This article reconsiders the legacy of the World Bank, one of the world’s most powerful international economic organizations. Scholars typically claim that the Bank helped create and maintain a US-centered neoliberal international economic order. This article demonstrates that it also undermined that very same order. It uncovers the history of how the World Bank supported the astonishing rise of Chinese state-owned enterprises—and, more broadly, Chinese state capitalism. This article describes the work of the World Bank in China in the 1980s and 1990s. During this time, the Bank supported Chinese leaders in reforming—but not privatizing—China’s state-owned enterprises. Much of this work took the form of advising and knowledge production. Across various high-profile reports and conferences, the World Bank helped the Chinese government explore different methods of revitalizing the state-owned sector. This work was not a fringe part of the Bank’s global programming. For much of 1990s, China was the single largest recipient of World Bank funding. By developing this historical account, the article deepens our understanding not only of the World Bank, but also of global neoliberalism. It draws out three principal insights. Fist, the article reveals that although neoliberalism was a global regime—in that it reached much of the world—it was never a universal one. Second, the article observes that the World Bank did not act straightforwardly as an agent for the United States, despite the considerable control that the United States held over the institution. Finally, the article suggests that by investigating the work of international organizations in China in the final decades of the twentieth century, scholars can find new linkages between two major historical developments of recent decades: the decline of neoliberalism and the global rise of state capitalism.