Ran Tao

Ran Tao
Chinese University of Hong Kong Shenzhen · School of Humanities and Social Science

Ph.D

About

75
Publications
20,593
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3,619
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Publications

Publications (75)
Article
Under intense fiscal pressure, China's local governments raced against each other to offer business-friendly policies to mobile industries. Lax environmental enforcement was widely adopted across the country and many poor regions became havens for polluting factories. We argue that this adverse effect went deeper than the interjurisdictional compet...
Chapter
China’s new development wave since the mid-1990s is distinguishable by its strong urbanism. Urban governments, particularly at municipal and county levels, rushed to build industrial parks. The urban landscape was also fundamentally transformed by their massive investments in infrastructure—both residential and commercial properties. How to explain...
Chapter
With unprecedented migration taking place in China, millions of children are profoundly affected. Using a sample of 916 children (aged 5–18) of migrants and the life course perspective, this chapter examines the impact of parental migration on children’s health. Results show that migration has a complex impact on children’s health. While migrating...
Article
Full-text available
China has adopted a transfer-based fiscal decentralisation scheme since the mid-1990s. In the 1994 tax sharing reform, the central government significantly raised its share of government revenue vis-à-vis local governments by taking most of the newly created value-added tax on manufacturing. One aim for the adoption of the transfer-based fiscal sch...
Article
China launched a massive poverty alleviation program in the 1990s that focused on nationally designated poverty counties. By injecting earmarked transfers with clear spending mandates, the central government hoped for major investments in productive capacities in the poverty counties so they could develop sustainably. Comparing fiscal data of count...
Article
Do non-Westerners donate differently? Drawing on a unique survey after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, this article reports some empirical findings about Chinese donation behavior. Our empirical analysis confirms the importance of various socioeconomic factors in charitable giving. What distinguishes the Chinese case from other societies is the role o...
Article
This article explains the regional variation in the electoral rules governing village election in China. We argue that China’s fast urbanization and land development have undermined the quality of rural democracy because local government officials faced pressure to ensure “right” cadres elected, and therefore had motivation to manipulate election r...
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Full-text available
As China is experiencing an urban revolution with massive rural‐to‐urban migration, millions of children are profoundly affected by their parents’ migration and their decisions about family arrangements. With the discriminatory hukou system and harsh living conditions in cities, the dilemma migrant parents face is whether they should take their chi...
Article
Existing research highlights a lack of organizational basis for collective action in nondemocratic regimes. This study reevaluates this view by examining the distinct roles played by different organizations (embedded in distinct state-society relations) in different stages of collective action (occurrence and success) in rural China.With both quant...
Chapter
This book brings together essays that tackle the political aspects of development. It offers various explanations for variations in the pace and pattern of economic development across both time and space, focusing on a particular variable or set of variables such as civil conflict, natural resources, and regime type. The book traces the trajectory...
Article
With unprecedented migration taking place in China, millions of children are profoundly affected. Using a sample of 916 children (aged 5-18) of migrants and the life course perspective, this article examines the impact of parental migration on children's health. Results show that migration has a complex impact on children's health. Although migrati...
Chapter
Full-text available
既有理论指出,社会管理离不开社会组织,社会组织对于加强和创新社会管理具有重要作用。本文通过对基于大样本的一手数据进行统计分析,从实证上确认了上述理论的有效性。本文发现,中国农村的“纠纷调解社团”能够显著降低村庄中发生大规模群体性上访的可能性,从而推动实现优化社会秩序与促进社会和谐的社会管理目标。然而,通过更加细致的比较研究,本文也发现既有理论的解释力是有边界的。在当今中国农村,无论是具有纠纷调解功能的官方社团,还是其他不具备纠纷调解功能的“半独立社团”,都不能切实起到消解大规模集体性上访事件的作用,而只有“纠调社团”才能在社会管理中发挥与众不同的积极作用。原因在于,此类社会组织独有两个结构性特征——即“纠调功能”和“半独立性”,因为相对更容易发育成为被政府和民众所共同认可的社会权威。积极培养...
