Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Debating the Consensuses
- PART I Deconstructing the Beijing Consensus
- PART II Examining the Beijing Consensus in Context
- 4 The Legal Maladies of “Federalism, Chinese Style”
- 5 Lessons from Chinese Growth: Rethinking the Role of Property Rights in Development
- 6 Size Matters? Renminbi Internationalization and the Beijing Consensus
- 7 A Chinese Model for Tax Reforms in Developing Countries?
- 8 The Chinese Model for Securities Law
- PART III Revisiting the Beijing Consensus
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - The Legal Maladies of “Federalism, Chinese Style”
from PART II - Examining the Beijing Consensus in Context
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 April 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Debating the Consensuses
- PART I Deconstructing the Beijing Consensus
- PART II Examining the Beijing Consensus in Context
- 4 The Legal Maladies of “Federalism, Chinese Style”
- 5 Lessons from Chinese Growth: Rethinking the Role of Property Rights in Development
- 6 Size Matters? Renminbi Internationalization and the Beijing Consensus
- 7 A Chinese Model for Tax Reforms in Developing Countries?
- 8 The Chinese Model for Securities Law
- PART III Revisiting the Beijing Consensus
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Introduction
According to those who claim the existence of a “Beijing Consensus,” a key element of the Chinese Model of economic development is the willingness of China's authoritarian government to experiment with policy choices. The literature on Chinese political economy has in turn analyzed policy experimentation chiefly in terms of the interactions between the national government and subnational political actors. For example, Yingyi Qian, Barry Weingast, and their fellow authors advanced the well-known hypothesis of “market preserving federalism,” attributing China's economic growth before the early 1990s to both the (purported) ability and strong fiscal incentives on the part of subnational governments to implement pro-growth policies. Zhang Jun, Zhou Li-An, and their collaborators have also developed a body of research demonstrating how the centralized personnel and appointment system within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and decentralized policy implementation jointly created conditions for a unique form of political “yardstick competition,” and how the strong political incentives generated by such competition may have contributed to economic growth. Other prominent social scientists have offered critiques or modifications of such theories, but all appear to agree that analyzing the dialectic between central control and subnational experimentation is key to the investigation of China's political economy.
However, in the study of Chinese law (whether pursued inside or outside China), the theme of federalism – or “central-local relations” – has so far played entirely a background role. Central-local relations may enter generic descriptions of the Chinese political system in which the country's legal institutions are situated, but they are never the focus of theoretical, empirical, or even doctrinal legal analysis. Instead, aside from investigations of particular substantive areas of law, descriptions of the Chinese legal systems have privileged judicial institutions, the general discourse about the rule of law, and their relations to authoritarianism as themes for inquiry. Since analyzing center-local relations has been one of the vital sources of insight into Chinese authoritarianism, the insulation of legal studies from the study of “federalism, Chinese style” means that legal scholars’ understanding of authoritarianism also remains generic and atheoretical.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Beijing Consensus?How China Has Changed Western Ideas of Law and Economic Development, pp. 97 - 118Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2017
- 1
- Cited by