ABSTRACT
Some 25 years ago, it seemed fair to cast the state as a monolith, perhaps as a giant boulder, though one undergoing mutilation and disintegration, as marketers and policy mavens chiselled it apart (Solinger 1992). A process of dismantling, then already well underway, appeared to presage the unravelling of the state’s dominance over all economic activity, and of its sway over every kind of ownership, powers that, into the 1990s, it had enjoyed for some three and a half decades.
