The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China

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University of California Press, Apr 28, 2023 - History - 412 pages
In the past decade, China was able to carry out economic reform without political reform, while the Soviet Union attempted the opposite strategy. How did China succeed at economic market reform without changing communist rule? Susan Shirk shows that Chinese communist political institutions are more flexible and less centralized than their Soviet counterparts were.

Shirk pioneers a rational choice institutional approach to analyze policy-making in a non-democratic authoritarian country and to explain the history of Chinese market reforms from 1979 to the present. Drawing on extensive interviews with high-level Chinese officials, she pieces together detailed histories of economic reform policy decisions and shows how the political logic of Chinese communist institutions shaped those decisions.

Combining theoretical ambition with the flavor of on-the-ground policy-making in Beijing, this book is a major contribution to the study of reform in China and other communist countries.
 

Contents

The Political Logic of Economic Reform
3
The Prereform Chinese Economy and the Decision to Initiate Market Reforms
23
CHINESE POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
53
Authority Relations The Communist Party and the Government
55
Leadership Incentives Political Succession and Reciprocal Accountability
70
Bargaining Arena The Government Bureaucracy
92
Who Is Enfranchised in the Policymaking Process?
107
Decision Rules Delegation by Consensus
116
Playing to the Provinces Fiscal Decentralization and the Politics of Reform
149
Creating Vested Interests in Reform Industrial Reform Takeoff 197881
197
Leadership Succession and Policy Conflict The Choice Between Profit Contracting and Substituting TaxforProfit 198283
221
Building Bureaucratic Consensus Formulating the TaxforProfit Policy 198384
245
The Power of Particularism Abortive Price Reform and the Revival of Profit Contracting 198588
280
CONCLUSION
331
The Political Lessons of Economic Reform in China
333
Bibliography
351

Chinese Political Institutions and the Path of Economic Reforms
129
ECONOMIC REFORM POLICYMAKING
147

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Page 6 - As the Chinese economists put it, Deng Xiaoping and his reformist lieutenants, Zhao Ziyang and Hu Yaobang, pushed against the stone wall of the Chinese bureaucracy. Where they found loose stones, they pushed through; when stones would not move, they did not waste energy pushing

About the author (2023)

Susan L. Shirk is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of Competitive Comrades: Career Incentives and Student Strategies in China (California, 1982).

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