Authoritarian China Research Articles

The idea of a ‘Chinese model’: A critical discussion

This article questions the idea of a Chinese model. It argues that the so-called Chinese model is a variant of neoauthoritarian development associated with the developmental experience of other Eastern Asian states. What distinguishes China is the revolutionary experience – ignored by both Chinese and non-Chinese promoters of the Chinese model idea – that has left its mark on post-revolutionary development. Admiration for the authoritarian China model idea is voiced most audibly by those who place efficient development ahead of all other considerations, including democracy and social justice. These voices include apologists for the corporate neoliberal model that combines organizational authoritarianism with market ‘freedom’, as well as educational institutions that emulate corporate models, and serve as willing instruments of the Chinese regime’s search for ‘soft power’. Competing ‘models’ within China itself provide prima facie evidence of an unsettled search for sustainable development that reconciles the ideological goals of the regime with the realities of participation in a global capitalist economy. Indeed, if there is a ‘China model’, its most outstanding characteristic is the willingness to experiment with different models.

Protestant Christianity and Civil Society in Authoritarian China

Recent research has suggested that Western donors working in China have channelled most of their funds to government-affiliated entities, including state-affiliated think tanks, academic institutions, and government agencies, rather than to grassroots civil society organisations. A more state-centred approach may have made sense in the early years of the reform era, when few non-governmental organisations existed in China that could serve as effective partners to Western donors. Yet the rapid growth and development of the civil society sector in China over the last several years means that a number of new actors are doing very important work on a range of issues related to human rights and the rule of law. The author argues that Western funding for newly-formed grassroots civil society organisations is crucial to the ongoing development of Chinese civil society. In addition, because grassroots groups can often make fuller use of key advocacy tools, such as interest group mobilisation, media advocacy, and strategic litigation, they may in some cases be even more effective in pursuing progressive goals than academic or government-affiliated entities. Western donors active in China should take note of the rapidly-changing civil society landscape in China and make efforts to ensure that their funding strategies are in line with the evolving country context.

Introduction: Discussing “civil society” and “liberal communities” in China

The idea inspiring the present issue of China Perspectives is that there are certain communities - or groups, or fields - in Chinese that can be most readily expected to promote the strengthening of universal values underpinning human rights. These values include freedom of conscience and speech, freedom of association and the right to participation, and liberty of the person - basic liberties. (1)Civil and liberal democratic valuesIn different ways, communities of journalists, human rights defenders including in particular lawyers, religious communities, and nongovernmental organisations (NGO) involved in the provision of social services or advocacy can be especially important to the promotion of these values. Journalist communities, religious groups, and NGOs are also dependent on freedom of speech, (2) conscience, (3) and association, (4) whereas rights lawyers are engaged in the defence of the rights to due process, a fair trial, and access to justice. (5) In non-liberal, nondemocratic systems, support from international or transnational is an especially important further aspect. Accordingly, the contributions to this volume discuss these fields and aspects.Our project had to overcome some challenges, beginning with the controversial question of whether, even assuming that the idea of society makes sense, a can exist in (post-) authoritarian China. Addressing this question, this introduction argues for a liberal conception of and on the basis of this conception discusses the contributions on the particular Chinese fields contained in this issue. An insight emerging from all the contributions is that pressure on - and sometimes repression of - is met by the strengthening and diversification of resources to resist pressure, and often contributes to rising consciousness of the institutional safeguards needed for a genuine society.Conceptual issues: Civil in China between gongmin and minjianThere is no universally accepted definition of society, because to say a exists is to make an evaluative judgement. Interpretations have produced different conceptions ranging from the sociological to the (more explicitly normative) political.(6)These have different virtues. The classic, liberal conception is often traced back to Tocqueville's account of eighteenth century American characterised, in his view, by the prevalence of associations, formed freely and voluntarily for non-commercial purposes, to serve some aspect of the common good - formed, thus, in the civic or civil spirit to be found in democratic systems. (7) From the perspective of Tocqueville and those he greatly influenced, the existence of is clearly tied to a particular society's democratic organisation. This might hold the promise that a strengthening of could result in a strengthening also of the demand for democratic change. But it could also suggest that in politically hostile conditions, cannot emerge.Adam Michnik's Towards a Civil Society remains an important and, in China, also influential twentieth century reflection on the optimistic reasoning Tocqueville's account led to on the part of democracy activists in Eastern Europe. (8) Under the pressure of the systems they lived in, direct and in a narrow sense political opposition, e.g., through the formation of a party or underground movement aiming to gain government power or overthrow the system, was on the one hand not as eligible as a more diffuse, less direct, broader, and non-violent strategy. On the other hand, just because these systems were totalitarian (at least from the perspective of those who opposed them), the formation of communities resisting domination by the state was certain to be effective, even if such communities did not directly engage in struggles for power. …

Protestant Christianity and Civil Society in Authoritarian China

Religious groups can reinforce, complement, or undermine authoritarian domination. This article investigates whether high-status Protestant churches act as democratising civil society organisations by gathering hundreds of Protestants openly outside state structures to change church registration policies. In so doing, they also seek to curtail state domination over religion and, by extension, over all groups in society.

