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ID:
137206
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| Summary/Abstract |
China has established a petition system to elicit information about grievances. However, the petition system may have perverse effects because it also reveals to the center the failure of local-level officials to resolve those grievances. Anecdotal accounts suggest that local officials have incentive to silence petitioners, often with the use of repression. In this article we study whether non–regime threatening petitions would provoke local governments' coercive response. To tackle the endogenous relationship between petition and repression, we take advantage of a natural experiment afforded by a change in hydroelectricity policy in China. In particular, we use provincial hydropower outputs as an instrument to identify citizen petitions. We find that citizen petitions significantly increase a province's spending on its repressive apparatus. The results suggest a paradoxical outcome of China's petition system: while it may help reduce the national authority's use of repression, it has caused an explosion of repression within the authoritarian system as a whole.
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| 2 |
ID:
134766
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| Summary/Abstract |
China’s contemporary leadership does not have a “grand strategy” for the 21st century and it is unlikely that the new leaders, who came into power in 2012–13, will be able to craft one. This is a viewpoint that goes against the established truth about China’s comeback as a great power in the international arena. China observers concur and to some extent admire the Chinese leadership’s ability to think long term and commitment to patiently work towards the realisation of a grand vision for the “Middle Kingdom”. There is, undoubtedly, a great deal of strategic thinking going on in China, but it has not been translated into any coherent strategy. Today’s Chinese leaders are pragmatists, seeing and seizing every opportunity that arises without a binding plan. They are also introverted, however, and forced to engage in short-term fire-fighting rather than think long term.
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