Sustaining Administrative Reform In China Through Path Dependence And Creation

This book examines questions of change and inertia in the context of the longstanding grievances over excessive taxation in rural China. How can some changes be sustained, whilst others cannot? How can a longstanding administrative practice be changed or even terminated, especially when previous attempts at change have failed? Using extensive interview data with local and central bureaucrats, Li's findings highlight the role of parallel developments and agency in the change process, as well as the prevalence of contingency and uncertainty. It also elegantly blends the narrative of the rural tax and administrative reforms with theoretical discussions to deepen our understanding of policy process and institutional change in 21st century China. Despite the authoritarian political system, the Chinese state-in-action which emerges from this book sees actions stemming from both the central and local levels, mediated by strategic design as well as contingency. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese Studies, political science and policy and development studies.

China's rise as an economic superpower has caused growing anxieties in the West. Europe is now applying stricter scrutiny over takeovers by Chinese state-owned giants, while the United States is imposing aggressive sanctions on leading Chinese technology firms such as Huawei, TikTok, and WeChat. Given the escalating geopolitical tensions between China and the West, are there any hopeful prospects for economic globalization? In her compelling new book Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism, Angela Zhang examines the most important and least understood tactic that China can deploy to counter western sanctions: antitrust law. Zhang reveals how China has transformed antitrust law into a powerful economic weapon, supplying theory and case studies to explain its strategic application over the course of the Sino-US tech war. Zhang also exposes the vast administrative discretion possessed by the Chinese government, showing how agencies can leverage the media to push forward aggressive enforcement. She further dives into the bureaucratic politics that spurred China's antitrust regulation, providing an incisive analysis of how divergent missions, cultures, and structures of agencies have shaped regulatory outcomes. More than a legal analysis, Zhang offers a political and economic study of our contemporary moment. She demonstrates that Chinese exceptionalism-as manifested in the way China regulates and is regulated, is reshaping global regulation and that future cooperation relies on the West comprehending Chinese idiosyncrasies and China achieving greater transparency through integration with its Western rivals.

China's spectacular rise challenges established economic moulds, both at the national level, with the concept of "state capitalism", and at the firm level, with the notion of indigenous "Chinese management practices". However, both Chinese and Western observers emphasise the transitional nature of the reforms, thereby leaving open the question as to whether China's reform process is really a fast catch-up process, with ultimate convergence to global standards, or something different. This book, by a leading economist and sinologist, argues that "culture" is an exceptionally useful tool to help understand fully the current picture of the Chinese economy. Drawing on a range of disciplines including social psychology, cognitive sciences, institutional economics and Chinese studies, the book examines long-run path dependencies and cultural legacies, and shows how these contribute crucially to the current cultural construction of economic systems, business organisations and patterns of embedding the economy into society and politics.

The growing disconnect between China's market-oriented economy with its emerging civil society, and the brittle, anacronistic, and authoritarian state has given rise to intense discussion and debate about political reform, not only by Western observers, but also among Chinese intellectuals. While some expect China's political reform to lead to democratization, others have proposed to strengthen the institution of single-party rule and provide it with a solid legal base. This book brings the ongoing debate to life and explores the options for political reform. Offering the perspectives of both Western and Chinese scholars, it presents the controversial argument for building a consultive rule of law regime as an alternative to liberal democracy. It provides several critiques of this thesis, and then tests the thesis through empirical studies on the development of the rule of law in China.

How has China been able to maintain high-speed economic growth during the last thirty-plus years and successfully transform itself from a poor, backward, and developing country to become the world's second-largest economy? What are the challenges that China faces today and how will she deal with them in order to continue moving toward a truly prosperous and modern society? Standing at a crossroads today, what future direction should China choose: a free market economy or state capitalism? In a series of penetrating dialogues, Wu Jinglian, China's most celebrated and influential economist, and Ma Guochuan, chief commentator of Caijing Magazine, attempt to address the following question: "Where is China going?" This volume offers critical insights into the historical evolution of China's ongoing economic and social transformation. Strongly reflecting Professor Wu's views on the future prospects of the economic reforms, the book provides readers with a deep and lucid understanding of the social and economic issues now confronting China, analyzes their underlying causes, and examines the serious challenges to implementing further reforms. Professor Wu argues that the only way to escape the various social ills in China today is to restart the economic and political reforms, which began thirty years ago but have slowed down during the recent decade, and to move China in the direction of a market economy, the rule of law, and democracy.

This book proposes a simple framework for understanding the political economy of subsidy reform and applies it to four in-depth country studies covering more than 30 distinct episodes of reform. Five key lessons emerge. First, energy subsidies often follow a life cycle, beginning as a way to stabilize prices and reduce exposure to price volatility for low-income consumers. However, as they grow in size and political power, they become entrenched. Second, subsidy reform strategies vary because the underlying political economy problems vary. When benefits are concentrated, satisfying (or isolating) interest groups with alternative policies is an important condition for effective reform. When benefits are diffuse, it can be much harder to identify and manage the political coalition needed for reform. Third, governments vary in their administrative and political capacities to implement difficult energy subsidy reforms. Fourth, improvements in social protection systems are often critical to the success of reforms because they make it possible to target assistance to those most in need. Finally, the most interesting cases involve governments that take a strategic approach to the challenges of political economy. In these settings, fixing energy subsidies is central to the governments’ missions of retaining political power and reorganizing how the government delivers benefits to the population. These cases are examples of “reform engineering,†? where governments actively seek to create the capacity to implement alternative policies, depoliticize tariffs, and build credibility around alternative policies. The most successful reforms involve active efforts by policy leaders to identify the political forces supporting energy subsidies and redirect or inoculate them.

Reform is a politicized, ideological, sometimes drifting, and chaotic process. As such, what public administration reform means, why it occurs, whose interests it serves, and whether it makes the world a better place, remain contested. Addressing these questions, this major comparative study sheds new light on existing and emerging issues in the field of public administration reform.