Welfare, Wealth and Poverty in Urban China: TheDibaoand Its Differential Disbursement

AbstractIn the broader social science literature, most studies of social protection investigate welfare in democracies, and at the national level, and typically assume that welfare is given in order to influence voting. This paper, to the contrary, considers social assistance in authoritarian China at the urban level. Its findings are compatible with an explanation that there are two dissimilar logics influencing the distributional decisions of lower-level administrators. That is, there appear to be two modes of social policy implementation, which vary with the fiscal capacity of a given city, as indicated by its average wage: Wealthier cities seem to prefer to push off the streets those viewed as unsuited to a modern city, therefore allocating a substantial proportion of their social assistance funds to them, in order to entice them to stay at home. On the other hand, poorer places seem to permit such people to work outside, in the hope that they will thus be better able to support themselves, thereby saving the city money. A data set from China's Ministry of Civil Affairs was used.

Social Protest and Contentious Authoritarianism in China by Xi Chen (review)

Reviewed by: Social Protest and Contentious Authoritarianism in China by Xi Chen Ho-fung Hung (bio) Xi Chen. Social Protest and Contentious Authoritarianism in China. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 256pp. Hardcover $95.00, isbn 978-1-107-01486-2. In most studies of social movement in China and elsewhere, protest and authoritarianism are often treated as two contradictory phenomena. Contentious authoritarianism, therefore, seems to be a contradiction in term. Xi Chen, however, has made an intriguing case in this book about how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been tolerating or even facilitating contentious politics from below to help maintain its authoritarian rule. The questions that the book addresses have been dealt with by many other authors: What accounted for the surge of social protests all over China in the 1990s and how did the CCP survive it? Many authors have given many different answers. Some argue the CCP dealt with these protests by repressing them selectively. It repressed those that started to spill over beyond a local region and develop coalitions with dissident intellectuals or those that manifested political demands, but it left the other self-limiting local protests with pure livelihoods demand alone. Some argue the ultimate source of stability of the CCP rule is the rapid economic growth and the performance legitimacy that such growth confers to the regime. While all these previous works are asking why the CCP rule survived despite widespread protest and discontent, Chen’s novel argument is that the CCP rule survived because of such widespread protest. The core point of the book is that “[be]neath the surface of noise and anxiety [of protest], the whole political system remains stable.” As with these protests, “most disgruntled social groups can find a space for interest articulation” that makes the whole system more sustainable (p. 5). After reviewing in the introduction the limitations of existing social movement literature in understanding the recent wave of Chinese protests, Chen uses the government data on petitions at the Hunan and Henan provinces to map in chapter 2, “The Surge in Social Protests from a Historical Perspective,” the trend of [End Page 429] collective petition and more disruptive protests that usually come with them. He finds that coinciding with the national trend documented in many other works, there was an unmistakable surge in collective petition and protests in the 1990s on. He also notices that such a surge could not be explained by increasing grievances caused by deepening market reform. If such a surge is caused mainly by mounting grievances, then there should be a surge of all collective and individual petitions. On the contrary, what he observes from the Henan and Hunan data is that the number of individual petitions remained more or less stable between the 1980s and 1990s and even showed a slight decline. Chen, therefore, asserts that the surge of collective protest in the 1990s is, indeed, a shift of aggrieved citizens’ action in articulating constant grievances. In chapters 3 and 4, the author goes on to explain such shifts of action provided with constant grievances by looking into the changing political opportunities structure between the 1980s and the 1990s. He finds that the first key difference between the two periods is that, in the 1980s, the work units system was still intact while the system had dissolved in the 1990s. In the Mao era, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) exerted its social control via a myriad of work units and its associated institutions, such as the official labor unions. Citizens of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had most aspects of their public and private lives embedded in particular work units. Cadres in such work units exercised the function of social monitoring, listening to as well as addressing grievances. As this system was still intact in the 1980s, citizens at that time would confine their contestation within the work unit and were less likely to resort to collective protest. However, when such systems were dismantled during the state enterprise reform in the 1990s, the CCP government was confronted with the citizens directly, without the mediation of the work units. In such situations, workers would be more tempted to employ collective...

