How can we explain market actors’ desire to use the state as a model for their entrepreneurial efforts? This article examines the varied and uneven ways in which the state is mimicked and appropriated by China’s market actors in the health care sector. A massage franchiser, which doubles as a job-training center in Harbin, serves as an ethnographic instance. By invoking a scene where the persistent appeal to the state is bound up with volatile market activities, this article intends to disrupt the prevailing notions of the state-market binary. The murky encounter between “the state” and “the market” does more than merely reflect the persistent power of the so-called “authoritarian” state. By examining how the state-market complex is made and also severed by market participants who appeared at first to represent “the state,” this article underlines the precarious and patchy nature of state centrality.
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