competence and performance have some relationship with professional advancement and social recognition, incentives to invest in those qualities become stronger. Where informal networks or arbitrary hierarchies dominate, the opposite problem can emerge.
I cannot claim on the basis of a short visit that China operates as a purely meritocratic system; no complex society does. What I observed, however, was a visible social value attached to competence, education and professional responsibility. This is consistent with a much longer Chinese institutional tradition in which education and administrative competence have historically occupied an important position.
Another aspect that became clearer to me in China was the relationship with time.
Rapid development changes not only income levels but also expectations about the future. China has experienced within a few decades transformations that took much longer elsewhere: urbanisation, industrialisation, infrastructure development, expansion of higher education and technological upgrading have occurred within the lived memory of a large part of the population.
Many people can compare their own living conditions with those of their parents or grandparents and identify substantial material differences. Development, in this context, is not merely an abstract increase in GDP. It becomes part of family history.
This may also help explain the importance of historical consciousness in contemporary China. References to earlier periods of poverty, foreign intervention and political weakness coexist with a strong awareness of the country's more recent economic transformation. Ancient civilisation, modern national history and contemporary development are therefore frequently incorporated into the same narrative.
The political implications of this are significant. National confidence cannot be explained solely through official discourse. It also has a material dimension. When people observe changes in infrastructure, income, education, technology and mobility during their own lifetime, perceptions of national development acquire an experiential basis.
This does not mean that every Chinese citizen interprets the country’s trajectory in the same way. China contains considerable regional, generational and socioeconomic differences. But it does suggest that assessments of state legitimacy or social confidence cannot be understood independently of the material transformation experienced over recent decades.
For a political economist, this raises the question of state capacity.
State capacity is commonly measured through administrative quality, fiscal capacity, bureaucratic effectiveness or the ability to implement policy. Yet there is also a social dimension: whether institutions are regarded as capable of producing tangible outcomes.
During my visit, I became increasingly interested in this relationship between institutional performance and social trust. The infrastructure surrounding everyday life, the organisation of public space, transportation systems, digital services and the general predictability of many routine processes suggested that state capacity is experienced not only through major national policies but through ordinary interactions between individuals and institutions.
Public safety was particularly striking in this respect.
Safety rarely receives the same attention as income, consumption or employment in discussions of development, although it is clearly an important component of welfare. The ability to use public transport late at night, walk through urban areas without significant concern and occupy public space relatively comfortably affects everyday quality of life in ways that conventional economic indicators do not capture.
My experience as a woman travelling in different Chinese cities made this dimension especially visible to me. Again, personal experience cannot substitute for systematic crime statistics or comparative research. But it can identify questions that quantitative indicators sometimes obscure. Development concerns not only what people earn, but also how they experience the spaces in which they live.
China also made me reconsider the relationship between modernisation and cultural continuity.
Much classical development thinking implicitly or explicitly associated modernisation with Westernisation. Developing societies were expected not merely to industrialise but, in some accounts, to converge institutionally and culturally towards Western models.
China complicates this proposition.
The country has experienced intensive industrialisation, urbanisation and technological modernisation while retaining a strong relationship with its own historical and philosophical traditions. Confucian and Taoist ideas should not be used as simple explanations for contemporary economic behaviour; doing so would reduce an extremely complex society to cultural determinism. Nevertheless, concepts associated with education, responsibility, social order, moderation and collective obligation remain relevant to understanding the cultural environment within which modern Chinese institutions have developed.
For me, this is one of the most interesting aspects of the Chinese experience. Modernisation does not necessarily require a society to detach itself from its historical identity.
The same caution is necessary when discussing China’s economic model. China’s development experience should neither be romanticised nor dismissed simply because it does not conform to Western institutional expectations. It contains contradictions, costs and unresolved problems, as every major development process does. Regional inequalities, demographic pressures, youth employment, the property sector, local government debt and the future balance between state coordination and private-sector dynamism are all legitimate subjects of debate.
But recognising these problems does not require ignoring the scale of the transformation that has occurred.
Nor does recognising China’s achievements require treating the Chinese system as a universally applicable model.
The more useful question is what the Chinese experience tells us about development itself.
For me, one conclusion is increasingly clear: development is not produced by markets or states in isolation. Nor can it be explained solely through capital accumulation. It requires institutions capable of setting and implementing objectives, a productive structure capable of technological transformation, human capital, social organisation and some degree of alignment between individual incentives and collective objectives.
This was perhaps the most useful connection between my academic work and my experience in China.
For years, I had examined Chinese development from the macro level. In China, I had an opportunity—necessarily limited, but nevertheless valuable—to observe some of its micro foundations. This does not lead me to the conclusion that China has discovered a perfect development model. Such a claim would be neither academically defensible nor particularly useful.
It leads me instead to a different conclusion.
China should be studied as China: through its own historical trajectory, institutional structure, political economy and social dynamics. Comparison is necessary, but comparison should not become a process of measuring every society against a single presumed endpoint of development.
When I began my doctoral research, my main question was how China had managed to transform its economy so rapidly.
After visiting the country, I would formulate the question somewhat differently.
Economic transformation on this scale requires us to examine not only policies, investment and institutions, but also the society within which they operate.
GDP statistics tell an important part of China’s story. They do not tell the whole of it.
