This paper focuses on China's industrial sector, utilizing both qualitative and quantitative evidence. We show the role of the state in China, far from withering out, is massive, dominant, and crucial to China's industrial development. State-owned and state-holding enterprises are now less numerous, but much larger, more capitaland knowledge-intensive, more productive and more profitable than in the late 1990s. The dominant role of the state in China's industrial development is not necessarily a transitional feature. In the long run, it might consolidate itself as a form of strategic planning, and as a key structural characteristic of market socialism.