Recent asia_eslictme items

Corruption and Market Reform in China

Fri, 25 Jul 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Everyone knows that officials in China are corrupt. It would be difficult to find a China scholar who would disagree outright with this statement. However, because official corruption is illegal, immoral or both, it is painstakingly concealed from the public and from researchers alike. So, what do we do about it if we can’t even measure it? Many authors have answered this challenge by using descriptive methods that discuss political corruption as a broad phenomenon that has commonalties of both cause and effect across many different situations. These works often focus more on the effects and potential future effects of corruption than on explanations and possibly helpful responses to its existence. In this paper, I propose that a solution to the problem of studying political corruption in China can be found in the analytic approach of game theory. I model particularistic gift-giving from citizens to officials for necessary goods as a product (equilibrium outcome) of choices...

The Implications of China's Accession to the World Trade Organization

Fri, 25 Jul 2003 00:00:00 +0000

China formally applied to rejoin the GATT in 1986. After more than ten years of negotiation, however, China’s entry into WTO seems as remote as ever. This unprecedented long application time in the GATT/WTO history, coupled with the uniqueness of the China case and the rapid growth of the Chinese economy, has made this subject one of the heated topics in the IPE field. Many works have addressed the rules and principles of WTO and status quo of China’s trade regime to imply a gap in between. By doing so, these works emphasize the insufficiency of China’s progresses on reductions of tariff and non-tariff barriers, lack of transparency in its laws and regulations, and the lack of national treatment of foreign companies. These are the major issues on the negotiation table; however, little work has been done the goal of the Chinese economy, which is the reason behind its economic and trade policies and its reform on the regime. To some degree it will have deeper impacts on its policies...

Testing the Cultural Boundaries of a Model of Trust: Subordinate-Manager Relationships in China, Norway and the United States

Fri, 25 Jul 2003 00:00:00 +0000

The purpose of this study is to test a model of trust in the organizational setting, incorporating hypotheses about the effect of culture on the trust process. It is predicted that subordinates’ trust in their supervisors is a function of their perceptions of their supervisors’ behavior and their own propensity to trust. In addition, subordinates’ cultural orientation toward relationships moderates the relationship between their perceptions of their managers’ trustworthiness and trust, and their orientation to human nature directly affects propensity to trust. These predictions are tested by using data collected with questionnaires completed by businesspeople in China (n=180), Norway (n=128) and the United States (n=203).

Dramatic Polilcy Shifts and Methodical Institutional Modifications: Developing an Indicator of Unemployment

Fri, 25 Jul 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Since the initiation of market reforms in 1978, the central government has used the principles of gradualism and experimentation to develop a labor market with Chinese characteristics. We show how these principles have manifested themselves in the development of an unemployment indicator. We find that top leaders of the party state make broad compromises that middle level officials seek to carry out given their inherited situation. Government agencies sometimes vary in their willingness to break with the status quo. In the quest to define and measure unemployment, the National Bureau of Statistics has championed straightforwardness and market transparency.

The River Runs Dry: Examining Water Shortages in the Yellow River Basin

Fri, 25 Jul 2003 00:00:00 +0000

The Yellow River (Huang He) has been deservedly cast as a source of great prosperity and great despair in the annals of Chinese history. Droughts have been a part of the struggles of the Yellow River basin’s population and, in an arguably less dramatic fashion, exacted an even more crippling toll than floods. In recent years, a lack of water has once again reawakened the anxiety caused by droughts, attracting the attention of Chinese policymakers and the Chinese media. In 18 out of the past 26 summers the Yellow River has run dry further and further upstream for longer and longer periods of time. During the summer of 1998, the river failed to reach its mouth at Bohai Bay for over 250 days.

Water managers in China cite a combination of unique characteristics or tedian as factors that contribute to the basin’s water shortages. The most obvious of these tedian is the yellow soil or huang tu from which the Yellow River gets its name. The Yellow River is the most heavily sediment-laden...

The April 25 Incident and Its Implications: A Study of the Buddhist Cult "Falun Gong" vis-a-vis the CCP's Ideological Education Work Among the Youth in a Period of Dramatic Economic Reforms

Fri, 25 Jul 2003 00:00:00 +0000

How did Falun Gong strike such a deep chord in so many Chinese people and find such a fertile ground for recruitment? This paper studies the nature of Falun Gong, and attempts to address issues concerning the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ideological work on the Chinese youth, and crisis of faith among the Chinese people brought forth by economic reforms in recent years. The hypothesis is: the CCP’s reemphasis on ideological education only aggravates the crisis of faith among the youth because the ideological work idealized by the CCP pushes for one direction, but the realities experienced by the youth push for a different direction. This has also allowed alternative values, such as Falun Gong, to fill the void left open by the decline of the CCP’s official ideology.

