Socialist countries are unique in having claimed a moral monopoly over the proper use of factors of production and the legitimate ends of economic activity. Political scientists have consequently viewed informal or second economy activities as potentially subversive of socialist state institutions, yet largely without impact on subsequent patterns of economic organization and development. This dissertation challenges this claim and related accounts of market formation by uncovering the links between socialist state definitions of the role of class struggle in development and post-socialist outcomes. In so doing, it offers an alternative explanation for why China's private sector is booming and Vietnam's is lagging today.; The dissertation shows that differences in socialist state strategies of economic management and political mobilization led to the creation of distinct kinds of sub-national threats to state allocative and economic authority in Vietnam and China. These threats, I argue, were not mere economic responses to shortage. They were fundamental moral challenges to state redistributive norms that led not only to speculation in the economy but also to struggles over the normative order in which wealth was created.; To explain how these challenges gave rise to different patterns of market formation, I examine the relationship between state definitions of the role of class struggle in socialist development and the evolution of norms of informal economic cooperation. I show that these norms arose not from resource dependency or economic shortage, but from how actors perceived each other, themselves and their interests.; Society, in other words, played a role in the construction of class as a unique institution in socialism and thus in the meaning and contours of private entrepreneurship. I show how this dynamic brought different sets of actors and mindsets to the forefront on each country's marketplace. In so doing, I explain why economic, social and political exclusion in socialist China proved richer soil for the articulation and expansion of market interests and market development than did the pervasive expression of economic unorthodoxy in socialist Vietnam.; The dissertation is based on three years of archival, documentary and field research in northern Vietnam and Sichuan Province, China.
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