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More than thirty years ago the political turn that brought the dismantling of agricultural collectives and exclusive rights to small plots of farmland for rural families initiated a historic return to smallholding in the People’s Republic of China. Today, agriculture in China is changing again. In many villages smallholder farming is giving way to large agricultural enterprises. This book explores this latest transformation of Chinese agriculture. It traces how the peasantry’s frustration with the farming conditions, the priorities of national and local political agents and the changes in the management of collective land since the return to family-based farming have paved the way for a ...
This book explores why, how, and under what conditions a single-party regime uses formal democratic institutions to strengthen its rule. Zhongyuan Wang challenges the traditional perceptions that the Chinese congress acts either as mere window dressing or as an immediate catalyst for democratization. He argues that managed elections and mobilized representation are two strategic cards of China’s one-party regime. By downplaying input electoral competition but promoting output congressional representation, the Chinese Communist Party has been committed to remodeling its unique brand of “socialist democracy” as an alternative to liberal democracy. Such a model of democracy with Chinese characteristics features the “Leninist trinity” of the Party’s leadership, the rule of law, and people’s sovereignty, as well as a new form of mobilized representation that relies heavily on non-electoral accountability from the top down. Remodeling democracy enables China’s one-party regime to enhance its resilience and consolidate and sustain its rule.
Translocality, Entrepreneurship and Middle Class Across Eurasia is a comprehensive, multi-sited ethnography about the unfolding of capitalism across Eurasia and the advent of a new middle class since the late Soviet era. Based on extensive fieldwork, the book follows three generations of ethnic Kyrgyz in three distinct eras and sites: The early bazaar traders of Novosibirsk (Russia), the post-2000 middlemen operating in Guangzhou (China) and the ‘new entrepreneurs’ who have emerged at home in Kyrgyzstan around 2015. The book advocates translocality as an innovative concept to better understand the dialectic of mobility and emplacement in contemporary livelihoods and value chains that tra...
Based on extensive field research in China and Vietnam the book reveals that the new body of entrepreneurs is not only interested in social and political processes of change, but is also actively trying to shape them.
Longlisted for the 2009 ICAS Book Award Mountainous Liangshan Prefecture, on the southern border of Sichuan Province, is one of China's most remote regions. Although Liangshan's majority ethnic group, the Nuosu (now classified by the Chinese government as part of the Yi ethnic group) practiced a subsistence economy and were, by Chinese standards, extremely poor. Their traditional society was stratified into endogamous castes, the most powerful of which owned slaves. With the incorporation of Liangshan into China's new socialist society in the mid-twentieth century, the Nuosu were required to abolish slavery and what the Chinese government considered to be superstitious religious practices. W...
Why and how does critical reporting persist at the local level in China despite state media control, a hallmark of authoritarian rule? Synthesizing ethnographic observation, interviews, survey and content analysis data, Convenient Criticism reveals evolving dynamics in local governance and the state-media relationship. Local critical reporting, though limited in scope, occurs because local leaders, motivated by political career advancement, use media criticism strategically to increase bureaucratic control, address citizen grievances, and improve governance. This new approach to governance enables the shaping of public opinion while, at the same time, disciplining subordinate bureaucrats. In this way, the party-state not only monopolizes propaganda but also expropriates criticism, which expands the notion of media control from the suppression of journalism to its manipulation. One positive consequence of these practices has been to invigorate television journalists' unique brand of advocacy journalism.
Since 1978, the end of the Mao era, economic growth in China has outperformed every previous economic expansion in modern history. While the largest Western economies continue to struggle with the effects of the deepest recession since World War II, the People's Republic of China still enjoys growth rates that are massive in comparison. In the country's smog-choked cities, a chaotic climate of buying and selling prevails. Tireless expansion and inventiveness join forces with an attitude of national euphoria in which anything seems possible. No longer merely the "workshop of the world," China is poised to become a global engine for innovation. In China's Capitalism, Tobias ten Brink considers...
Fueled by its surging economic strength, China has been increasingly utilizing economic tools such as trade, foreign aid, foreign direct investment, and sanctions to pursue strategic and security interests on the world stage. This approach, known as economic statecraft, has thus far received mixed policy results and ambivalent reactions from the international community. This book presents a collection of global assessment of China's economic statecraft. The contributors to this volume answer three key questions: What are the challenges faced by China’s economic statecraft? Why is China sometimes able to achieve its foreign policy objectives via economic statecraft and sometimes not? How do foreign countries, particularly the targets of China’s economic statecraft, respond to China's strategies? This comprehensive study examines economic statecraft in the context of more than a dozen nations and international organizations across four continents, thus providing a truly global perspective.
This edited volume assesses governance innovation and institutional change under the fifth generation of China’s political leaders headed by Xi Jinping. The configuration of long-term policy innovation without regime change requires skilled political actors who secure strategic majorities and set up coalitions to design and launch new policies. Recalibrations or reconfigurations of the governance model respond to domestic reform pressures or external shocks in order to secure regime survival. Given that most structural constraints and reform pressures do not arise out of a sudden, the thrilling question is why the political elites sometimes decide not to engage in institutional reforms des...
China’s economic development has become a matter of world-wide interest since the boom that began in the 1980s. Key Papers in Chinese Economic History since 1949 offers a selection of outstanding articles that trace the origins of the modern Chinese economy. Topics covered include agriculture and the rural economy; industrialisation and urbanisation; finance and capital; political economy and international connections.