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The politics of regionalism: Economic development, conflict and negotiation: Politics, Trade and Regionalism
... 'decentralisation' and 'regionalisation'. As David Goodman (1994) put, these two logics have been the nature of China's economic restructuring policies and social developments; and accordingly, local regions had different experiences over the reform years. Being far from the political centre of Beijing, but geographically and culturally close to Hong Kong and Macau, Guangzhou's experience throughout the economic reform era contributed to the formation of a distinctive local identity. ...
... This claim is supported by cultural geographers, who point out that regional powers were constantly challenging the central authorities since the dynasties in China (Oakes and Schein, 2006;Wang, 2007;Sun, 2012b). More recently, despite the CCP's one-party rule, the processes of decentralisation and regionalism have been the basic rationales of the country's economic reforms (Goodman, 1994;Cartier, 2001). As a result, the contrasting economic and social experiences generate different and even competing senses of self and belonging across geographic regions. ...
This thesis investigates the role of Chinese microblogging platform Sina Weibo in how the people of Guangzhou understand and negotiate their sense of locality. The geo-identity approach used in this thesis opens up a new approach to explore the complex power relationships that structure our society in and through digital media. It finds that although the Chinese government is trying to orchestrate a homogeneous sense of national belonging, Weibo is constantly reinforcing people’s awareness of and identification with the local. The findings show that as new communication technologies and practices reconfigure people’s daily experience and social lives, they redefine our sense of self and belonging.
... China studies in Australia encompass a multidisciplinary approach, integrating perspectives from history, politics, economics, education, and cultural studies (Golley, 2002;Golley & Ingle, 2018;Goodman, 2000Goodman, , 2002Goodman, , 2004aGoodman, , 2004bGoodman, , 2004cGoodman, , 2013Hong, 2020;Laurenceson & Chai, 2001;2003;Laurenceson & Rodgers, 2010;Lo, Xue, & Wang, 2016;Mackerras, 2001;Makeham, 2003Makeham, , 2010McCarthy & Song, 2018;Tomba, 2009Tomba, , 2017. Universities across the country have responded to this demand by developing robust curricula that not only focus on the language and history of China but also on contemporary issues such as foreign policy, and environmental sustainability. ...
... Central control and local governance in China are often presented, both within and outside the PRC, as either in competition or as fundamentally opposed . From a developmental perspective it is though more useful to see that relationship as a creative tension, often experimental and constantly evolving (Goodman 1994). The glue that holds the whole together has been and remains not so much the institutions of fiscal control as might be expected, but the CCP's control of leadership personnel throughout the politicoadministrative hierarchy, in associational as much as institutional terms. ...
Central Control and Local Governance in China
... Within an RDA regime, the state never loses its control over political and personnel affairs at both Central and regional level (Huang 1996). Moreover, state capacity has yet to be compromised, even in the Reform era (Goodman and Segal 1997). ...
Regional higher education growth in non-federal states has not attracted much academic attention. This paper is one of the first attempts to explore China’s latest higher education expansion and its systematic and regional impact from the perspective of multi-level governance. This article argues that the state had explicitly utilized the Commanding Heights Strategy to diffuse the higher education authority to sub-national level and promote regional growth. The Central authorities allowed the Ministry of Education establishing a vertical elite coalition to command the heights of tertiary institutional hierarchy and key resources for tertiary development. In addition, the state used both financial incentives and sectoral incentives to mobilize resources for regional expansion. The Commanding Heights Strategy shapes China’s response to the higher education trilemma of costs, access, and quality. Under this strategy, the unprecedented tertiary expansion has expanded college access, but at the expense of affordability, quality, and a large and increasing regional variation.
... Consequently, there is always a spatial dimension attached to the notion of citizenship and political subject in China (Rankin, 1993). The political spatiality was further reinforced during the decades of economic reforms -the processes of decentralisation and regionalisation have been the basic logic for China's economic development due to the CCP's concern over the uncertainties of economic reform (Goodman, 1994). Since Guangdong's cities (including Guangzhou) are not important locations in China's existing administrative system, 'but were strategically linked to historic trading economies or Chinese overseas communities, or both' (Cartier, 2001, p. 4), Guangdong was chosen to be a test-bed for the economic reforms. ...
... Among the few China scholars who challenged this logic is Australian scholar David S. G. Goodman. For an example, see Goodman (1994). ...
