Industrial Change In China

This landmark study provides an integrated analysis of China's unexpected economic boom of the past three decades. The authors combine deep China expertise with broad disciplinary knowledge to explain China's remarkable combination of high-speed growth and deeply flawed institutions. Their work exposes the mechanisms underpinning the origin and expansion of China's great boom. Penetrating studies track the rise of Chinese capabilities in manufacturing and in research and development. The editors probe both achievements and weaknesses across many sectors, including China's fiscal, legal, and financial institutions. The book shows how an intricate minuet combining China's political system with sectorial development, globalization, resource transfers across geographic and economic space, and partial system reform delivered an astonishing and unprecedented growth spurt.

This book analyses the industrial reform measures taken by the Chinese government during the decade 1985-95 and identifies the economic and political tensions and contradictions that state enterprise reform has presented to a leadership intent on maintaining its authoritative political position. Using government sources and interviews with economists and workers at one of China's largest state-owned enterprises (The Second Automobile/Dongfeng corporation ), Hannan concludes that the relationship between state policy and enterprise is a complex two-way process characterised by tensions resulting from conflicting priorities.

The debate on industrial policy has been in full swing among the academic circles in recent years. The crux of this debate is not whether China needs industrial policies, but rather, the kind of industrial policies it wants. Given the profound changes to the domestic and international environments, and institutional background during China's industrial development, industrial policies must be able to make up for 'market failures,' while avoiding 'government failures'. To this end, it is suggested to establish a 'market-friendly' industrial policy system dominated by functional industrial policies, in accordance with the requirements of building an 'interactive and cooperative' government-market relationship to help transform and upgrade China's industries.

This book focuses on China's economic transformation at firm and institution levels. It shares insights into the growth of innovative Chinese firms in the automobile and telecom equipment sectors, both of which promoted social dialogue of policy-making and ultimately contributed to a policy paradigm shift in China's 'indigenous innovation'. The book illustrates, through case studies on firms like Geely, the Chery, the BYD, Huawei, the ZTE and the DTT, how these firms behave differently from other local actors and what social conditions had contributed to their success. The book will help those who are interested to learn more about the rise of innovative Chinese firms to better understand the dynamics of China's industrial progress.

In recent years China has experienced intense economic development. Previously a rapidly urbanising industrial economy, the country has become a post-industrial economy with a service sector that accounts for almost half the nation’s GDP. This transformation has created many socio-political changes, but key among them is social mobilisation. This book provides a full and systematic analysis of social mobilisation in China, and how its use as part of state capacity has evolved.

In the decades following World War II, factories in many countries not only provided secure employment and a range of economic entitlements, but also recognized workers as legitimate stakeholders, enabling them to claim rights to participate in decision making and hold factory leaders accountable. In recent decades, as employment has become more precarious, these attributes of industrial citizenship have been eroded and workers have increasingly been reduced to hired hands. As Joel Andreas shows in Disenfranchised, no country has experienced these changes as dramatically as China. Drawing on a decade of field research, including interviews with both factory workers and managers, Andreas traces the changing political status of workers inside Chinese factories from 1949 to the present, carefully analyzing how much power they have actually had to shape their working conditions.

Rising labour unrest is changing Chinese governance from below; Elfstrom shows that this is occurring in unexpected and contradictory ways.