AN EMERGING CIVIL SOCIETY: THE IMPACT OF THE 2008 SICHUAN EARTHQUAKE ON GRASS-ROOTS ASSOCIATIONS IN CHINA

The western China, especially near the Wenchuan region witnessed a terrible earthquake in the year 2008, which led to some severe damage in the country. Several interviews and studies are conducted to explain the impact of this Sichuan earthquake on the development of the various grass-root associations present in the country.

FACTIONS AND SPOILS: EXAMINING POLITICAL BEHAVIOR WITHIN THE LOCAL STATE IN CHINA

The emergence of local factions in County X and their relationship to the formal institutions of Party and government and the resilience of local state factionalism and its implications for central government control and one-Party rule are examined. It is argued that local politics is driven largely by a competition over spoils and that competition over spoils is organized around a relatively stable system of factionalism.

Pierre-François Landry, Decentralized Authoritarianism in China: The Communist Party’s Control of Local Elites in the Post-Mao Era

China, or Zhongguo (literally “central state”), is seen by many as naturally or traditionally centralized under authoritarian rule. Yet China recently has enjoyed a brisk boom of prosperity that local entrepreneurs have brought by eroding a formerly centralized, now competitive market. How has the Communist Party maintained political control, as the economy has burgeoned and diversified? Pierre Landry answers this question by analyzing the efficiency of appointment and promotion systems. Presuming that the main motive of any official is to retain his/her current position (or, better, to move up the government ladder), an efficient system allocates appointment powers to a level that can effectively monitor and sanction cadres. Deductive theory suggests that if administrative appointing agents are located too far above a post to be filled, they will lack enough information about potential candidates. But if the appointing officials are too close in level to the vacant post, a talented appointee could later challenge their own authority. Post-Mao China offered a natural experiment to put empirical flesh on the bones of this theory: In the early 1980s, the Party’s Central Organization Department mandated a “two levels down” (xia liangji) rule: Any appointment to an important post was approved by a Party group not at the next-higher level, but two levels up. This procedure did not work well. So since 1984, the norm has been changed: the Party makes appointments just one level down. This applies to all leadership posts—in the state bureaucracy, businesses, congregations, universities, the media, and the Party itself. Specifically, the Party’s Organization Department in Beijing appoints provincelevel leaders (governors, Party secretaries, provincial Party standing committees, chairs of provincial people’s consultative conferences, chief justices and procurators, J OF CHIN POLIT SCI (2010) 15:337–338 DOI 10.1007/s11366-010-9105-3

Decentralized Authoritarianism in China: The Communist Party's Control of Local Elites in the Post-Mao Era. By Pierre F. Landry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xvii, 295 pp. $85.00 (cloth).

Decentralized Authoritarianism in China: The Communist Party's Control of Local Elites in the Post-Mao Era. By Pierre F. Landry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xvii, 295 pp. $85.00 (cloth). - Volume 68 Issue 4

Decentralized Authoritarianism in China. By Pierre Landry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 293p. $85.00 cloth. - The Search for Deliberative Democracy in China. Edited by Ethan J. Leib and Baogang He. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006. 288p. $79.95 cloth.

Decentralized Authoritarianism in China. By Pierre Landry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 293p. $85.00 cloth. - The Search for Deliberative Democracy in China. Edited by Ethan J. Leib and Baogang He. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006. 288p. $79.95 cloth.

Interpreting the Chinese Discourse on State in the Era of Globalization

Under the impact of globalization the Chinese state is caught in the dilemma of intensifying economic reforms on the one hand, and maintaining authoritarian rule on the other. This dichotomy has put China at the crossroads and precipitated a debate between its Left and the Right groups on the direction the Chinese state should take. Hu Jintao sought to address this dilemma by formulating the concept of harmonious development. However, there are doubts on how an authoritarian China will reconcile with the two opposing forces of globalization and authoritarianism and thereby achieve a truly harmonious society.

From Local Experiments to National Policy: The Origins of China's Distinctive Policy Process

China's national policy formulation undergone economic transformation and shaped the making of policies in promotion of private business and stock market regulation. China's distinctive process of central-local interaction in policy generation is one of its core strengths in reforming its economy.

The Archery of "Wisdom" in the Stream of Life: "Wisdom" in the Four Books with Zhu Xi's Reflections

Confucian wisdom is commonly assumed to consist in the Confucian value perspective as humanism in a naturalistic outlook. In fact, Confucius and Mencius sketched out a far more interesting notion of wisdom (zhi) as rooted in cognizance and flexibility and expressed in sensitive discernment and the ability to read and respond to complex, changing circumstances-to read (and respond to) the writing on the wall. Whereas the notions of tradition and the Way are thought to weigh heavily in the Confucian perspective, the deeper insight and innovative action of the "wise" can transform everything and recast tradition and the Way on a more adequate basis. In his commentaries and discourses on the Four Books, Zhu Xi grasped this notion of "wisdom" and explicated its connection to several related notions, including chung (hitting the mark), yi (appropriateness), quan (weighing, discretion), and chongyong (hitting the utmost propriety in the common situation). This inquiry reveals an innovative, critical spirit in classical Confucianism that has largely lain dormant since the rise and persistence of a bureaucratic, authoritarian China after the Qin-Han period.