The metonymical association between 'China’ and 'revolution' is a rhetorical game savoured by contemporary China observers. Ironical references in Western press to Chinese 'consumer revolution7 and 'pop cultural revolution, made a parade of global capitalism's victory. Indisputably, vast social, cultural, and economic transformations have swept over China since 1992 when Deng Xiaoping gave his strategic Southern Excursion Talks to salvage a market reform mired in a bottleneck phase. Post-1992 China witnessed a dramatic release of forces of production and a steady annual GDP growth. Accompanying this economic takeoff is the public's growing craze for consumption. A fully fledged buyers' market has come into being. Chinese consumers, budding desires for music CDs, fast and frozen food, and convertibles may indeed serve to validate the ascendance of a 'counter-revolution' to socialist ideology. Tugging economic and cultural indexes in tandem, Western journalists and pundits have shown us time and again: China illustrates a paramount example of crony capitalism's new conquest.
... (Huang, 1998: 20) Local officials are well aware that their "careers depend on their superiors within the CCP [CPC]." (Goodman, 1994: 4) They do not rely on the vote support to maintain positions as their peers in Western countries, but "follow closely both his patron and his patron's faction, since they are the source of his authority." And "officials were always 'looking up,' accountable mainly to those above." ...
What determine Chinese party and state cadres’ promotion? Does government performance matter? Using a unique data-set on the promotion and performance of provincial party secretaries and governors (N=303) in China (2000-2004), we apply event history analysis (EHA) methods to empirically analyze the relationships between distinctive dimensions of government performance and political promotions of local cadres. Contrary to previous studies, it’s found that the whole government performance has weak effects on promotion of provincial cadres. Though the effects of economic performance are not significant, public service effectiveness impacts political promotion positively and significantly. The results imply that the criteria of government performance evaluation are dynamic and undertaken restructuring, and the era of post-GDP government performance evaluation may have been coming. The position, tenure and guanxi (social capital) of provincial cadres and their jurisdictional attributes have significantly effects on political promotion, similar to former research. Comparative analysis among different positions and areas are also conducted and discussed, and research and practical implications are concluded.
... Certainly studies show that the economic transition towards market economy has largely been propelled by active local city and regional governments, pioneering new policies with varying degrees of national endorsement or tolerance (Goodman 1994;Yang 1994;Chung 1999;Yeung 2000). One type of case is represented by the initial development of Special Economic Zones in Guangdong and Fujian provinces, from a prototype in Shekou approved by central government (in 1979) on a joint proposal from Guangdong provincial government and a Hong Kong-based company (Zhu 2005). ...
Territorial economic competition first emerged in North America, appeared in Europe during the 1980s, and recently in many LDC/transition economies chasing FDI. In China the process is key to economic development, but operates without the electoral competition and private land markets which are central in the West. We relate developments in each to a general model whereby local circumstances shape selective coalitions of economic agents, and hence policy mixes, differing in their wastefulness and redistributive effects. In the Chinese case, strong competition (involving much waste) is primarily driven by ambitious local officials seeking promotion by pursuing centrally determined growth targets.
... At the time he made his speech, he could still rely on the grassroots party organizations in the villages and therefore never considered the possibility of rural society getting out of control. The decision on reform and opening taken by the CCP's Central Committee in 1978 initiated yet another wave of decentralization (Goodman and Segal 1994, Goodman 1994, Wong 1991. In order to solve its growing budget problems the CCP central leadership had to agree to the government demanding lower levels of the administration to act as investors whenever the center did not dispose of the financial means to intervene itself. ...
While the People's Republic of China appears on a daily basis in all of the important newspapers around the world with its enormous successes in modernizing its economy, life in the Chinese countryside usually does not attract international attention. However, we know from a wide range of reports that the situation in the Chinese countryside is getting more and more complicated with local corruption, pollution and poverty growing in most parts of the country. The Chinese language press reports on a growing number of local uprisings in remote areas. While some analysts regard the situation in the countryside as a potential threat to the ongoing peaceful process of economic reform in China, China seems to be well prepared to cope with this change and the state is comparatively flexible in dealing with unrest among the rural population. So far the system itself has not been challenged by peasant discontent. This article introduces the idea that the distance between state and rural society is the basis of this flexibility. It will analyze a major policy document issued by the state and party leadership in order to show how state and rural society interact on the basis of a still insurmountable distance between state and rural society.
... This increased to 166.5 square kilometres in 1989 and 220.9 square kilometres in 1994 (Hou, 1996). The local government-enterprise coalition is fostered in order to convert more resources for local development in the face of central government's fiscal pressure ( Waston and Findlay, 1992;Goodman, 1994;Zhu, 1999). Legally, autonomous SOEs should purchase land-use rights from the state, and existing land users have to pay rental for the use of land. ...