The Domestic Distributional Effects of China's Opening to the International Economy and the Politics of Institutional Choice

Fri, 25 Jul 2003 00:00:00 +0000

China’s opening to the international economy has brought about a great transformation in its economy, society, and political system. Allowing trade, investment, international finance, and other vehicles of the international economy into China’s domestic economy has changed the distribution of assets in society and, in turn, has changed the distribution of political power among important domestic constituents. I argue in this brief survey that the pattern and timing of China’s opening was driven by the anticipated distributional effects on important domestic constituents of specific opening policies. Similarly, the areas that remain closed can be explained with the same distributional logic.

This survey of the patterns of China’s opening is based on a simple, and highly stylized, three-actor model in which top leaders vie for support from subordinate constituents in either central government or local government positions. The main thrust of the argument is that top leaders...

Social Challenges of Transitions: Individual Narratives about the Impact of Transition on Self, Family, and Society

Fri, 25 Jul 2003 00:00:00 +0000

The social dimensions of economic transition that make headlines -- unemployment, corruption, the reemergence of prostitution and drug use, a huge floating population, and the rise of new millionaires -- tend to sensationalize the changes taking place on the Chinese social landscape. Yet there are other changes that have been no less dramatic for the individuals who experience them, and economic transition could not be taking place without them. Many of these new features may seem so familiar to the Western reader that it is hard to understand what is new about them. However, when highlighted against the way things were before, even eight years earlier, it is clear that the changes are real and significant. Among the most striking social changes affecting ordinary Chinese is increasing social differentiation, an important dimension of which is the emergence of an urban middle class.

In this paper I will describe some of the signs of transition that are evidenced in interviews...

Housing Choices and Changing Residential Patterns in Transitional Urban China

Fri, 25 Jul 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Aiming to introduce market mechanisms to an administratively managed and heavily subsidized housing system, the ongoing housing reform in urban China has brought dramatic changes in housing provision and consumption. Chinese households have started to enjoy freedom of housing choice that was not possible in socialist China. Yet, their choices are constrained because of the transitional nature of the current housing system where both institutional forces and market mechanisms operate. It is the goal of this research to examine how these two types of forces interact and how households make their housing choices in the transitional housing system. In contrast to the economic and socio-demographic perspectives on housing choices in the Western literature, I argue that a framework incorporating social relationships between the state, work units and employees is needed to understand households’ housing choice in transitional urban China. Associated with housing choices, the homogenous...

Work Units and Income Inequality: the Effect of Market Transition in Urban China

Fri, 25 Jul 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Nee's market transition theory claims that redistributive power will decline and returns to human capital will increase as state socialist economies are transformed into market economies. However, many other scholars have discovered that either the influence of redistributive power persists or returns to human capital decline. In this paper, I analyze the effect of marketization on individuals= income inequality in urban China as mediated by work units, which are classified into three types: Low Profit State Firms (LPFs), High Profit State Firms (HPFs), and Market Firm (MFs). LPFs are farthest from the market, HPFs are closer to the market and MFs have to be completely exposed to market conditions. Results based on two urban survey data sets show that while the influence of redistributive power declines, returns to human capital do not monotonically increase, as market transition theory predicts. Although returns to human capital are higher in the market sector than in the...

Foreign Ownership, Foreign Technology and China's Economic Transition: A Case Study on Firm Performance

Fri, 25 Jul 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Numerate empirical studies have documented a positive correlation between trade, or the "openness," of an economy and its economic growth. The exceptional performance of some developing economies in the past decades seems to have convinced economists as well as government policy makers that developing countries will benefit from opening up their economies. The traditional concerns over the foreign dominance in domestic economies and the loss of non-renewable resources have slowly subsided. China, like many developing economies have begun pursuing a more open trade framework. Despite the many difficulties China is still facing today, the economic reform started two decades ago has not only transformed the once centrally planned economy to a market-oriented economy, but brought impressive economic growth over a fairly long period of time as well. During this transition, foreign investment and other forms of foreign participation in the economy have played a crucial role. China’s...

The Political Economy of China's Urban Reforms

Fri, 25 Jul 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Why did China's national authority (the center) allow some provinces to adopt deeper urban reforms than others? This paper evaluates alternative answers found in political-economic literature. My data analyses suggest that the center, in implementing urban reforms in the provinces, primarily tried to increase revenue income. The center also attempted to garner political support from the rural consumers and surplus labor, and generate higher returns from material inputs in the provinces. Interest groups appear to be irrelevant. This conclusion is reached by testing the growth, revenue, political-support, and interest-group explanations for different extents of provincial involvement in urban reforms.