Chinese Political Economy

This comprehensive, interpretive economic history presents the dramatic recent changes in China's approach to economic organization and development in an historical context.

This book takes a fresh look at Chinese political economy at a key inflection point. Facing a more competitive international environment, Chinese reform has shifted from its earlier focus on economic liberalization and political decentralization to a more tightly organized, centralized form of state socialism. The Party-state's vigorous fiscal reaction to the Global Financial Crisis (2008-2009) left the country with a much improved infrastructure and greater sense of national self-assurance. The more monocratic central leadership has redoubled efforts to fight poverty and pollution, push technological innovation, and at the same time rigorously enforce ideological consensus, political loyalty and anticorruption.This has been occurring in an international context of slowing trade and nationalist pushback against 'globalization', prominently including bilateral Chinese-American polarization. While China has been among the staunchest advocates and beneficiaries of globalization, incipient trade war 'decoupling' has spurred movement toward economic and technological self-reliance. Turning inward however vies with a rival impulse toward more vigorous engagement in the world. This is most consequentially represented by the Belt and Road Initiative, driving massive infrastructure construction through Central Asia and the South and Southeast Asian maritime periphery. Despite slowing growth and a large debt overhang, swift recovery from the Covid-19 epidemic leaves China in a relatively strong economic position.

Is the US losing its economic authority to China, whose global economic identity is being determined more by entrepreneurial spirit than developmental principle? Through the exercise of soft power and hard currency in some areas of the global economy, China has clear national interest in the protection of intellectual property rights, financial integration and sovereign wealth funds. China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank will set new standard to global economic development.

This book makes an important contribution to the study of changes in China’s institutions and their impact on the national economy as well as ordinary people’s daily material life from 1800 to 2000. Kent Deng reveals China’s mega-cycle of prosperity-poverty-prosperity without the usual attribution to the 1840 Opium War, or the alleged population pressure, class struggle and oriental despotism. The book challenges the conventional view on ‘rebellions’, ‘revolutions’ and their alleged motivations and outcomes. Its findings separate commonly circulated myth with reality based on solid evidence and careful evaluation. The benchmark used by the author is people’s entitlement and mundane day-to-day material well being, instead of the stereotype of aggregates of industrial hardware and national GDP. China’s Political economy in Modern Times proves that state-building was the prime mover in China’s modern history. Contrary to the popular belief in mass movement, Deng shows convincingly that changes were in most cases imposed by a minority with external help. Therefore, the quality of the state was unpredictable, seen from the anti-state that cost lives and economic growth. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese Politics, Chinese Economics, Chinese History, and Political Economy.

Uses the framework of 'market in state', to argue that the Chinese economy is state-centered, dominated by political principles over economic principles.

This book explores the institutional factors in social policymaking and implementation in China. From the performance evaluation system for local cadres to the intergovernmental fiscal system, local policy experimentation, logrolling among government departments, and the “top-level” design, there are a number of factors that make policy in China less than straightforward. The book argues that it is bureaucratic incentive structure lead to a fragmented and stratified welfare system in China. Using a variety of Chinese- and English-language sources, including central and local government documents, budgetary data, household surveys, media databases, etc., this book covers the development of China’s pensions, health insurance, unemployment insurance, and social assistance programs since the 1990s, with a focus on initiatives since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Providing a deeper understanding of policymaking and implementation in China, this book interests scholars of public administration, political economy, Asian politics, and social development.

1997 was truly an eventful year for China, with many momentous happenings. In February of that year Deng Xiaoping passed away, thus marking the end of an era. Shortly after, the post-Deng Chinese leadership under Jiang Zemin had to mobilise great efforts to ensure the smooth resumption of sovereignty over Hong Kong on June 30. This was then followed by intensive preparation for the holding of the 15th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in September, which set national priorities for China's medium- and long-term development as well as decided on the core team of younger leaders responsible for leading China into the 21st century.China is in the midst of great political, economic and social changes, which will intensify each other on account of their speed and scale. History has never before witnessed such a huge country as China industrialising and transforming itself so rapidly and so extensively.Accordingly, China's success or failure in its domestic development carries serious regional and international implications. There is still a great deal of uncertainty as to how soon in the next century China will become the world's most powerful economy. But what is happening in China today has already impinged on many aspects of life for people in the Asia-Pacific region, either in terms of growing trade and investment opportunities from China or in terms of regional security.This volume is largely based on public lectures and seminar papers by academic visitors and scholars at the East Asian Institute. Each has been written as a self-contained piece by a China expert, but presented primarily with non-specialist readers in mind.

This book examines the processes, evolution and consequences of China’s rapid integration into the global economy. Through analyses of Beijing’s international economic engagement in areas such as trade, investment, finance, sustainable development and global economic governance, it highlights the forces shaping China’s increasingly prominent role in the global economic arena. Chapters explore China’s behavior in global economic governance, the interests and motivations underlying China’s international economic initiatives and the influence of politics, including both domestic politics and foreign relations, on the country’s global economic footprint.

In the past decade, China was able to carry out economic reform without political reform, while the Soviet Union attempted the opposite strategy. How did China succeed at economic market reform without changing communist rule? Susan Shirk shows that Chinese communist political institutions are more flexible and less centralized than their Soviet counterparts were. Shirk pioneers a rational choice institutional approach to analyze policy-making in a non-democratic authoritarian country and to explain the history of Chinese market reforms from 1979 to the present. Drawing on extensive interviews with high-level Chinese officials, she pieces together detailed histories of economic reform policy decisions and shows how the political logic of Chinese communist institutions shaped those decisions. Combining theoretical ambition with the flavor of on-the-ground policy-making in Beijing, this book is a major contribution to the study of reform in China and other communist countries. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994. In the past decade, China was able to carry out economic reform without political reform, while the Soviet Union attempted the opposite strategy. How did China succeed at economic market reform without changing communist rule? Susan Shirk shows that Chine

Since the beginning of China's phenomenal rise in the international system, our knowledge of the country has grown rapidly. But those who have debated the China issue in policy circles mostly focus on the implications of China’s rise, often without a firm understanding of why the country is rising in the first place. Using an analytical framework which links China’s domestic political economy order and the global system, this book helps us to understand China’s rise and the China model more clearly. Indeed, unlike most other works that study the China model as a domestic political economy issue, it adopts an explicit international comparative perspective, comparing the Chinese model to others, such as the Washington Consensus and the Japan model. This comparison allows us to break down different components of the China model, and to show that while the Chinese Communist Party leadership part of the model is unique, other components such as export-led growth strategy or packaged aid programs are not. By focusing on the root cause of China's rise - namely the loop between the evolving China model and an evolving global governance structure – this book reveals the degree of compatibility between the country’s profit-driven domestic political economy system and the post-war global economic order, and in turn how and why China has been able to rise in the global system. The China Model and Global Political Economy makes a key contribution to theories of international relations, state development and modernization, and as such will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese politics, Chinese foreign policy, international political economy, development studies and international relations.