Property rights play a key role in maintaining sustainable growth and in achieving efficient development. China’s economic reforms have stimulated urban physical development through the commodification and marketization of land-use rights and building construction. Property rights over urban land have been decentralized, but the gradualist reform of state assets has not assigned and delineated property rights clearly between the principal and agents. Within a short space of time, Shanghai, a city in a transition economy, is facing a great property glut for the first time in its history. It is the two-tier incentive structure that has created the dynamics of Shanghai’s urban physical development since 1980. The marketization of buildings makes property development a viable business. Capitalization on valued properties in the open domain motivates key actors in the development process to initiate redevelopment projects. Rapidly rising price benchmarks established by the booming property market escalate the urge to transform rents in the unsecured public domain to physical assets that are protected by the socialist use right.
In this paper, we propose a dynamic grouping negotiation model for climate mitigation based on real-world business and political negotiation protocols. Within the AI4GCC competition framework, we develop a three-stage process: group formation and updates, intra-group negotiation, and inter-group negotiation. Our model promotes efficient and effective cooperation between various stakeholders to achieve global climate change objectives. By implementing a group-forming method and group updating strategy, we address the complexities and imbalances in multi-region climate negotiations. Intra-group negotiations ensure that all members contribute to mitigation efforts, while inter-group negotiations use the proposal-evaluation framework to set mitigation and savings rates. We demonstrate our negotiation model within the RICE-N framework, illustrating a promising approach for facilitating international cooperation on climate change mitigation.
Often analysing ‘the Chinese Internet’ as a national entity, existing research has overlooked China's provincially oriented web portals, which have supplied information and entertainment to substantial user populations. Through the lenses of the critical political economy of media and critical media industry studies, this article traces the ascendance of China's provincial web from the late 1990s to the early 2000s by analysing industry yearbooks, official reports, conference records, personal memoirs, archived webpages, and user traffic data. We uncover interactions between Internet service providers, legacy media organizations, commercial Internet companies, and the central and local governments – each driven by discrete economic interests, political concerns, and imaginaries about the new technology. Delineating the emergence and consolidation of China's provincial web, our study foregrounds the understudied political economy of online content regionalization at scale. Further, it sheds new light on Chinese media policy, Internet governance, and Internet histories, especially the widely noted conservative turn of online cultures after the mid-2010s.
This book discusses the Belt and Road Initiative at the provincial level in China. It analyses the evolution of the role of local governments in Chinese foreign policy since the opening of China’s economy in 1978, showing how the provinces initially competed with each other, and how the central government was forced to react, developing more centralised policies. Unlike other books on the Belt and Road Initiative, which focus on the international aspects of the initiative, this book demonstrates the importance of the Belt and Road in reinforcing China’s unitary status and for managing and coordinating development at the local level as well as centre-province relations and province to province relations inside China.
Andrew Wedemen argues that China succeeded in moving from a Maoist command economy to a market economy because the central government failed to prevent local governments from forcing prices to market levels. Having partially decontrolled the economy in the early 1980s, economic reformers baulked at price reform, opting instead for a hybrid system wherein commodities had two prices, one fixed and one floating. Depressed fixed prices led to 'resource wars', as localities battled each other for control over undervalued commodities while inflated consumer goods prices fuelled a headlong investment boom that saturated markets and led to the erection of import barriers. Although local rent seeking and protectionism appeared to carve up the economy, in reality they had not only pushed prices to market levels and cleared the way for sweeping reforms in the 1980s, they had also pushed China past the 'pitfalls' of reform that entrapped other socialist economies.
Ziel des vorliegenden Kapitels ist es, die Betrachtungsperspektive für die Untersuchung zu öffnen und die wirtschaftspolitischen Interessen der drei ausgewählten Länder als weitere Bestimmungsfaktoren außerhalb Hong Kongs zuzulassen.
Despite the mutually complementary conditions between many of its different regions, the Chinese economy has been internally affected by various geographical, administrative and cultural barriers that exist between provincial administrations. Following an empirical analysis of the spatial efficiency of the Chinese economy, this chapter studies the possibilities and conditions under which the Chinese economy can (or cannot) be optimized spatially. We analyze the negative economic impacts of China’s interprovincial barriers. The result shows that the multiregional complementarities have not been utilized fully and that due to this existing cross-border separation the Chinese economy cannot be spatially optimized. During recent decades, China’s economic reform and open-door policies have developed its provincial and local economies disproportionally. The particular focus of the final part of this chapter examines China’s various efforts on the search for spatial economic integration.
The question of equity versus efficiency is a thorny issue that social scientists and decision-makers all over the world, regardless of ideological predisposition, have to confront. At times these two objectives of economic and social development are complementary to each other; but, more often than not, the two are at odds, and there is a trade-off to be made. In the realm of regional analysis, the trade-off is often in the form of faster but spatially uneven development versus less rapid and yet spatially more uniform growth. A complex set of interacting political, economic, social and spatial processes together shape the outcome of this process of choice.
