Chinese Politics Mini-Conference: Surveying the Landscape: Knowledge Production, Bureaucracy and Policymaking

Session Submission Type: Created Panel

Part of Mini-Conference

• Chinese Politics Mini-Conference

Session Description

Major shifts in Chinese politics and society are occurring just as the study of
Chinese politics faces critical challenges. Access to reliable data sources has been disrupted,
expertise has narrowed, and theoretical frameworks long prominent in the study of China
are being revised based on data that is available. This panel provides a picture of the state of
the Chinese politics subfield and its limitations, and addresses key debates on
bureaucratization and policymaking at the heart of the field.
Two papers uncover important limitations and directions in the study of Chinese
politics. Edmund Cheng and Samson Yuen’s paper examines the patterns of knowledge
production and diffusion in the study of Chinese politics based on the bibliometrics analysis
of over 75,000 articles in area studies journals and 250,000 articles in political science
journals between 1956 and 2022. They find that while the China field is increasingly
productive and methodologically more advanced and diverse, its intellectual diffusion
toward the discipline of political science remains circumscribed. Amid increased
authoritarian control, lingering pandemic restrictions and rising geopolitical tensions
between China and the global North, the authors raise concerns over the resilience of the
China field. Franziska Barbara Keller, Jos Dornschneider-Elkink, and Hans Hanpu Tung study
China experts and their interactions, bringing to light echo chamber effects and information
biases. Using original network data and monthly surveys of experts, they find evidence of
cliqueness based on geographic location and profession – and a central role of US-based
experts as well as homophily in this interaction network with regards to their risk
assessment. Their work has implications for how database organizers recruit their experts,
and for policy-makers to critically examine the sociology of knowledge among China experts
who inform national policymaking.
Another three papers present important findings that engage and modify
longstanding theories of bureaucratization and policymaking in China. Engaging scholarship
that follows the ever-present tension between centralization and discretion in policymaking,
Jessica Teets and Xiang Gao draw on new survey data of over 1400 local officials to show
how policymaking is perceptibly centralizing, with remaining areas of local discretion across
policy issues and geography. While centralizing reforms create more professional and less
corrupt local officials, and standardize policymaking across China, they result in unintended
consequences of more inconsistent policymaking and enforcement and cadre
demoralization. Their findings add broader empirical data to the trend of centralization
revealed in existing case study research concentrated in specific locations or policy areas.
Lizhi Liu and Reed Lei explore a surprising wave of deregulation of the bureaucracy
under the Xi administration considering the popular belief that the administration has been
centralizing power on every front. They analyze what strategic considerations are driving
China’s sweeping deregulation program by examining which regulatory approval items are
most likely to be removed. They find that deregulation is not about reducing the overall
power of the state, but about restructuring power and relocating bureaucratic resources. As
the government removes ex ante administrative approvals for economic activities, it also
creates new powers for ex post regulation. Second, Chinese leaders have used deregulation
as a tool to discipline the bureaucracy: reducing corruption opportunities and regulatory
discretion.
Finally, Zhihang Ruan traces the policy evolution of China’s land ownership system in
comparative perspective with that of Vietnam. Vietnam has a “unitary” system where all
land is in name owned by the state, while China’s dualist land ownership system enables the
state to limit the transferability of rural land and maintain monopolistic power over the
primary land market in cities. Using newly available historical archives and extensive
fieldwork, the author traces the roots of the land ownership regimes, showing that these
divergent regimes cannot be explained by China’s generally stronger state power vis-à-vis
society compared to Vietnam. Rather, the Chinese state’s restrained strategy towards
nationalization at this critical juncture produced an unexpected and likely unintended
dualist regime that proved especially useful for later land expropriation and capital
mobilization.
Together, the papers present a bird’s-eye view of the China politics subfield,
highlighting areas of strengths and weakness, and suggesting the need to revise
longstanding assumptions underlying the study of policymaking and bureaucratization in
China

Sub Unit

• Division 13: Politics of Communist and Former Communist Countries

Individual Presentations

• Researching Chinese Politics in Critical Times: A Bibliometric Analysis - Edmund W. Cheng, City University of Hong Kong; Samson Yuen, Hong Kong Baptist University; Yuner Zhu, City University of Hong Kong

• Should We Be Worried about Echo Chambers among China Experts? - Franziska Barbara Keller, University of Bern; Johan A. Dornschneider-Elkink, University College Dublin; Hans Hanpu Tung, National Taiwan University

• Beyond Fragmented Authoritarianism: Centralizing Policymaking in China - Xiang Gao, Zhejiang University; Jessica C. Teets, Middlebury College

• Turning the Blade Inward: Demystifying China's Deregulation Program - Lizhi Liu, Georgetown University; Zhenhuan Lei, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

• State-Building and Land Nationalization in China and Vietnam - Zhihang Ruan, Hunter College, CUNY

Chair

• Sabrina Habich-Sobiegalla Freie Universität Berlin

Discussants

• Iza Ding Northwestern University

• May Farid University of San Diego