The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China

The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China
Author: Susan L. Shirk
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2023-04-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520912217

In the past decade, China was able to carry out economic reform without political reform, while the Soviet Union attempted the opposite strategy. How did China succeed at economic market reform without changing communist rule? Susan Shirk shows that Chinese communist political institutions are more flexible and less centralized than their Soviet counterparts were. Shirk pioneers a rational choice institutional approach to analyze policy-making in a non-democratic authoritarian country and to explain the history of Chinese market reforms from 1979 to the present. Drawing on extensive interviews with high-level Chinese officials, she pieces together detailed histories of economic reform policy decisions and shows how the political logic of Chinese communist institutions shaped those decisions. Combining theoretical ambition with the flavor of on-the-ground policy-making in Beijing, this book is a major contribution to the study of reform in China and other communist countries. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994. In the past decade, China was able to carry out economic reform without political reform, while the Soviet Union attempted the opposite strategy. How did China succeed at economic market reform without changing communist rule? Susan Shirk shows that Chine

Power over Property

Power over Property
Author: Matthew Noellert
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2020-10-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472127101

Following the end of World War II in 1945, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spent the next three decades carrying out agrarian reform among nearly one-third of the world’s peasants. This book presents a new perspective on the first step of this reform, when the CCP helped redistribute over 40 million hectares of land to over three hundred million impoverished peasants in the nationwide land reform movement. This land reform, the founding myth of the People’s Republic of China (1949–present) and one of the largest redistributions of wealth and power in history, embodies the idea that an equal distribution of property will lead to social and political equality. Power Over Property argues that in practice, however, the opposite occurred: the redistribution of political power led to a more equal distribution of property. China’s land reform was accomplished not only through the state’s power to define the distribution of resources, but also through village communities prioritizing political entitlements above property rights. Through the systematic analysis of never-before studied micro-level data on practices of land reform in over five hundred villages, Power Over Property demonstrates how land reform primarily involved the removal of former power holders, the mobilization of mass political participation, and the creation of a new social-political hierarchy. Only after accomplishing all of this was it possible to redistribute land. This redistribution, moreover, was determined by political relations to a new structure of power, not just economic relations to the means of production. The experience of China’s land reform complicates our understanding of the relations between economic, social, and political equality. On the one hand, social equality in China was achieved through political, not economic means. On the other hand, the fundamental solution was a more effective hierarchy of fair entitlements, not equal rights. This book ultimately suggests that focusing on economic equality alone may obscure more important social and political dynamics in the development of the modern world.

China's Political Economy In The Xi Jinping Epoch: Domestic And Global Dimensions

China's Political Economy In The Xi Jinping Epoch: Domestic And Global Dimensions
Author: Lowell Dittmer
Publisher: World Scientific
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2021-03-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9811226598

This book takes a fresh look at Chinese political economy at a key inflection point. Facing a more competitive international environment, Chinese reform has shifted from its earlier focus on economic liberalization and political decentralization to a more tightly organized, centralized form of state socialism. The Party-state's vigorous fiscal reaction to the Global Financial Crisis (2008-2009) left the country with a much improved infrastructure and greater sense of national self-assurance. The more monocratic central leadership has redoubled efforts to fight poverty and pollution, push technological innovation, and at the same time rigorously enforce ideological consensus, political loyalty and anticorruption.This has been occurring in an international context of slowing trade and nationalist pushback against 'globalization', prominently including bilateral Chinese-American polarization. While China has been among the staunchest advocates and beneficiaries of globalization, incipient trade war 'decoupling' has spurred movement toward economic and technological self-reliance. Turning inward however vies with a rival impulse toward more vigorous engagement in the world. This is most consequentially represented by the Belt and Road Initiative, driving massive infrastructure construction through Central Asia and the South and Southeast Asian maritime periphery. Despite slowing growth and a large debt overhang, swift recovery from the Covid-19 epidemic leaves China in a relatively strong economic position.

How China Escaped Shock Therapy

How China Escaped Shock Therapy
Author: Isabella M. Weber
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2021-05-26
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 042995395X

China has become deeply integrated into the world economy. Yet, gradual marketization has facilitated the country’s rise without leading to its wholesale assimilation to global neoliberalism. This book uncovers the fierce contest about economic reforms that shaped China’s path. In the first post-Mao decade, China’s reformers were sharply divided. They agreed that China had to reform its economic system and move toward more marketization—but struggled over how to go about it. Should China destroy the core of the socialist system through shock therapy, or should it use the institutions of the planned economy as market creators? With hindsight, the historical record proves the high stakes behind the question: China embarked on an economic expansion commonly described as unprecedented in scope and pace, whereas Russia’s economy collapsed under shock therapy. Based on extensive research, including interviews with key Chinese and international participants and World Bank officials as well as insights gleaned from unpublished documents, the book charts the debate that ultimately enabled China to follow a path to gradual reindustrialization. Beyond shedding light on the crossroads of the 1980s, it reveals the intellectual foundations of state-market relations in reform-era China through a longue durée lens. Overall, the book delivers an original perspective on China’s economic model and its continuing contestations from within and from without.