Debating political reform in China: rule of law vs. democratization

Introduction, Suisheng Zhao 1. Toward a Rule of Law Regime in China, Pan Wei 2. Political Liberalization without Democratization: Pan Wei's Proposal for Political Reform, Suisheng Zhao 3. A Government of Laws: Democracy, Rule of Law and Administrative Law Reform in China, Randall Peerenboom 4. The Rule of Law as Transition to Democracy in China, Larry Diamond 5. A Comparative Politics of Democratization in China, Edward Friedman 6. Pan Wei's Rule of Law Regime and Reforming Authoritarianism in China, Gunter Schubert 7. Toward the Rule of Law: Why China's Path Will Be Different from the West, Baohui Zhang 8. The People's Court in Transition: The Prospects of the Chinese Judicial Reform, Qianfan Zhang 9. State Power and Unbalanced Legal Development in China, Yongshun Cai and Songcai Yang 10. Law and Labor in Post-Mao China, Yunqiu Zhang 11. The Internet and Emerging Civil Society in China, Guobin Yang 12. The Internet and Single-Party Rule in China, Tamara Renee Shie 13. Towards a Rule of Law Political Reform under China's Fourth Generation of Leadership, Suisheng Zhao 14. Reflections on Consultative Rule of Law Regime: A Response to My Critics, Pan Wei About the Editor and Contributors Index.

Subsistence Crises, Managerial Corruption and Labour Protests in China

Subsistence Crises, Managerial Corruption and Labour Protests in China

Stagnation Without Equity: Patterns of Growth and Inequality in China's Rural Economy

When China's leaders launched rural reforms in the late 1970s, they acknowledged the nation's need to modify its commitment to egalitarianism.1 Slogans such as Tt is glorious to be rich!' and 'Some areas will lead; others will follow!' signalled this fundamental shift in ideology. Leaders backed up these exhortations with a series of concrete policy actions ? establishing the Special Economic Zones and implementing the East Coast-first policy, introducing financial reforms, and initiating the rural industrialization movement. In China's version of the 'trickle down' theory, certain core areas were to take the lead in the modernization process and provide models for other areas to later emulate. Adopting strategies that had been employed

Reform ideology, political commitment and resource transfor: An alternative model for the explanation of China's economic reform∗

One of the most intriguing ironies of our era is the result of recent changes in the former communist world. Whereas the “democratizing” Russia and Eastern European countries are caught in repeated political as well as economic crises, the “unrepentant” authoritarian China and Vietnam are seeing their economies booming and more market‐oriented. Such an irony poses many important questions. One of the questions is how China has managed to get where it is. This paper represents an attempt to address this question. Firstly, it will briefly outline where economic reforms have brought China so far. Secondly, it will discuss two popular models used to explain China's economic performance. And finally, it will develop an alternative model that combines politics and economy in accounting for China's reform experience.

Prospects for Civil Society in China: A Case Study of Xiaoshan City

'Civil society', 'the market' and 'democracy' are the conceptual 'good guys' that dominate current Western thinking about China's present and future in the social, economic and political realms respectively. Though these ideas are often used in imprecise and tendentious ways, they have considerable analytical and practical power; they reflect real processes and point toward real solutions. This paper sets out to examine how useful the notion of 'civil society' is in describing and explaining social change in contemporary Chinese society. I shall proceed, flrst, by clarifying the specific way in which I intend to use the term 'civil society' and, second, by investigating the empirical utility of the idea through a case-study of one Chinese city.

Toward a Sound Theory of Innovation

Previous articleNext article No AccessToward a Sound Theory of InnovationStanley J. HeywoodStanley J. Heywood Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Elementary School Journal Volume 66, Number 3Dec., 1965 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/460273 Views: 2Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Youkui Wang, Nan Zhang, Xuejiao Zhao Understanding the Determinants in the Different Government AI Adoption Stages: Evidence of Local Government Chatbots in China, Social Science Computer Review 40, no.22 (Dec 2020): 534–554.https://doi.org/10.1177/0894439320980132Xufeng Zhu Mandate Versus Championship: Vertical government intervention and diffusion of innovation in public services in authoritarian China, Public Management Review 16, no.11 (May 2013): 117–139.https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2013.798028