Article
China's rising demand for natural resources and its growing presence in many poor and resource-rich countries have been criticized for promoting neo-colonialism in the 21st century. Using panel data for 135 developing countries from 1995 to 2007, the present paper empirically evaluates the validity of such claims. Our findings do not support the re...
Article
Full-text available
China’s new development wave since the mid-1990s is distinguishable by its strong urbanism. Urban governments, particularly at municipal and county levels, rushed to build industrial parks. Urban landscape was also fundamentally transformed by their massive investments in infrastructures – both residential and commercial properties. How to explain...
Article
Full-text available
China is experiencing an unprecedented urban revolution, with massive rural-to-urban migration. Owing to the discriminatory hukou system, millions of migrants are excluded from accessing subsidized housing and suffer severe housing poverty. How to provide decent and affordable housing to migrants is an unprecedented challenge in China. In this pape...
Article
This study examines differences in children's subjective well-being and health across the full range of family structures that have emerged in China's rural areas because of parental labour migration. It uses original cross-sectional survey data collected in 2010 in Anhui and Jiangxi provinces from children aged 8–17 years, as well as from their te...
Article
How does female out-migration reconfigure gender values surrounding son preference in origin communities? We propose that the feminization of migration has the potential to infuse origin communities with economic and ideational changes that may challenge son preference. Rural China provides an interesting setting, both because its unprecedented lab...
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Full-text available
We review James Kung and Shuo Chen's study, published in the American Political Science Review, on the causes of China's Great Leap Famine (1959–1961). Kung and Chen explain the variations in provincial leaders' radicalism on the basis of the career incentives facing the provincial First Secretaries. In this article, we question the validity of the...
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Full-text available
While China's ruling Communist Party has benefited from a reservoir of political trust engendered by more than three decades of rapid economic growth, it is confronted with rising social tensions and the prospect of instability. The number of mass incidents, which is a key measure of instability, has risen enormously, and a major source of such inc...
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Full-text available
Based on our analysis of a survey of 120 villages across six Chinese provinces, as well as more than one hundred in-depth interviews across these same regions, we found two distinct pathways to local political stability. A “virtuous path,” based on civic participation and engagement, in which autonomous or quasi-independent organizations play impor...
Article
This essay draws on an original cross‐sectional survey of 1,010 children and their guardians in highly migratory regions of Anhui and Jiangxi provinces located in China's interior. It uses propensity score matching, a technique that mitigates endogenity, to examine the impact of parental migration and post‐migration guardianship arrangements on the...
Article
Drawing on a survey of migrants in 12 cities across four major urbanising areas in China, this paper analyses rural migrants’ intention for permanent urban settlement. We focus on one sizeable but often overlooked group of rural migrants, that is, the self-employed. Our hypothesis is that the self-employed migrants tend to have stronger intention f...
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Full-text available
The functionalist reasoning of institutional changes builds on individual rationality and explains institutional changes from the demand side. While insightful, a comprehensive understanding also needs to take into account the supply side. The state, as the ultimate supplier of institutional changes, plays the pivotal role of agency; therefore, its...
Article
Using an instrumental variable approach, we analyze survey data to untangle the relationship between social and political trust in contemporary China. We find strong evidence that political trust enhances social trust in China and the results are robust to a range of measures, including the generalized social trust question, as well as three contex...
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Full-text available
Safe and affordable housing is accepted as a basic right in the modern world. Studies on transitional societies have demonstrated how politicized the housing market can become and how housing consumption is determined by both economic forces and public rules. Rural housing in China offers a unique institutional environment. While residential land i...
Article
To explain China's dramatic economic growth, researchers have proposed a “tournament thesis.” According to this thesis, the central government's ability to set growth targets has played a crucial role in growth since political promotion is largely based on local economic growth. We use provincial officials' career mobility data to test this thesis....
Chapter
Full-text available
The burst of housing bubbles in 2008 triggered the worst economic crisis in the United States since the Great Depression. Financial globalization has exacerbated the contagion and a worldwide crisis soon followed. As a major trading country, China depended heavily on export markets in the United States and Europe; therefore its economy experienced...
