My Chinese background provides a good change of case study for my research question. China has undergone dramatic economic reforms in the past three decades from a planned economy to a market-oriented one. It is an excellent historical laboratory where the role of the government in economic development can be scrutinized: on the one hand, the reduction of government planning unleashed the power of the market; on the other hand, this was not a spontaneous market process but one that was largely navigated by the Chinese government. The combination of institutional theories with the case study of China's reform history would potentially provide a theoretical explanation of the institutional changes during the reform and possibly shed light on the country’s possible future development path.