Why China’s Re-centralisation Emerges in the Age of Globalisation?

Abstract

Although involved in the age of globalisation,1 China has become more centralised. After the decentralisation from 1978 to 1993, the trend of centralisation2 has been once again strengthened since 1994, which was called re-centralisation by some scholars. Many scholars only focus on the period since the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012, but they fail to find out the root cause for re-centralisation. They ignore the fact that the 1994 Tax-sharing System Reform is an important sign of China’s re-centralisation, the answer may lie in it. In this article, we analyse the 1994 Tax-Sharing System from the perspective of Weber’s theory of domination and find out that the anxiety of the new Chinese central government in the early 1990s was the motivation for both tax reform and re-centralisation. At that time, the new central government could rely on none of Weber’s types of legitimate authority to maintain efficient operations because the charismatic authority3 of central leaders had weakened since the era of Deng Xiaoping, and the new type of authority had not been established. In these circumstances, the central government was eager to reshape the authority to stabilise the centralised order, which was also the basic motivation for Tax-Sharing System Reform.