China Governance Project

The global implications of China's rise as a global actor In 2005, a senior official in the George W. Bush administration expressed the hope that China would emerge as a “responsible stakeholder” on the world stage. A dozen years later, the Trump administration dramatically shifted course, instead calling China a “strategic competitor” whose actions routinely threaten U.S. interests. Both assessments reflected an underlying truth: China is no longer just a “rising” power. It has emerged as a truly global actor, both economically and militarily. Every day its actions affect nearly every region and every major issue, from climate change to trade, from conflict in troubled lands to competition over rules that will govern the uses of emerging technologies. To better address the implications of China's new status, both for American policy and for the broader international order, Brookings scholars conducted research over the past two years, culminating in a project: Global China: Assessing China's Growing Role in the World. The project is intended to furnish policy makers and the public with hard facts and deep insights for understanding China's regional and global ambitions. The initiative draws not only on Brookings's deep bench of China and East Asia experts, but also on the tremendous breadth of the institution's security, strategy, regional studies, technological, and economic development experts. Areas of focus include the evolution of China's domestic institutions; great power relations; the emergence of critical technologies; Asian security; China's influence in key regions beyond Asia; and China's impact on global governance and norms. Global China: Assessing China's Growing Role in the World provides the most current, broad-scope, and fact-based assessment of the implications of China's rise for the United States and the rest of the world.

This book elaborates on how China’s previous leaders established, consolidated, developed and improved China’s basic modern governance system. It also explores and discusses how to correctly, objectively and scientifically perceive, evaluate and promote the modernization of China’s state governance and its capacity. Using detailed and accurate data and extensive background information, this book analyzes the changing history and future perspectives of the relationship between China’s government and the market, state-owned economy and private economy. Covering an extensive timespan, this comprehensive book includes contributions from Chinese scholars specialized in contemporary China studies discussing the major breakthroughs and decision-making consultations in Chinese development strategies. It also offers insights into the research mechanism and development levels of Chinese think tanks based at research institutes. Last but not least, it sheds light on the democratic advances in the Chinese decision-making process.

This volume offers systematic analysis of China’s growing engagement in global governance institutions over the past three decades. During this period, China has gone from outsider to observer to insider. The volume is based on studies of Chinese involvement in a wide cross section of regimes, including trade, finance, intellectual property rights, foreign aid, and climate change. The contributions show that China’s participation in global governance reflects the mutually interactive processes of China’s own socialization into the global community and the simultaneous adaptation of global institutions and actors to China’s growing activism. Both China and the international system are internally complex. Hence, Chinese engagement varies across economic regimes, yielding different results in terms of Chinese compliance, its influence on regimes, and the extent of cooperation and conflict in addressing challenges in international society. The chapters reveal that China is neither purely a savior nor scofflaw of the global economic system, and while China is a defender of the status quo in some areas, it is a reformer in others, and occasionally a revisionist in still other spheres. A detailed analysis of many areas of global governance, this volume will be essential reading for students and scholars of international relations, Chinese studies and global governance.

Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork, The Logic of Governance in China develops a unified theoretical framework to explain how China's centralized political system maintains governance and how this process produces recognizable policy cycles that are obstacles to bureaucratic rationalization, professionalism, and rule of law. The book is unique for the overarching framework it develops; one that sheds light on the interconnectedness among apparently disparate phenomena such as the mobilizational state, bureaucratic muddling through, collusive behaviors, variable coupling between policymaking and implementation, inverted soft budget constraints, and collective action based on unorganized interests. An exemplary combination of theory-motivated fieldwork and empirically-informed theory development, this book offers an in-depth analysis of the institutions and mechanisms in the governance of China.

This book elucidates fundamental governance features and issues in contemporary China. While especially focusing on principal governance areas, it offers comprehensive coverage, capturing the dynamics of governance across vertical and horizontal connexions. The book is succinctly written and systematically addresses essential governance aspects that to date have only been dealt with separately and sporadically: state governance, the executive branch and administration, organization of production and approaches to production, and governance conventions and protocols. Further, it examines the evolution of governance practice in terms of both political and legal superstructure and economic base/infrastructure. Adopting a purely analytical approach and making no value judgments on the country’s social institutions and political systems, the book offers a vital resource to help readers grasp the complexities of governance in China.

A unique model of political development is underway in China, which differs considerably from those conceived under both traditional socialist and liberal Western models. This work tackles the important issues of the changes underway in China's political and economic systems.

This book offers an analysis of China in its muddling through of financial reforms towards adopting a local real property tax. The research is designed to serve dual purposes. First, it is an effort to provide an independent perspective on an urgent public policy under consideration by the Chinese government and to reflect upon this policy’s process, which started over a dozen years ago yet is still in the fermenting stage with no sight of fruition. Additionally, this project is intended to share China’s experience with other developing and transitional countries, so they can discern the difficulties China has faced and understand what may entangle them in the modernization of their taxation systems.

The apparent contradiction between China's rapid economic reforms and political authoritarianism is much debated by scholars of comparative political economy. This is the first examination of this issue through the impact of a series of administrative reforms intended to promote government transparency and increase public participation in China.