Presents a story of two Chinas – an entrepreneurial rural China and a state-controlled urban China. In the 1980s, rural China gained the upper hand. In the 1990s, urban China triumphed. In the 1990s, the Chinese state reversed many of its rural experiments, with long-lasting damage to the economy and society. A weak financial sector, income disparity, rising illiteracy, productivity slowdowns, and reduced personal income growth are the product of the capitalism with Chinese characteristics of the 1990s and beyond. While GDP grew quickly in both decades, the welfare implications of growth differed substantially. The book uses the emerging Indian miracle to debunk the widespread notion that democracy is automatically anti-growth. As the country marked its 30th anniversary of reforms in 2008, China faces some of its toughest economic challenges and substantial vulnerabilities that require fundamental institutional reforms.

Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State

Throughout the 1950s China implemented a code of laws, regulations and programmes whose effect was formally to differentiate residential groups as a means to control population movement and mobility and to shape state developmental priorities. The hukou system, which emerged in the course of a decade, was integral to the collective transformation of the countryside, to a demographic strategy that restricted urbanization, and to the redefinition of city-countryside and state-society relations. This article offers a documentary study tracing the origins and development of the hukou system of population registration and control, and scrutinizes its relationship to a host of connected institutions, for clues to understanding distinctive features of China's developmental trajectory and social structure in the era of mobilizational collectivism. It considers the farreaching social consequences of the hukou system with particular attention to its implications for the creation of spatial hierarchies, especially its consequences for defining the position of villagers in the Chinese social system.

The Origins and Social Consequences of China's Hukou System*

Traditional analyses of political liberalization in China focus on elections or other facets of democratization. But they cannot account for the fact that although China remains authoritarian, it is nevertheless responsive to the increasingly diverse demands of Chinese society. I argue that the rules of the policy-making process are still captured by the fragmented authoritarianism framework, but that the process has become increasingly pluralized: barriers to entry have been lowered, at least for certain actors (hitherto peripheral officials, non-governmental organizations and the media) identified here as “policy entrepreneurs.” With policy change as the variable of interest, I compare three cases of hydropower policy outcomes. I argue that policy entrepreneurs' ability to frame the issue effectively explains variation in hydropower policy outcomes. I then extend these findings to an unlikely policy area, international trade, specifically, the 2001–06 Sino-EU trade talks over child-resistant lighter safety regulations.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0305741009990592

“Fragmented Authoritarianism 2.0”: Political Pluralization in the Chinese Policy Process*

Spectacular economic growth in China suggests the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has somehow gotten it right. A key hypothesis in both economics and political science is that the CCP's cadre evaluation system, combined with China's geography-based governing logic, has motivated local administrators to compete with one another to generate high growth. We raise a number of theoretical and empirical challenges to this claim. Using a new biographical database of Central Committee members, a previously overlooked feature of CCP reporting, and a novel Bayesian method that can estimate individual-level correlates of partially observed ranks, we find no evidence that strong growth performance was rewarded with higher party ranks at any of the postreform party congresses. Instead, factional ties with various top leaders, educational qualifications, and provincial revenue collection played substantial roles in elite ranking, suggesting that promotion systems served the immediate needs of the regime and its leaders, rather than encompassing goals such as economic growth.

https://faculty.washington.edu/cadolph/articles/ChinaRank.pdf

Getting Ahead in the Communist Party: Explaining the Advancement of Central Committee Members in China

In this book, Yasheng Huang makes a provocative claim: the large absorption of foreign direct investment (FDI) by China is a sign of some substantial weaknesses in the Chinese economy. The primary benefits associated with China's FDI inflows are concerned with the privatization functions supplied by foreign firms, venture capital provisions to credit-constrained private entrepreneurs, and promotion of interregional capital mobility. Huang argues that one should ask why domestic firms cannot supply the same functions. China's partial reforms, while successful in increasing the scope of the market, have so far failed to address many allocative inefficiencies in the Chinese economy.

Michel Oksenberg

Papers

Policy Making in China: Leaders, Structures, and Processes.

Policy Making in China

China's developmental experience

Bureaucratic politics and Chinese energy development