The Political Economy of Making and Implementing Social Policy in China

The Political Economy of Making and Implementing Social Policy in China
Author: Jiwei Qian
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2021-09-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 981165025X

This book explores the institutional factors in social policymaking and implementation in China. From the performance evaluation system for local cadres to the intergovernmental fiscal system, local policy experimentation, logrolling among government departments, and the “top-level” design, there are a number of factors that make policy in China less than straightforward. The book argues that it is bureaucratic incentive structure lead to a fragmented and stratified welfare system in China. Using a variety of Chinese- and English-language sources, including central and local government documents, budgetary data, household surveys, media databases, etc., this book covers the development of China’s pensions, health insurance, unemployment insurance, and social assistance programs since the 1990s, with a focus on initiatives since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Providing a deeper understanding of policymaking and implementation in China, this book interests scholars of public administration, political economy, Asian politics, and social development.

How Reform Worked in China

How Reform Worked in China
Author: Yingyi Qian
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2017-11-24
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 026253424X

A noted Chinese economist examines the mechanisms behind China's economic reforms, arguing that universal principles and specific implementations are equally important. As China has transformed itself from a centrally planned economy to a market economy, economists have tried to understand and interpret the success of Chinese reform. As the Chinese economist Yingyi Qian explains, there are two schools of thought on Chinese reform: the “School of Universal Principles,” which ascribes China's successful reform to the workings of the free market, and the “School of Chinese Characteristics,” which holds that China's reform is successful precisely because it did not follow the economics of the market but instead relied on the government. In this book, Qian offers a third perspective, taking certain elements from each school of thought but emphasizing not why reform worked but how it did. Economics is a science, but economic reform is applied science and engineering. To a practitioner, it is more useful to find a feasible reform path than the theoretically best way. The key to understanding how reform has worked in China, Qian argues, is to consider the way reform designs respond to initial historical conditions and contemporary constraints. Qian examines the role of “transitional institutions”—not “best practice institutions” but “incentive-compatible institutions”—in Chinese reform; the dual-track approach to market liberalization; the ownership of firms, viewed both theoretically and empirically; government decentralization, offering and testing hypotheses about its link to local economic development; and the specific historical conditions of China's regional-based central planning.

China's Political Economy

China's Political Economy
Author: Gungwu Wang
Publisher: World Scientific
Total Pages: 382
Release: 1998
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9810234287

"the book is of greatest benefit to students of quantum mechanics who want to learn more than solely computational recipes and predictive tools of the theory, and, in this sense, the book really fills a gap in the literature".Mathematical Reviews, 1999

Economic Reform in China

Economic Reform in China
Author: James A. Dorn
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 414
Release: 1990-11-29
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780226158310

In this volume, distinguished Chinese and Western scholars provide a detailed examination of the problems associated with China's transition to a market-oriented system. A variety of reform proposals, aimed at resolving the contradictions inherent in piecemeal reform, are discussed along with the chances for future liberalization. These clearly written and insightful essays address the roots of China's crisis. The authors focus on institutional changes necessary for a spontaneous market order and point to the close relation between economic reform and political-constitutional reform. Topics include the speed and degree of the transition, whether ownership reform must precede price reform, how inflation can be avoided, steps to depoliticize economic life, how to create an environment conducive to foreign trade and investment, and how to institute basic constitutional change and open China to the outside world. The revolutionary changes now shaking the foundations of socialism and central planning in the Soviet Union and Eastern and Central Europe are sure to have an impact on China's future. Despite their seriousness, the events of Tiananmen Square may constitute only a temporary detour on the road toward a private market order. The essays in this volume help lay a rational framework for understanding China's present problems and for discussing the prospects for future reform.

China's Reforms and International Political Economy

China's Reforms and International Political Economy
Author: David Zweig
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2007-05-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1134221517

Written by an international team of experts from the US, UK, Hong Kong, China, Korea and Canada, this important and interesting book examines and explores the relationship between the international political and economic system, and China’s economic and political transition. Exploring international relations theory with a China-centric view, the book addresses key and significant questions such as: Has the outside world shaped China’s position within the global polity and economic, and affected the way China deals with the world economy? Have Chinese leaders and foreign policy makers internalized the norms and values of the global economic activity? Who are the key players in China in this process of globalization? Giving vital insights into China’s likely development and international influence in the next decade, China’s Reforms and International Political Economy is an essential and invaluable read.

China’s 40 Years of Reform and Development: 1978–2018

China’s 40 Years of Reform and Development: 1978–2018
Author: Ross Garnaut
Publisher: ANU Press
Total Pages: 709
Release: 2018-07-19
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 176046225X

The year 2018 marks 40 years of reform and development in China (1978–2018). This commemorative book assembles some of the world’s most prominent scholars on the Chinese economy to reflect on what has been achieved as a result of the economic reform programs, and to draw out the key lessons that have been learned by the model of growth and development in China over the preceding four decades. This book explores what has happened in the transformation of the Chinese economy in the past 40 years for China itself, as well as for the rest of the world, and discusses the implications of what will happen next in the context of China’s new reform agenda. Focusing on the long-term development strategy amid various old and new challenges that face the economy, this book sets the scene for what the world can expect in China’s fifth decade of reform and development. A key feature of this book is its comprehensive coverage of the key issues involved in China’s economic reform and development. Included are discussions of China’s 40 years of reform and development in a global perspective; the political economy of economic transformation; the progress of marketisation and changes in market-compatible institutions; the reform program for state-owned enterprises; the financial sector and fiscal system reform, and its foreign exchange system reform; the progress and challenges in economic rebalancing; and the continuing process of China’s global integration. This book further documents and analyses the development experiences including China’s large scale of migration and urbanisation, the demographic structural changes, the private sector development, income distribution, land reform and regional development, agricultural development, and energy and climate change policies.