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Political culture and participation in urban China
\"This book discusses one of the most noticeable and significant transformations in China over the past three decades is the rapid and massive urbanization of the country, which has brought shifts in political culture of Chinese urbanites. This book is a systematic and empirical study of political culture in urban China. The book covers various aspects of political culture such as political regime support, political interest, democratic values, political trust, and environmental attitudes and sub-political culture of Chinese urban Christians. This book will be of immense value to urban scholars, sinologists, and those wishing to get a closer look at the issues that affect the political future of a rising world power.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Participation and empowerment at the grassroots
This monograph ties in the scholarly debate on Chinese village elections and their consequences for China’s political system. It draws on comparative fieldwork conducted in six villages in two counties in Jiangxi and Jilin Provinces and one district in Shenzhen between 2002 and 2005, producing data from some 140 in-depth interviews of villagers and local officials up to the prefectural level. The major objective of this book is as much a critical assessment of the research literature of Chinese village elections published over the last fifteen years as to sharpen the reader’s sight for the scope and limits of this important reform to generate regime legitimacy in the local state, an issue which has so far been neglected in the study of Chinese village elections. It hence contributes to our understanding of the nexus between political participation and cadre accountability at the grassroots, and highlights a number of factors ensuring the persistence of one-party rule in contemporary China.
eBook
The failure of China's \democratic\ reforms
In its propaganda, the Chinese Communist Party does not deny the value of “democracy”, but it insists that democracy in China can be only “socialist democracy with Chinese characteristics”. The most essential nature of such “democracy” is that it is under the single-party system and it excludes multi-party politics and competitive elections. In recent years, “Chinese democracy” has won more support because of achievements the party has made in developing economy. This raises a question: does this “efficient” authoritarian political system in China, even if it is not democratic, deserve applause because it can facilitate economic development? The party also insists that it is “democratic”. But, is the party's theory of “democracy” compatible with western democracy? Since 1998, the party has organized some political reforms, such as “direct elections” for township executives, “direct elections” for township party secretaries, township party congress reform and “deliberative democracy” experiments, while maintaining single-party politics. In the party's propaganda, some of these reforms have become party achievements in improving “socialist democracy with Chinese characteristics”. In addition to these four kinds of party-organized reforms, another “reform” originated from the grassroots, the participation of independent candidates in a few local people's congress elections. This book examines these five local political reforms. It demonstrates that the four reforms instigated and organized by the party were tightly controlled and manipulated by the party. Although some reform measures may possibly liberalize parts of China's political mechanism, it is highly unlikely that the four reforms will eventually lead to political democratization in China. In the fifth “reform”, which was motivated from outside the bureaucratic system, the party took drastic measures to repress the political participation of grassroots power. As a result, nearly all independent candidates in the local people's congress elections failed in their attempts to gain office. The prospects for this “reform” are also poor. The book argues that all five reforms have failed and that none will lead to China’s democratization in the near future. The book concludes that the party’s authoritarian regime in China is by nature anti-democratic and that so-called “socialist democracy with Chinese characteristics” is not democratic.
eBook
Ballot box China
Since 1988, China has undergone one of the largest, but least understood experiments in grassroots democracy. Across 600, 000 villages in China, with almost a million elections, some three million officials have been elected. The Chinese government believes that this is a step towards `democracy with Chinese characteristics'. But to many involved in them, the elections have been mired by corruption, vote-rigging and cronyism. This book looks at the history of these elections, how they arose, what they have achieved and where they might be going, exploring the specific experience of elections by those who have taken part in them - the villagers in some of the most deprived areas of China.
eBook
Show Me the Money: Interjurisdiction Political Competition and Fiscal Extraction in China
We argue that interjurisdiction competition in authoritarian regimes engenders a specific logic for taxation. Promotion-seeking local officials are incentivized to signal loyalty and competence to their principals through tangible fiscal revenues. The greater the number of officials accountable to the same principal, the more intense political competition is, resulting in higher taxation; however, too many officials accountable to the same principal leads to lower taxation due to shirking by uncompetitive officials and the fear of political instability. Using a panel dataset of all Chinese county-level jurisdictions from 1999–2006, we find strong evidence for an inverse U-shaped relationship between the number of county-level jurisdictions within a prefecture—our proxy for the intensity of political competition—and fiscal revenues in most provinces but not so in politically unstable ethnic minority regions. The results are robust to various alternative specifications, including models that account for heterogeneous county characteristics and spatial interdependence.
