Fragile Fortune: State Power and Concentrated Wealth in China

Abstract

A sizable group of superwealthy business elites have emerged in China, now home to the world’s second-largest number of US dollar billionaires. Whereas existing studies highlight how large fortunes confer enormous power to their holders, this article shows, through an original data set on China’s top business tycoons, that they often have trouble sustaining their absolute wealth or relative position. It argues that a key source of concentrated wealth’s fragility in China is autonomous and unchecked state power. While the state’s developmental orientation has limited predation and facilitated wealth accumulation, its discretion in economic and legal matters allows it to discipline and punish tycoons whose behaviors have contravened its priorities. Leveraging the intensification of state pressure after 2012, the article further finds that business networks among tycoons alleviate threats from the state. The uneasy relations between the state and the largest capitalists set China apart from many capitalist societies.