Business And Bureaucracy In A Chinese City

An examination of how private business is conducted through personal ties in China's market economy.

Jane Duckett describes in detail new state business activities in China and explains why they have appeared. Using research on the northern city of Tianjin during the 1990s, she argues that individual departments, within the Chinese state, are involved in the market economy through the establishment of their own businesses. The book demonstrates that many of these businesses are genuinely entrepreneurial in the sense of profit-seeking, risk-taking and productive, rather than rent-seeking, speculative or profiteering. This entrepreneurialism is an important new dimension of state activity in China with implications for our understanding of the Chinese state. This book develops an alternative to the local government state model and emphasises instead the State's dynamic, entrepreneurial role in the process of economic reform.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The era of globalization saw China emerge as the world's manufacturing titan. However, the "made in China" model—with its reliance on cheap labor and thin profits—has begun to wane. Beginning in the 2000s, the Chinese state shifted from attracting foreign investment to promoting the technological competitiveness of domestic firms. This shift caused tensions between winners and losers, leading local bureaucrats to compete for resources in government budget, funding, and tax breaks. While bureaucrats successfully built coalitions to motivate businesses to upgrade in some cities, in others, vested interests within the government deprived businesses of developmental resources and left them in a desperate race to the bottom. In Manipulating Globalization, Ling Chen argues that the roots of coalitional variation lie in the type of foreign firms with which local governments forged alliances. Cities that initially attracted large global firms with a significant share of exports were more likely to experience manipulation from vested interests down the road compared to those that attracted smaller foreign firms. The book develops the argument with in-depth interviews and tests it with quantitative data across hundreds of Chinese cities and thousands of firms. Chen advances a new theory of economic policies in authoritarian regimes and informs debates about the nature of Chinese capitalism. Her findings shed light on state-led development and coalition formation in other emerging economies that comprise the new "globalized" generation.

Based on over 300 in-depth interviews with company executives, business association representatives, and government officials, this study identifies a wide range of national economic policies influenced by lobbying, including taxes, technical standards, and intellectual property rights. These findings have significant implications for how we think about Chinese politics and economics, as well as government-business relations in general.

Well-traveled throughout China and well-published on its political, cultural, and business aspects, the editors of this unusual new book and their contributing authors give a systematic analysis of public sector management—as it is now and as it is emerging—in a country of massive size, now in retreat from a centrally planned economy. Many features of the new reforms parallel the movement toward new public management in the West. Functions have been transferred away from China's public sector, including the government, and into the private sector, and many of the managerial tools common in the private sector have been introduced into the public sector. The book thus analyzes the logic, mechanisms, and designs of new public management in China. It examines context-bound issues, in the light of the legacies of massive state intervention, the transition away from centralized planning, the structure of the Leninist party-state, and Chinese bureaucratic culture. Finally it discusses and illustrates events in a variety of policy areas, and in doing so, draws upon unique interviews and field studies developed personally by each contributor. The result is an important insight into China and how its public sector operates, one that will have special value for professionals in international development, finance, banking, government, economics, politics, and for their academic colleagues as well.

During the past quarter century Jonathan Unger has interviewed farmers and rural officials from various parts of China in order to track the extraordinary changes that have swept the countryside from the Maoist era through the Deng era to the present day. A leading specialist on rural China, Professor Unger presents a vivid picture of life in rural areas during the Maoist revolution, and then after the post-Mao disbandment of the collectives. This is a story of unexpected continuities amidst enormous change. Unger describes how rural administrations retain Mao-era characteristics - despite the major shifts that have occurred in the economic and social hierarchies of villages as collectivization and "class struggle" gave way to the slogan "to get rich is glorious." A chapter explores the private entrepreneurship that has blossomed in the prosperous parts of the countryside. Another focuses on the tensions and exploitation that have arisen as vast numbers of migrant laborers from poor districts have poured into richer ones. Another, based on five months of travel by jeep into impoverished villages in the interior, describes the dilemmas of under-development still faced by many tens of millions of farmers, and the ways in which government policies have inadvertently hurt their livelihoods.