Journal Article
Understanding Blame Politics in China's Decentralized System of Environmental Governance: Actors, Strategies and Context
Decentralized environmental governance theory suggests that decentralization can produce better environmental performance mainly because lower-level governments are closer to the people and environmental issues and are considered more legitimate than the national government. However, China's decentralized system of environmental governance has been often regarded as a key factor in creating pollution problems rather than in solving them. To explain this puzzle, this article, using Blame Avoidance Behaviour in government theory as a theoretical framework, examines how blame avoidance behaviour shapes China's decentralized system of environmental governance from three perspectives: first, actors and the chain of blame shaped by the hierarchical power structure among environmental policymakers and implementers; second, the strategies of discursive domination and decentralization for blaming environmental problems on local officials; and lastly, the contextual factor of “hierarchical governmental trust.” Drawing on documentary discursive analysis and extensive fieldwork, this article suggests that the dysfunction of China's decentralized environmental governance structure may in fact be an outcome of a blame-shifting game between central and local governments. 分权式环境治理理论认为地方分权有利于提升环境治理绩效, 主要原因是次级国家政府比全国性政府更接近民众和环境问题, 其获得的政治合法性更高。但是, 中国环境治理的分权系统通常被视为产生而非解决环境问题的主要原因。为了解释这个悖论, 本文以推诿政治作为理论框架, 从三个层面考察了官员的推诿行为如何塑造了中国环境治理的分权系统。首先, 环境政策制定和执行者的权力等级关系影响下的行动者及其推诿链条。其次, 将环境问题向地方官员推诿的话语主导和地方分权战略。最后, 作为情景性因素的“差序政府信任”。以文献话语分析和大量的田野调查为研究方法, 本文认为中央与地方政府的互相推诿可能在一定程度造成了中国环境治理的分权系统的功能障碍。
Journal Article
BUSTING THE “PRINCELINGS”
Using data on over a million land transactions during 2004–2016 where local governments are the sole seller, we find that firms linked to members of China’s supreme political elites—the Politburo—obtained a price discount ranging from 55.4% to 59.9% compared with those without the same connections. These firms also purchased slightly more land. In return, the provincial party secretaries who provided the discount to these “princeling” firms are 23.4% more likely to be promoted to positions of national leadership. To curb corruption, President Xi Jinping stepped up investigations and strengthened personnel control at the province level. Using a spatially matched sample (e.g., within a 500-meter radius), we find a reduction in corruption of between 42.6% and 31.5% in the provinces either targeted by the central inspection teams or whose party secretary was replaced by one appointed by Xi. Accordingly, this crackdown on corruption has also significantly reduced the promotional prospects of those local officials who rely on supplying a discount to get ahead.
Journal Article
Manipulation without Resistance: Consensus Elections in Rural China
The Chinese Communist Party has been increasing its control over village elections since the early 2010s, yet this move has not triggered any widespread popular resistance. Drawing on ethnographic evidence from village elections held in 2017 in a county in Hunan province, I conceptualize a form of electoral manipulation I term “consensus elections,” in which the Party engineers a pre-electoral consensus with ordinary villagers on whom to select while deterring challenges from village elites. Consensus elections are rooted in the Chinese political elites’ ideal that favours electoral participation over competition. While participation increases regime legitimacy, competition threatens regime authority. Propaganda promoting this electoral ideal shapes the views of ordinary villagers, laying a basis of legitimacy on consensus elections. The villagers embraced voting as being oriented by a unitary common interest and developed a cynicism whereby campaigning was equated with corruption. Comparison of the processes involved in engineering consensus elections in five villages suggests popular support for such elections. Whereas popular resistance was mounted against the lack of participation, popular complicity helps the Party to deter challenges from village elites. Consensus elections have facilitated the fall of Chinese village elections without undermining the Party's legitimacy, but consensus elections will also encourage more political challenges from village elites through non-institutionalized channels.
Journal Article
Village Elections, Grassroots Governance and the Restructuring of State Power
China’s urbanization has revitalized grassroots governance under which millions of villagers have become increasingly keen to participate in grassroots elections and influence decision making in their village affairs. To maintain its political legitimacy over a rapidly transforming society, the authoritarian party-state has progressively promoted open, competitive grassroots elections in response to the increasing demand by villagers for more public participation. Based on in-depth field research in urbanizing villages in southern China, this article provides an empirical analysis of how the local state has adopted different interventionist strategies in elections to support villagers’ active participation while sustaining its direct leadership over daily village governance. Our findings explain why the recent development of open and transparent grassroots elections is reinforcing the ruling capacity of the socialist state rather than enhancing self-governance and grassroots democracy, although villagers now have more opportunities to defend their economic and social rights through elections.
中国快速城市化的进程激发出基层治理的活力，数以百万计的村民参与基层选举积极性越来越高，村民对村务决策影响力不断提升。为了维护政治合法性，执政党积极推动公开和竞争性的基层选举，以顺应村民对公共参与日益增长的需求。基于在华南地区城市化村庄的深度田野调查，本文对地方政府在选举中采取的干预策略进行了实证分析，重点剖析当地政府如何在支持村民积极参与的同时，加强了对日常村庄管理的直接领导。研究结果解释了为什么公开透明的基层选举强化的是执政党的国家治理能力而不是村民自治和基层民主，尽管村民被赋予了更多的投票机会来捍卫他们的权益。
Journal Article