Governance, Innovation and Policy Change: Recali-brations of Chinese Politics under Xi Jinping ed. by Nele Noesselt

Abstract

Reviewed by: Governance, Innovation and Policy Change: Recali-brations of Chinese Politics under Xi Jinping ed. by Nele Noesselt Jason Young (bio) Nele Noesselt, editor. Governance, Innovation and Policy Change: Recalibrations of Chinese Politics under Xi Jinping. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018. xvi, 209 pp. Hardcover, isbn 978-1-4985-8024-3. Since Xi Jinping took his position as general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and chairman of the Central Military Commission in 2012, scholars have debated how Chinese politics are changing under his rule. This 2018 edited volume by Nele Noesselt presents a collection of chapters that attempt to answer this question. The organizing concept for the volume is "governance innovation" and the general approach institutionalism, though the three major parts, each with three chapters, in reality present an eclectic set of theoretical paradigms and approaches to the question. [End Page 95] The first part of the volume is a reflection on the field of Chinese political studies and is made up of two single-authored chapters by Suijian Guo and Jon Taylor, and coauthored chapter by Elizaveta Priupolina and Fan Yang. Guo's chapter outlines key themes and challenges in China's political science presenting some insights and raises important questions about the universality claims of political science theory in light of the China case and the response to this from the field of Chinese political science. This is a short but interesting contribution that concludes by asking where Chinese political science is heading. The next chapter argues that the rest of the world should pay more attention to the insights of China's political science in order to dehegemonize the discipline, and the following puts forward a discourse analysis methodology. The second part of the volume has three chapters on "values, norms and political culture in contemporary China" with single-authored chapters by Kent Freeze and Baogang Guo, and one coauthored by Xuedong Yang and Yan Jian. The first chapter uses public opinion data to explore pathways (inequality and cultural modernization) between economic modernization and support for political liberalization, concluding that "trends over time indicate that support for the status quo (measured by support for the current direction of the country) appears to be increasing in the past fifteen years" (p. 69). The next chapter argues that it "revealed cognitive differences between the Chinese and Western people" where "the group (family), ethical rule, and political hierarchy is to some extent inconsistent with individualism, rule of law, liberty, and equality advocated by Western liberalism" (p. 91). This is then followed by a chapter that presents interpretation of the trajectory of reform since the eighteenth CPC Party Congress and that argues China's reform process has shifted from "crossing the river by feeling the stones" to "top-level design." The chapter discusses this from the perspective of the institutionalization of central decision making and local autonomy. The third part of the volume is on "local governance reform and rule of law" with three chapters by Wei-chin Lee, Zhiyuan Zhang, and Nele Noesselt. The first chapter explores a series of judicial reforms arguing that "each reform attempt has required careful deliberation and crafty design to fulfill public aspiration for justice without seriously undercutting the party's supremacy and legitimacy in political governance" (p. 128). This chapter presents a realistic appraisal of the challenges China's judiciary faces in light of the reinvigoration of party control. This is followed by an analysis of government approaches to the implementation of environmental policy that identifies both top-down mandatory approaches as would be expected from the environmental authoritarianism literature but other approaches also, thereby questioning this literature. Zhang concludes that "the environmental performance evaluation system introduced by the central government creates powerful incentives for provincial bureaucratics and urges them to expand their policy instrument boxes by adopting more voluntary and [End Page 96] market-based instruments" (p. 168). The final chapter, "Reinventing the Chinese Leviathan," presents a very useful discussion of the debates and positions taken on the question of constitutionalism in China and illustrates the shift toward greater party control and management, thereby showing the limits of this movement. Taken together, this volume presents a good collection of...