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| 1 |
ID:
194283
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| Summary/Abstract |
In China's one-party bureaucracy, central directives issued by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the State Council are the most important instrument of formal policy communication, yet their language has rarely been studied. This study highlights three politically salient varieties of directives: grey (ambiguous about what can or cannot be done), black (clearly states what can be done) and red (clearly states what cannot be done). Grey directives encourage flexible policy implementation and experimentation, black ones strongly endorse and thereby scale up selected initiatives, while red ones forbid certain actions. Together, this mixture of ambiguous and clear directives forms a system of adaptive policy communication. Using automated text analysis, I classify nearly 5,000 central directives issued from 1978 through 2017 into the categories of grey, black and red. This first-of-its-kind measurement effort yields new insights into the patterns and evolution of central commands from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping.
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| 2 |
ID:
194293
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| Summary/Abstract |
Chinese cross-border investments are often assumed to be state driven and a tool of Beijing's economic statecraft. However, corresponding evidence remains inconclusive. This article examines mainland Chinese direct investments in Taiwan and finds that they are not particularly effective tools of economic statecraft. Their excessive politicization and the sheer possibility that investments could be used for Beijing's economic statecraft resulted in a considerable pushback by Taiwan's government, bureaucrats and civil society against large and sensitive investments. The agency enjoyed by Taiwan hindered Beijing from deploying cross-Strait direct investments for political purposes, and Beijing has not openly promoted or supported such investments in Taiwan. Moreover, cross-border direct investments are by nature less exploitable for political purposes because they involve company-level commercial and entrepreneurial decisions. This sets them apart from other forms of economic statecraft, such as sanctions or trade restrictions, where the state has greater influence. Mainland Chinese companies have had limited commercial interests in Taiwan, and the investments that have been made there do not appear to have triggered significant political or security externalities. These findings suggest more generally that foreign direct investment might not be particularly effective as a tool of economic statecraft.
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| 3 |
ID:
194294
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The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) mobilizes Chinese construction and investment in developing countries. Ethiopia is Africa's “model” BRI country, due to China's elaborate infrastructure financing and building and its many manufacturing enterprises. Based on field and documentary research, we examine the BRI's meaning, as understood from the perspective of Ethiopia, in comparison to many China-oriented studies. We find that it is an informal Chinese state promise that even when capital flows from China to non-BRI states are curbed, flows to BRI states will be encouraged, and that Ethiopia exercises agency in leveraging the BRI for its development agenda. Using a comprehensive data set, we show that Chinese investment has become even more important in Ethiopia with the BRI and that neither COVID-19 nor Ethiopia's civil war has reversed that trend. We also discuss local criticisms of Chinese activities, which challenge the wholly positive view of the BRI, but do not affirm the US-generated negative narrative.
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| 4 |
ID:
194291
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| Summary/Abstract |
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a global health and political crisis like no other in recent history. As ground zero of the virus outbreak, significant criticism and blame have been directed at China for covering up the outbreak. Yet a systematic assessment of China's responses to international opprobrium of its pandemic measures has been largely lacking in the literature. Drawing on the concept of “blame” from public administration, this article seeks to fill this gap by investigating China's COVID-19 crisis and blame (mis)management practices. We make two key contributions in this article. First, we highlight how Beijing engaged in the politics of blame and outline three modes (defensive, aggressive and proactive benevolence) of its blame management practices. Second, we suggest that China sought to articulate and refine its identity during the COVID-19 pandemic, providing insights into a China that is increasingly assertive yet vulnerable to reputational damage. We contend that China's efforts to counter international opprobrium and shift strategic narratives speak directly to issues of autocratic legitimation and its conceived “responsible great power” identity, with greater success among domestic rather than global audiences.
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| 5 |
ID:
194282
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| Summary/Abstract |
Why do policy experimentation regimes breakdown? And, if there are recognizable patterns of experimental failure, what might explain the variation? Focusing on aviation, finance and food safety, this article considers why a policy style that has been credited with China's successes in the past is failing to address governance challenges in these sectors at present. The article moves beyond discussions of policy mis-implementation by reframing experimental failure as a case of policy maladaptation under conditions of complexity and ambiguity. Maladaptation describes how approaches used in previous periods to foster adaptation can inadvertently make a system less resilient in the future. The analysis shows how the degree of consolidation of previously successful experimental regimes lends itself to certain types of maladaptation in the present: consolidated regimes are unable to generate policy alternatives (aviation), moderately consolidated regimes are maladapted for selection (finance), and unconsolidated regimes impede niche creation (food safety).
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| 6 |
ID:
194284
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In China, government at all levels relies on the specially selected graduates (SSG) scheme to recruit elite university students as future political leaders. This article examines the mechanism of the SSG scheme and the relationship between elite university education and political selection in China. We show that elite education is increasingly stratified, such that graduates from top elite universities have significant selection advantages in the SSG competition and are more likely to be offered incentives and preferences. We argue that taking elite university education as a hard eligibility criterion reinforces the homophily effects in selection of future political elites and strengthens the political influence of top elite universities on China's politics. Further, because poor and lower-class students have little chance of entering elite universities, the SSG does not provide an effective route of upward mobility for non-elite classes. Merit-based political recruitment as a channel of upward mobility for non-elite classes is largely an illusion.
