China Journal 

About: China Journal is an academic journal published by University of Chicago Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): China & Politics. It has an ISSN identifier of 1324-9347. Over the lifetime, 1822 publications have been published receiving 24465 citations. The journal is also known as: Chung-kuo yen chiu & Zhongguo yan jiu.

From Local Experiments to National Policy: The Origins of China's Distinctive Policy Process

Abstract: China's national policy formulation undergone economic transformation and shaped the making of policies in promotion of private business and stock market regulation. China's distinctive process of central-local interaction in policy generation is one of its core strengths in reforming its economy.

Land Rights in Rural China: Facts, Fictions and Issues

Abstract: China's rural economic reforms radically altered land tenure in rural China. With the granting of land use rights and residual income rights to farming households between 1979 and 1983, agriculture shifted from a collective-based to a familybased system. Land was not privatized, however. Ownership remained "collective", with local officials, typically at the village level, exercising a major influence over the allocation of land and the way households could use land. The initial land allocations to families were typically based on household size, household labour supply, or both. The central government's policy was that these allocations were supposed to be for 15 years. In some villages, land use contracts have been respected; in other villages, however, local leaders have periodically redistributed land among households and have intervened throughout the reform period to determine how farmers are able to use the land. The initial reforms triggered an unprecedented acceleration of agricultural growth in China. From 1979 to 1984, the gross value of agricultural output increased in real terms at an annual rate of 7.6 per cent, and grain production rose by 4.9 per cent annually.' Empirical studies attribute a significant part of this increase to enhanced incentives, as farmers were able to keep the output and

China's Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation

Abstract: China's Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation, by David Shambaugh. Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. xvi + 234 pp. US$39.95/£23.95 (hardcover). At a recent conference, a Sunday-morning panel met to discuss the current state of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The conclusion was that either the CCP was in its death throes or it had adapted to changing conditions and retained a substantial degree of power. The tension generated by these seemingly irreconcilable conclusions drives veteran China- watcher David Shambaugh's most recent book, China 's Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation. The book's organization is straightforward. The first third looks at scholarly assessments of the CCP in light of domestic events in China (particularly during 1989) and international events (specifically - but not limited to - the breakdown of Communism in Europe from 1989 to 1991). The second part of the book discusses the lessons learned by analyzing the elite intellectual party discourse about these events and the many prescriptions to allow the CCP to avoid the same fate. The final section looks at the two most important Party systems Propaganda and Organization - to illustrate how these lessons have shaped the CCP's tenure from 1990 to about 2005. Shambaugh's conclusion is that the CCP is simultaneously atrophying and adapting to changing circumstances but that, for the moment at least, adaptation is getting the upper hand. The scope of Shambaugh's description of the CCP at the national level is impressively expansive. He deftly maps out the contemporary Party apparatus in Beijing. Among many other things, Shambaugh traces the ways in which Hu Jintao has been able to manipulate what Jiang Zemin had carved out as his particular legacy - the "Three Represents" - to serve Hu' s own agenda. He also makes a strong case that CCP intellectuals' critiques of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s were simultaneously - and subversively - criticism of China, and nicely reproduces the fearful lens through which China's leaders watched as the rest of the socialist world withered away before their eyes. Of course, in any work of scholarship on a subject as complex as the CCP, there will inevitably be some shortcomings. Perhaps it is unfair to criticize a book aimed as much at the policy community as at the academy, but there is a striking paucity of theory. Shambaugh does not establish a causal relationship between the fall of the Soviet bloc, lessons learned, and the subsequent CCP recasting of itself. Nor does he conceptualize the CCP's learning process in response to these external events. Rather, we are given a set of events, a series of scholarly debates and internal policy recommendations, and a discussion of adaptation undertaken by the Party. There is no causal argument; nor is there much of a discussion at all about how these national-level decisions were implemented or absorbed by the CCP apparatus writ large. …