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Full-text available
Rural residential land represents one of the most important land use types in China. However, the literature so far has paid insufficient attention to the patterns and efficiencies of this type of land use. To fill in this gap, this paper uses a national survey to analyze the institutional setups for rural residential land use, to assess the effect...
Article
China's fiscal arrangement in the 1980s has preserved local governments' incentive but the 1994 fiscal reform recentralized revenues. Since then, farmers' tax burdens have risen steeply and become a major challenge to the state legitimacy. How to account for the huge regional variation? Why were some localities able to tax more heavily than others?...
Article
This article draws on a survey conducted in six provinces in summer 2008 to investigate the determinants of son preference in rural China. The analysis confirms the conventional wisdom that son preference is embedded within patrilineal family structures and practices. We extend our analysis by exploring specific aspects of variation within patrilin...
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Full-text available
In China, rural land is collectively owned at the village level. Village officials usually have the power to reallocate land property across families on an ongoing basis due to demographic changes in the village. Realizing that frequent land reallocation and abusive land requisition will undermine economic productivity as well as social stability,...
Article
In this paper, we argue that China's grain procurement system as a major instrument in rural taxation survived the communes and lost its importance only gradually in recent years. However, as agricultural liberalization progressed, the traditional tax instruments of ‘tax deduction prior to grain procurement payment’ and implicit taxation through ‘p...
Article
Villagers' committee elections in Chinese rural areas highlight the promise as well as the challenge of democratization in a one-party state. Why are there huge regional variations in terms of voter turnout rate? Based on a large survey conducted in 2005, we argue that electoral procedures have played a crucial role in signaling the democratic inte...
Article
Democratic governance is believed to improve government responsiveness to citizens' demand for public goods. In China, villagers' committee elections represent a major progress in China's development toward good governance. We develop a rational model to explain villagers' participation. Utilizing a national survey of rural residents in 2005, this...
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Full-text available
在总结中国农村社团和群体性抗争活动既有研究的基础上,本文通过随机抽样数据的定量分析,描述了民间社团在中国农村的发育情况,重点讨论了具备两个性质的“农村半独立社团”。第一,社团的实际负责人不是政府官员或村干部;第二,社团的重大决策不需经由基层政府或村干部批准。实证研究发现,当这些“半独立的社团”具备了社会纠纷调解职能时,就可以有效地削减村庄的大规模群体性上访,而由官方控制的负责治保或民调类的社团却无法达到同样的效果。文章结合实地调查的经验,对该实证发现的现实机理及其政策含义进行了多方面探讨。
Article
There has been a growing interest in transfer of development rights (TDR) in urban planning and economics literatures. Most studies report new practices and evaluate their policy effectiveness in developed countries, such as the United States and Europe. This paper aims to fill in an empirical gap in TDR studies by analyzing a case from a developin...
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Full-text available
By analysing the evolution of local governments' roles in different periods of China's growth in transition, this paper explores local fiscal incentives to use subsidised land and infrastructure as key instruments in regional competition for manufacturing investment since the mid 1990s. Local land development behaviour is related to China's current...
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This paper uses a 2003 household survey to examine implementation and impacts of China’s Sloping Land Conversion Program. We find that land targeting has been strongly influenced by program goals, but that mistargeting also occurred. Using a treatment effects approach to evaluate program impact, we find evidence of positive impact on cropping, husb...
Article
With a budget of RMB 337 billion (over US$ 40 billion), the Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP) is one of China's most ambitious environmental initiatives, and is one of the world's largest land-conservation programs. Pending successful completion, it will have significant implications for China's forests and remaining natural ecosystems, repres...
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Full-text available
In order to improve the effectiveness of redistributive policies, in 2002 the Chinese government increased fiscal transfers and imposed more stringent regulations on the use of earmarked funds. This article evaluates the impact this had on K county in a north-western province. The case study finds that the misappropriation of earmarked transfers di...
