Chinese State Responses to Pressures from Below: Old Methods for New Challenges?

Abstract

Social Protest and Contentious Authoritarianism in China. By Chen Xi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 241 pp., $95.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-1-107-01486-2). Economic Openness and Territorial Politics in China. By Sheng Yumin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 292 pp., $85.00 hardcover (ISBN-13 978-0-521-19538-6). How will the new leadership team in China cope with challenges from dissatisfied citizens and restive provinces? The two books under review approach these questions from the perspective of Chinese state institutions and investigate the tools they use to maintain political control and manage social protest. In Economic Openness and Territorial Politics in China, Yumin Sheng focuses on the fiscal and personnel policies the Chinese central government employs to maintain political control over the wealthier Chinese provinces that have benefited most from economic openness. Xi Chen's Social Protest and Contentious Authoritarianism in China examines the institutions and strategies that enable the Chinese party state to routinize social protest. Using an empirical cross-national analysis, Sheng takes issue with theories predicting that economic globalization leads to a decline in state power. Drawing on William Riker's (1964) work on federalism, the author argues instead that in political systems, where political power is centralized, the national government has economic and political incentives to control winner regions to extract revenue from them, redistribute wealth within the country, and prevent pressures for regional autonomy from diminishing central control. Turning to the Chinese case, Sheng first reviews the history of China's economic opening in the 1980s and 1990s. When the preferential policies that enabled coastal provinces to boom resulted in growing economic disparities, in the mid-1990s Chinese national leaders implemented fiscal reforms to redistribute wealth from the coastal winners to the inland losers. Another important goal of fiscal recentralization was to redress a growing power imbalance between the center and the provinces and restore control over corrupt local leaders whose policies were creating conditions for instability and rural protest (Oi, Singer Babierz, Zhang, Luo, and Rozelle 2012). How did the leadership in Beijing rein in recalcitrant provincial leaders from the …