Marty Kirchner

In 2021, the Communist Party of China announced an ambitious plan to address the country’s vast socio-economic inequalities—spanning regional, urban-rural, and income divides—under the framework of “common prosperity.” While many scholars remain skeptical, arguing that only redistributive tax policies can effectively close these gaps, the Chinese government has rejected such “welfarist” measures. This 18-month ethnographic and archival research project examines six “landmark achievements” promoted by the Zhejiang provincial government as part of its common prosperity demonstration zone. Drawing on my proficiency in Chinese, four months of preliminary fieldwork, and an extensive analysis of policy documents, I will test the theory that the Party seeks to achieve more equitable market outcomes by building new institutions—before taxation—that: (1) leverage local governments and state-owned enterprises to provide development assistance to impoverished areas, and (2) redefine the rules, norms, and incentives guiding market actors and civil society. Data analysis will evaluate the impacts of this institution-building on various stakeholders. Informed by a rich tradition of anthropological inquiry, the project examines common prosperity to ask whether China is developing a new type of economic system capable of transcending cycles of welfare expansion and retrenchment characteristic of systems with entrenched property rights.