China's economic reforms have resulted in spectacular growth and poverty reduction. However, China's institutions look ill-suited to achieve such a result, and they indeed suffer from serious shortcomings. To solve the "China puzzle," this paper analyzes China's institution—a regionally decentralized authoritarian system. The central government has control over personnel, whereas subnational governments run the bulk of the economy; and they initiate, negotiate, implement, divert, and resist reforms, policies, rules, and laws. China's reform trajectories have been shaped by regional decentralization. Spectacular performance on the one hand and grave problems on the other hand are all determined by this governance structure. ( JEL O17, O18, O43, P21, P25, P26)

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The Fundamental Institutions of China's Reforms and Development

The New Transnational Activism, first published in 2005, shows how even the most prosaic activities can assume broader political meanings when they provide ordinary people with the experience of crossing transnational space. This means that we cannot be satisfied with defining transnational activists through the ways they think. The defining feature of transnationalism in this book is relational, and not cognitive. This emphasis on activism's relational structure means that even as they make transnational claims, transnational activists draw on the resources, the networks, and the opportunities in which they are embedded, and only then - if at all - on more distant transnational links. But we can no more sharply draw a line between domestic and international politics in studying transnational activism than we could ignore local politics in studying its national equivalent. Understanding the processes that link the local, the national and the international is the major undertaking of the book.

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The New Transnational Activism

1. Rightful resistance 2. Opportunities and perceptions 3. Boundary-spanning claims 4. Tactical escalation 5. Outcomes 6. Implications for China.

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Rightful Resistance in Rural China

Legitimacy is a concept meant to capture the beliefs that bolster willing obedience. The authors model legitimacy as a sense of obligation or willingness to obey authorities (value-based legitimacy) that then translates into actual compliance with governmental regulations and laws (behavioral legitimacy). The focus is on the factors that elicit this sense of obligation and willingness to comply in a way that supports rational-legal authority. The framework posits that legitimacy has two antecedent conditions: trustworthiness of government and procedural justice. Using African survey data, the authors model the relationship between the existence of a relatively effective, fair, and trustworthy government and beliefs that government deserves deference to its rules. The authors find considerable evidence of a link between the extent of the trustworthiness of government and procedural justice and citizens’ willingness to defer to the police, courts, and tax department in a wide range of African societies.

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Conceptualizing Legitimacy, Measuring Legitimating Beliefs:

Why would government officials in authoritarian and transitional systems where formal democratic and bureaucratic institutions of accountability are often weak ever provide more than the minimum level of public goods needed to maintain social stability? Findings from a unique combination of in-depth case study research and an original survey of 316 villages in rural China indicate that even when formal accountability is weak, local officials can be subject to unofficial rules and norms that establish and enforce their public obligations. These informal institutions of accountability can be provided by encompassing and embedding solidary groups. Villages where these types of groups exist are more likely to have better local governmental public goods provision than villages without these solidary groups, all other things being equal.

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Solidary Groups, Informal Accountability, and Local Public Goods Provision in Rural China

1. Introduction 2. Peasants and taxation in historical perspective 3. Extracting funds from the peasants 4. Institutional sources of informal tax burdens 5. Burdens and resistance: peasant collective action 6. Containing burdens: change and persistence 7. Burden reduction: village democratization and farmer national interest representation 8. Conclusions.

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Taxation without Representation in Contemporary Rural China

China's countryside has undergone tremendous changes in the last two decades, but the changes and the benefits that came with them were not distributed evenly. Rapid rural industrialization in the Eastern, coastal provinces under the aegis of the local developmental state dramatically improved the lives of villagers. In contrast, township and village enterprises (TVEs) and incomes grew much more slowly in the Central belt of provinces and still more slowly in the Western belt. Because agriculture was the major resource, rural governments had to rely on extraction of taxes and fees from the peasants in order to meet their expenses and to carry out developmental programmes. Here, predatory state agents imposed heavy financial burdens on the peasants. The result was a long festering crisis in the relations between peasants and the local state. Since the mid-1980s, the central authorities have been ordering their local agents to lighten the burdens of the peasants, yet the problem persists to the present. Why has it been so intractable?

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/655797.pdf

Taxation without Representation: Peasants, the Central and the Local States in Reform China

1. Introduction: organization, cadres, and corruption 2. Sugar-coated bullets from enemies: corruption in early years 3. The Great Leap Forward: the beginning of involution 4. Political mobilization and the cadres 5. The reforms and the transformation of cadres 6. The economic transition and cadre corruption 7. Conclusion Bibliography.

Cadres and corruption : the organizational involution of the Chinese Communist Party

Corruption by public officials has long been regarded as a cancer of polity, demoralizing and destablizing society and politics. It occurs in almost all societies, but often for different reasons and with varying consequences. Despite the flourishing of studies in recent years, we have yet to come to grips with the complexity and pervasiveness of corruption in contemporary China. For one thing, while some old patterns of corruption persist, new patterns have emerged. In this article, I address the issues of the changing role of the state under reform and persistent bureaucratic indiscipline by focusing on one particular form of corruption, that by public agencies. For lack of a better term, I will call it organizational corruption. I believe the study of organizational corruption in China bears two sets of theoretical implications. First, it yields telling clues about the changing role of the state in a transitional regime; second, it can afford us a better understanding of the nature of corruption. Two bodies of literature provide theoretical reference points for this paper. The first concerns the state's role in promoting economic development. Studies in this genre attempt to capture the nature of the state in a reforming Communist regime. Though differing in their depictions of the state, scholars tend to base their view on the successful economic growth that China has experienced in recent years. They argue that, unlike the conventional belief held by neoclassical economists, the state can adapt itself to the newly emerging markets and can even play an active role in leading marketization. This argument is different, however, from "capitalist developmental states," where the structure of the economy and property rights is decidedly different. In what has been variously called the "socialist developmental state',"' "local state corporatism,"2 "entrepreneurial state,"3 and "state entrepreneurialism,"'4 the Chinese state is portrayed as an adaptive and positive force in guiding the transformation of the economy. These studies usually focus on the growth-promoting and market-friendly role of the state, especially that of the local government. They treat the Chinese state as distinct from both predatory states in developing countries mired in economic stagnation and developmental states in the East Asian newly industrializing economies. In China the state acts as either an independent promoter of the local economy (as in the "socialist developmental state") or a collaborator with local enterprises (as in "local state corporatism") or an entrepreneur itself directly involved in profit-making activities (as in "state entrepreneurialism").

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/422367.pdf

Booty Socialism, Bureau-Preneurs, and the State in Transition: Organizational Corruption in China

This article analyses the changing nature and role of the state in rural China during reform by examining the issue of peasant financial burdens. It argues that, despite some successes in transforming China's countryside, the state has not been reduced since the reform began in 1978. Rather, it is being reshaped (with certain distortions) with its major role changing from ‘redistributive’ to ‘regulatory’. This transition, epitomised by continuing expansion of the state and growing unruly exaction from peasants by local state agents, has been in the direction of neo‐patrimonialism where resources are contested by state, officials, and the masses. This three‐way struggle has led to tensions among the state, cadres, and peasants.

Xiaobo Lü

Papers

Taxation without Representation in Contemporary Rural China

Taxation without Representation: Peasants, the Central and the Local States in Reform China

Cadres and corruption : the organizational involution of the Chinese Communist Party

Booty Socialism, Bureau-Preneurs, and the State in Transition: Organizational Corruption in China

The politics of peasant burden in reform china