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 online retail sales. In From Click to Boom, Lizhi Liu unveils the surprising forces behind this extraordinary growth, tackling a key question in political economy: How can states build essential market institutions when formal institutions are lacking? Contrary to conventional wisdom, Liu argues, China's e-commerce market boom occurred partly because of weak government institutions, not despite them. Gaps in government institutions compelled e-commerce platforms to build powerful private institutions for contract enforcement, fraud detection, and dispute resolution. For a surprisingly long period, the authoritarian government acquiesced, endorsed, and even partnered with this private institutional building — a phenomenon Liu calls "institutional outsourcing." Drawing on extensive interviews, original surveys, tens of millions of proprietary data, and a field experiment across three Chinese provinces, Liu shows that the resulting e-commerce boom had far-reaching effects on China, offering fresh insights with implications for emerging markets worldwide.

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