Opportunities and Challenges in Studying China’s Political Economy

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

The political economy of reform-era China has been a source of fruitful research.
Scholars often find that the dynamics of China have diverged from the expectations of conventional theories in explaining important outcomes such as economic performance, reform success, and regime survival. How can these findings contribute to the broader field of political economy? This roundtable brings together an exciting group of scholars that show the constant interaction between theories and changing realities of China. Kellee Tsai starts the roundtable by pointing out the new opportunities for scholars to engage in concept formation and reformation as a way to contribute to the discipline. She provides the recent example of China’s surveillance industry that challenges the traditional assumptions about the boundary between public and private actors, and how interests of various stakeholders can be reconfigured with implications for China’s authoritarian governance. Similarly, Margaret Pearson questions how useful it is to make distinctions between “state” and “private” as usually adopted in academia and the public sphere. She finds that the Chinese economy counters traditional expectations about the rights afforded to holders of property when using the notions of “state-owned,” “private,” and “the state.” She discusses the extent to which firms—both state and private—are agents of the Chinese state. Echoing Tsai and Pearson, Ling Chen challenges the usual zero-sum assumption embodied in the debate on state-capitalism vs. private sector strength. She argues that it is crucial to examine the historically ambivalent relationship between SOEs and private businesses in urban China, especially when entrepreneurs left state-owned firms to became private entrepreneurs. That was a critical transformation that shaped their interests, strategies and the interpretation of “liberalization” within an authoritarian state. Susan Whiting challenges the hypothesis of secure property rights as a pre-requisite for economic growth. She argues that the ability to reassign property rights from lower-value to higher-value uses, making some rights insecure, is especially important during the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, while within a single economic sector, traditional theories about secure property rights still hold. Jeremy Wallace draws on a broader cross-national literature on authoritarian politics and regime survival. Wallace questions this literature’s static conception of the political economy of the regime, which often ignores political and economic reforms that shape people’s lives and the country’s development trajectories. Sharing Tsai’s concern for authoritarian governance, Wallace proposes a framework to incorporate reforms into the authoritarianism literature using evidence from China’s evolving political economy. Moving forward, Scott Kennedy reminds us of the constant interaction between theoretical development and real world changes. In particular, China’s economic change and growing global economic influence raises questions about existing approaches to political economy. He examines how the evolution of issues the Washington policy community is focused on may be affecting, for better or worse, the agenda of scholars of China’s political economy.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 13: The Politics of Communist and Former Communist Countries

Chair

• Kellee S. Tsai Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Presenters

• Kellee S. Tsai Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

• Margaret M. Pearson University of Maryland

• Ling Chen Johns Hopkins University

• Susan Whiting University of Washington

• Jeremy L. Wallace Cornell University

• Scott Kennedy Center for Strategic & International Studies