China’s long-term economic dynamics pose a formidable challenge to economic historians. The Qing Empire (1644 –1911), the world’ s largest national economy before 1800, experienced a tripling of population during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with no signs of diminishing per capita income. While the timing remains in dispute, a vast gap emerged between newly rich industrial nations and China’s lagging economy in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Only with an unprecedented growth spurt beginning in the late 1970s did this great divergence separating China from the global leaders substantially diminish, allowing China to regain its former standing among the world’s largest economies. This essay develops an integrated framework for understanding that entire history, including both the divergence and the recent convergent trend. We explain how deeply embedded political and economic institutions that contributed to a long process of extensive growth before 1800 subsequently prevented China from capturing the benefits associated with the Industrial Revolution. During the twentieth century, the gradual erosion of these historic constraints and of new obstacles erected by socialist planning eventually opened the door to China’s current boom. Our analysis links China’s recent development to important elements of its past, while using recent success to provide fresh perspectives on the critical obstacles undermining earlier modernization efforts, and their eventual removal. (JEL N15, N45, O11, O47, P21, P24, P26)

/pdf/from-divergence-to-convergence-reevaluating-the-history-2cs2ef8i6n.pdf

From Divergence to Convergence: Reevaluating the History behind China's Economic Boom

Fiscal incentives and policy choices of local governments: Evidence from China

The determinants (political connections vs. economic performance) behind the political selection of officials in China have been the subject of intense debate. This paper evaluates the extent to which the Chinese Communist Party uses economic performance — operationalized as the growth of local fiscal revenues and GDP — as the key criteria when promoting local politicians. We argue that economic performance plays a greater role in cadre promotion at the lower administrative level of government than at the higher level. This dualist strategy allows the ruling elites to balance between loyalty and competence among subordinates in order to maintain political survival. Using a comprehensive panel dataset of provincial, prefectural, and county-level Communist Party secretaries and government executives between 1999 and 2007, we find supporting evidence for our argument. We also show that even when we suspect that local officials attempt to manipulate fiscal or GDP data, their odds of promotion remain unaffected.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2885923_code1320685.pdf?abstractid=2452482&mirid=1

Does Performance Matter? Evaluating Political Selection along the Chinese Administrative Ladder

Fiscal Incentives, Public Spending, and Productivity – County-Level Evidence from a Chinese Province

This article studies the formation process of China's belt and road initiative (BRI) – the most important Chinese foreign policy initiative under Xi Jinping. It argues that the BRI was put forward as a broad policy idea that was subsequently developed with relatively concrete content. During this process, the shifting international landscapes have gradually driven the BRI from a periphery strategy into a global initiative. By examining the case of Jiangsu Province, this article also shows how Chinese local governments have actively deployed their preferred narratives to influence and (re‐)interpret the BRI guidelines of the central government in order to advance their own interests. As a result, this produces a variety of competing, ambiguous and contradictory policy narratives of the BRI within China, which undermines the Chinese central government's monopoly on the BRI narratives. This leaves the BRI as a very vague and broad policy slogan that is subject to change and open to interpretation. In this regard, the existing analyses – that consider the BRI as Beijing's masterplan to achieve its geopolitical goals – pay insufficient attention to the BRI's domestic contestation and overstate the BRI's geopolitical implications.

Damien Ma

Papers

Federalism, Chinese Style

The Rise of China's Reformers?

Lenin’s Chinese Heirs

After the Plenum