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| 7 |
ID:
194287
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| Summary/Abstract |
By analysing the development and operation of local government bonds (LGBs), a new tool fashioned by the Chinese government to finance infrastructure projects, this article improves the understanding of the political economy of China's local debt. We find that the central government uses LGBs to intervene in local debt and pursue policy objectives, and designs a quota system to decide the bond issuing amount and the project selection. When calculating quotas, the central government prioritizes limiting financial risk and achieving national development goals. Local debt should match the fiscal capacity of local governments, and the projects should contribute to the sectors emphasized by the central government as important for national development, reflecting the centralization of central–local relations. However, LGBs hardly fix the problem of local debt, and the pressure to maintain economic growth by expanding infrastructure investment has pushed local debt to an alarming level.
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| 8 |
ID:
194295
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| Summary/Abstract |
On 15 November 1956, Mao Zedong 毛泽东 delivered a speech at the Second Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Eighth CCP Congress. The official written version of this speech was published belatedly, in 1977, in the fifth volume of Mao's Selected Works. In this text, Mao was supposed to be talking about the Dalai Lama's forthcoming stay in India, and he had no difficulty in envisaging the Dalai Lama's eventual departure into exile. This passage, obviously, seems problematic as it contradicts the policy of the CCP leadership towards the Dalai Lama at that time. Tsering Shakya (The Dragon in the Land of Snows, Pimlico, 1999), Li Jianglin 李江琳 (1959 Lhasa, New Century Press, 2010), Melvyn Goldstein (A History of Modern Tibet, Volume 3, University of California Press, 2013), and Liu Xiaoyuan 刘晓原 (To the End of Revolution, Columbia University Press, 2020) have successively sought to understand the reason for this. The probable reason seems to be simply that Mao most likely never made these remarks about the Dalai Lama on the date in question, and that this passage was added later in the written version of the speech, to avoid Mao losing face.
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| 9 |
ID:
194292
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| Summary/Abstract |
Frames such as political warfare, sharp power and weaponized interdependence do not capture the full spectrum of China's “reunification” operations targeting Taiwan, particularly in regard to the fundamental legal domain. Making use of primary materials and elite interviews, Beijing's lawfare against Taiwan is examined as part of a matrix of military threats, covert infiltration and measures aimed at attracting Taiwanese public opinion. This study argues that China's multi-domain Taiwan strategy should be understood as hybrid influencing. A foundational element of this strategy is Chinese lawfare, which can be boiled down to three axiomatic principles – namely, to reframe the relationship between Beijing and Taipei as an internal dispute, to close down Taiwan's international space and to contain any right to self-determination. As distinct from Anglophone conceptions, Chinese lawfare seeks in essence to exploit the uncertainty of Taiwan's status under international law to make strategic gains – maximally, “to win without fighting.”
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| 10 |
ID:
194286
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| Summary/Abstract |
Extensive research in Western societies has demonstrated that media reports of protests have succumbed to selection and description biases, but such tendencies have not yet been tested in the Chinese context. This article investigates the Chinese government and news media's selection and description bias in domestic protest events reporting. Using a large protest event data set from Weibo (CASM-China), we found that government accounts on Weibo covered only 0.4 per cent of protests while news media accounts covered 6.3 per cent of them. In selecting events for coverage, the news media accounts tacitly struck a balance between newsworthiness and political sensitivity; this led them to gravitate towards protests by underprivileged social groups and shy away from protests targeting the government. Government accounts on Weibo, on the other hand, eschewed reporting on violent protests and those organized by the urban middle class and veterans. In reporting selected protest events, both government and news media accounts tended to depoliticize protest events and to frame them in a more positive tone. This description bias was more pronounced for the government than the news media accounts. The government coverage of protest events also had a more thematic (as opposed to episodic) orientation than the news media.
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| 11 |
ID:
194285
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper presents the first systematic study of the political behaviour of female members of China's national legislature, the National People's Congress (NPC). Women held 23 per cent of seats in the 12th NPC, yet they sponsored 44 per cent of all legislative bill proposals and more than half of the bills relevant to women's interests. Women sponsored more bills (4.8 bills) than did men (3.1 bills). We propose that there are two mechanisms driving women's outperformance: (i) women are more collaborative than men, and (ii) female leadership encourages female participation. We analyse 2,366 bills and show that women are disproportionately more active than men in all issue areas and are particularly engaged with women's issues. Our findings demonstrate that underrepresented regime outsiders (women) can carve out a space to amplify their voices, outperform insiders and shape policy direction to a certain extent within an authoritarian legislature.
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| 12 |
ID:
194289
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| Summary/Abstract |
The governance of China under Xi Jinping functions mainly through leading groups. Using the case of water governance, this article examines the interaction between these groups at three levels: the top-level design group, the riverine macroregion groups and the implementation groups. This governance model is designed to avoid nomenklatura failure, restrict fiscal federalism and reduce the agency problem between the centre and local leaders. For the purpose of water governance, China has been divided into five blocs based on river basins, which we call riverine macroregions. Using this approach, the Chinese Communist Party is combining water governance with regional development and enhancing local governments’ collective implementation of central policy.
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