Article
Continued urban—rural income disparity poses a serious policy challenge in China’s economic transition. As the Chinese economy booms and the state’s fiscal capacity grows, there should be a corresponding increase in the center’s capacity to redress urban—rural inequality. However, it seems that the stronger state extractive capacity since the mid-1...
Chapter
This chapter attempts to reveal some stylized facts and features of taxes and fees in rural China based on a 10-province large sample rural survey from 1986–1999 (database of Fixed Observation Points of Agriculture Ministry). In contrary to many other people's claim, we found the taxes and fees burden for the sampled farmers' households as a share...
Article
Based on a survey of rural school districts in Western China, this essay explores the effects of fiscal centralisation on the relationship between local governance and school district management, most particularly on how managerial power is distributed in the rural education sector. The essay also examines some of the possible effects that changes...
Article
The emergence of self-governing social organizations is one of the most significant yet unexplored developments in rural China. By conducting a nationwide village-level survey, we find that these organizations are playing an important role in the provision of local public goods and services. To explain villagers' participation rates in these organi...
Article
China's state planned land use system, including regulations such as setting planned quotas for land use, basic cropland preservation, and pursuing a balance between the conversion of arable land into non-agricultural use and the supplement of new agricultural land, has substantially constrained the economic growth of industrial provinces in China....
Article
In the past decade or so, local governments in China have significantly increased their land development activities by acquiring land from farmers and leasing it on a large scale to industrial and commercial developers. This paper is an analysis of how land is used under China's existing institutional background as a competitive incentive for local...
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This paper considers the issue of local "land finance" in the context of China's fast urban expansion. In an analysis of China s land requisition and public leasing system we argue that low-cost land acquisition is the fundamental cause of land-related distortions that have occurred during China s urbanization. Granting farmers the power to negotia...
Article
Temporary migration due to lack of social security for migrants, rural land tenure insecurity due to frequent land reallocation and abusive land requisition due to lack of functioning land markets are all major policy challenges that China is facing in its yet-to-be finished economic transition. Although there have been intensive studies and variou...
Article
Using nationally representative data, the present paper examines the impact of China's ongoing rural tax reform on farmers. The difficulties in further local governance restructuring are also discussed. It is argued that the issues associated with rural taxation and local governance in China result from inherent tension between an increasingly libe...
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Full-text available
This paper examines the historical evolution of China's rural taxation system and provides an initial assessment of the ongoing rural tax reform. It is argued that the issue of rural taxation and local governance in China is one typical challenge arising from the inherent tension between an increasingly liberalized economic system and a still centr...
Chapter
Over the past three decades the developing world has seen increasing devolution of political and economic power to local governments. Decentralization is considered an important element of participatory democracy and, along with privatization and deregulation, represents a substantial reduction in the authority of national governments over economic...
Article
This paper is an attempt to present an analysis of China's decentralization and local governance practices, the dilemmas rooted in the current institution. We argue that the misbehavior of local government officials is endogenous to China's central-local structure and that competition among localities has become distorted and constrained by various...
Article
China's economic transition has reached a stage where the past experimental approach is no longer sufficient. Future policy reforms need to be carried out in a holistic rather than a piecemeal manner. This paper analyzes the reforms of two related institutions in China: the household registration system and the rural land system. We argue that furt...
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Full-text available
By measuring the tax burdens for both Chinese urban and the rural households in the 1990s, we find that the taxes on the urban households were mainly indirect taxes through consumption of goods and services while those on rural households were largely direct taxes such as state agricultural taxes, local fees and tuition. Although the incomes of rur...
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Using data from 28 provinces and five distinct census periods, we identify what factors have led to declines in forest growth, or equivalently, factors important in moving Chinese forests away from sustainable management since the 1970 reforms. These reforms gave increased autonomy to local forest managers. The central government sets harvest limit...
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This paper places the problem of Chinese rural taxation in the context of government regulation and seeks to present an integrated theoretical framework of Chinese rural development in the past two decades. Our theoretical framework reconciles the seemingly contradictory facts that the average level of rural taxation relative to rural net income di...
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Replaced with revised version of paper 08/25/03.
Article
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Economics, December 2002. Includes bibliographical references.

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