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Observers often note the glaring contrast between China's stunning economic progress and stalled political reforms. Although sustained growth in GNP has not brought democratization at the national level, this does not mean that the Chinese political system has remained unchanged. At the grassroots level, a number of important reforms have been implemented in the last two decades. This volume, written by scholars who have undertaken substantial fieldwork in China, explores a range of grassroots efforts--initiated by the state and society alike--intended to restrain arbitrary and corrupt official behavior and enhance the accountability of local authorities. Topics include village and township elections, fiscal reforms, legal aid, media supervision, informal associations, and popular protests. While the authors offer varying assessments of the larger significance of these developments, their case studies point to a more dynamic Chinese political system than is often acknowledged. When placed in historical context--as in the Introduction--we see that reforms in local governance are hardly a new feature of Chinese political statecraft and that the future of these experiments is anything but certain.
Focusing on the conflict and coordination between social development and political order in social governance, this book investigates the causes, evolution, and manifestations of such tensions in contemporary China, combining both qualitative and quantitative analysis. It has always been a complicated issue for social governance in China to maintain a balanced and benign interaction between social development and political order: Strong leadership from the state can foster robust social development, which can itself pose challenges to the existing political order. To approach this paradox, this book first discusses the entanglement of law and politics in China’s social governance, embodied by state legitimacy of the state and its governance. It then examines institutional changes through analyzing the relationship between market mechanisms and planned systems, as well as the petitioning system, a unique political setup in China. By examining arbitrariness in the practice of Mao Zedong’s theory on two types of contradictions, the author uncovers the characteristics and political basis of China’s approach to resolving social conflict. This title is essential reading for scholars and students studying sociology and political science, especially those interested in social governance in China and contemporary Chinese politics. Shizheng Feng is Professor and Dean of the School of Sociology and Population Studies at Renmin University of China. His research areas include political sociology, historical sociology, social governance and state-making, and political order in China’s social transformation.
This is a study of peasant-state relations and village politics as they have evolved in response to the state's attempts to control the division of the harvest and extract the state-defined surplus. To provide the reader with a clearer sense of the evolution of peasant-state relations over almost a forty-year period and to highlight the dramatic changes that have taken place since 1978,1 have divided my analysis into two parts: Chapters 2 through 7 are on Maoist China, and chapters 8 and 9 are on post-Mao China. The first part examines the state's grain policies and patterns of local politics that emerged during the highly collectivized Maoist period, when the state closed free grain markets and established the system of unified purchase and sales (tonggou tongxiao). The second part describes the new methods for the production and division of the harvest after 1978, when the government decollectivized agriculture and abolished its unified procurement program.
Focusing on the conflict and coordination between social development and political order in social governance, this book investigates the causes, evolution and manifestations of such tensions in contemporary China, combining both qualitative and quantitative analysis. It has always been a complicated issue for social governance in China to maintain a balanced and benign interaction between social development and political order: strong leadership from the state can foster robust social development, which can itself pose challenges to the existing political order. To approach this paradox, the book first discusses the entanglement of law and politics in China's social governance, embodied by state legitimacy of the state and its governance. It then examines institutional changes through analyzing the relationship between market mechanisms and planned systems, as well as the petitioning system, a unique political setup in China. By examining arbitrariness in the practice of Mao Zedong's theory on two types of contradictions, the author uncovers the characteristics and political basis of China's approach to resolving social conflict. The title is essential reading for scholars and students studying sociology and political science, especially those interested in social governance in China and contemporary Chinese politics.
China's opening up to the West, its extraordinary economic rise, and the subsequent internal and global issues, are an object of huge interest and concern. Discourse and Socio-political Transformations in Contemporary China focuses on one aspect of the contemporary Chinese phenomenon, one that is so obvious that it is generally ignored in the mainstream academic departments – that politics, society and transformation are the product of myriad collective linguistic interchanges, some stabilized, some competing, some agonistic, some new and emerging. As an outcome of dialogue between Chinese and Western scholars, the present volume contains case studies that offer a survey of the discourse aspect of Chinese society in social stratification, government service, policy consultancy, higher education, foreign policy, and TV. The conceptual reflections on discourse and critique in different cultures offer new considerations for discourse analysis, including critical discourse analysis, in the context of Chinese society today. This volume was originally published as a special issue of Journal of Language and Politics 9:4 (2010).
Including key research articles from specialists in the field, this volume provides an introduction and critical insights into the most important debates surrounding the governance of contemporary China. The material will enable readers to understand how China is ruled, how participation and protest are regulated by the authorities, and the relationship between the Central state and its local agencies. Spanning the most important areas of the subject, the chosen articles explore the study of Chinese politics, the nature of the Chinese political system, the policy-making process, the nature of the local state, participation and protest, and authoritarian resilience or democratization. Professor Saich's collection brings together essential reading for students of China, those who are interested in comparative politics and the general reader who wants a coherent introduction about how China is ruled.
Using in-depth case studies of a wide-range of political, social and economic reforms in contemporary China this volume sheds light on the significance and consequences of institutional change for stability of the political system in China. The contributors examine how reforms shape and change Communist rule and Chinese society, and to what extent they may engender new legitimacy for the CCP regime and argue that authoritarian regimes like the PRC can successfully generate stability in the same way as democracies. Topics addressed include: ideological reform, rural tax- for-fees reforms, elections in villages and urban neighbourhood communities, property rights in rural industries, endogenous political constraints of transition, internalising capital markets, the media market in transition, the current social security system, the labour market environmental policy reforms to anti-poverty policies and NGOs. Exploring the possibility of legitimate one-party rule in China, this book is a stimulating and informative read for students and scholars interested in political science and Chinese politics
Nations are not trapped by their pasts, but events that happened hundreds or even thousands of years ago continue to exert huge influence on present-day politics. If we are to understand the politics that we now take for granted, we need to understand its origins. Francis Fukuyama examines the paths that different societies have taken to reach their current forms of political order. This book starts with the very beginning of mankind and comes right up to the eve of the French and American revolutions, spanning such diverse disciplines as economics, anthropology and geography. The Origins of Political Order is a magisterial study on the emergence of mankind as a political animal, by one of the most eminent political thinkers writing today.
An exploration of the transformations of contemporary China, firmly grounded in both disciplinary and China-specific contexts.
How, practically speaking, is the Chinese polity - as immense and fissured as it has now become - actually being governed today? Some analysts highlight signs of 'progress' in the direction of more liberal, open, and responsive rule. Others dwell instead on the many remaining 'obstacles' to a hoped-for democratic transition. Drawing together cutting-edge research from an international panel of experts, this volume argues that both those approaches rest upon too starkly drawn distinctions between democratic and non-democratic 'regime types', and concentrate too narrowly on institutions as opposed to practices. The prevailing analytical focus on adaptive and resilient authoritarianism - a neo-institutionalist concept - fails to capture what are often cross-cutting currents in ongoing processes of political change. Illuminating a vibrant repertoire of power practices employed in governing China today, these authors advance instead a more fluid, open-ended conceptual approach that privileges nimbleness, mutability, and receptivity to institutional and procedural invention and evolution.