In merely two decades, China transformed from a digital newcomer to the world’s largest e-commerce market, with 800 million users and nearly 50% of global retail sales. In From Click to Boom, Lizhi Liu unveils the surprising forces behind this extraordinary growth, addressing a key question in political economy: How can states build essential market institutions when formal institutions are weak or lacking? Liu argues that China’s ‘paradoxical’ e-commerce boom reveals a digital path to institutional development, in which e-commerce platforms have built powerful private institutions for contract enforcement, fraud detection and dispute resolution. The state, rather than opposing this private institutional development, has acquiesced, endorsed, and even partnered in it. By doing so, the state has effectively outsourced certain parts of institutional building and enforcement to digital platforms ‒ a phenomenon Liu terms ‘institutional outsourcing’. Drawing on extensive interviews, original surveys, tens of millions of proprietary data points and a rare field experiment conducted across three Chinese provinces, Liu further shows how this e-commerce boom has reshaped Chinese economic governance, with wider implications for emerging markets globally.

Lizhi Liu is an Assistant Professor at the McDonough School of Business and a faculty affiliate of the Department of Government at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on politics of trade and technology. Her work has been published in leading journals and university presses, including American Economic Review: Insights and Princeton University Press. Liu’s research has received funding from institutions such as the Gates Foundation and has earned multiple accolades, including recognition from the China-Britain Business Council as one of the ‘Best Books on China from 2024’ and the 2020 Ronald Coase Award for Best Dissertation in Institutional and Organizational Economics. In 2021, she was named one of Poets&Quants’ Top 50 Undergraduate Business Professors.