Why have some small culture areas formed larger ones, while those large culture areas eventually disintegrated? Why are unions formed by culturally heterogeneous economies sometimes less stable and efficient than those formed by culturally homogeneous economies with different political systems? In this chapter, a model of spatial efficiency (optimality) of cultures is constructed to explain the integration and break up of culture areas. On the basis of this model, four propositions relating to the equilibrium location of and the optimal size of cultures are derived, and their political economy implications to the interactions between cultures differing in size are illustrated. The analytic narratives indicate that the increasing complexity of managing a culture area that either grows beyond a certain size or has locational disadvantages is the major source of cultural inefficiencies.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, one of the post-Mao electoral reforms was semicompetitive elections, including those for local people's congresses. A better understanding of voters' subjective motivations in these elections is critical for explaining and predicting the significant effects of the elections on sociopolitical development in rapidly changing Chinese society. Using survey data collected in Beijing China, in 1995, we reexamine arguments and findings about voters' subjective motivations reported by Shi (1999a). Contrary to Shi's arguments and findings, we find that people with stronger democratic orientation and a keener sense of internal efficacy are less likely to vote in these semicompetitive elections, while those who are identified with the regime and have affective attachments to the political authority are more likely to vote in the elections. In this article, we present the differences between our arguments and findings and Shi's. Then we draw some important political and theoretical implications from these differences.
The article discusses the efforts of a subnational government, Guangxi's Shanglin County, to support local residents as they participated in galamsey – a local reference for unregistered artisanal gold mining in Ghana. This resulted in a diplomatic crisis that damaged Sino-Ghanaian relations and threatened Beijing's efforts to access Ghana's energy resources. "In the fight against Chinese involvement in galamsey 1 , our target is not the Chinese government but those illegal Chinese immigrants who have come here to destroy our environment and cause mayhem."
This article looks at Yunnan’s theatrical, overly professionalized minority folksong and dance performances at the 2007 Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C. Yunnan’s presentation presents an opportunity to explore the way a provincial government culturally and spatially imagines its governed administrative territory through ethnic performing arts on a global stage. The article argues that Yunnan’s image crafting is not only structured by the politics of international artistic exchange. It can also be viewed as a global extension of the Yunnan provincial government’s provincial identity project and economic development scheme back home. Its strategy, described as “the artifying of politics” by one of Yunnan’s cultural officials, reveals how ethnic performing arts are programmed to aestheticize Yunnan as a place and economic–cultural brand in this context, and, thus, how the Yunnan government manages both the politicization of art and the aestheticization of politics in order to carry out its economic agenda by way of aesthetic experience.
China’s transition from a planned to a market economy has been very successful, although the reforms have been quite different from those proposed by most Western observers. Despite the fact that property rights were not well defined or formally secured, and that one party dominated the political system, China has become one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. What are the reasons for this success? Following the tradition of Hayek, Tiebout and Brennan/Buchanan some scholars place emphasis on the political decentralization initiated by the Chinese central authorities and the competition between provinces and lower level political entities triggered by this decentralization. In the EU, a specific federalist structure has been evolving, whereby the Member States transferred, step by step, more and more competences to supranational authorities. One important goal of European integration was to create a common market and thereby to improve the economic performance of the Member States. Two questions arise. First, under what conditions will a federal structure contribute to economic growth? Secondly, what are the specific features of the federal structures in the EU and China, respectively, and what are their social costs and benefits? In the next chapter, we will briefly present the concept of marketpreserving federalism, which tries to find an answer to the first question.Thereafter, we will discuss to what extent the federal structures in the EU and in China are expected to have economically beneficial consequences, and whether China can learn something from the EU experience.
The Sea of Japan Zone (SJZ) is an area that has been shaped essentially by transnational relations between the localities of western Japan, northeastern China and the Russian Far East. The emergence of this new type of space, based on interlocal cooperation, is a significant aspect of what could be called the ‘new’ regionalism, i.e. the polymorphous and multicen‐tred movement that is affecting international relations today as opposed to its more rigid version of the late 1950s. The shape of the new regionalism reflects the transformation of international relations in general: this particular regionalization process, that gave shape to the SJZ, is linked to the transnationalization of local actors. The idea of creating the SJZ, in the late 1960s, was first an external answer (interlocal cooperation) to an internal problem (uneven development in Japan). It became a reality some twenty years later as Russian and Chinese localism eventually converged with Japanese localism. Despite important domestic differences the need for local actors around the Sea of Japan to look outside for better development conditions made the synergy possible. It produced a new regional entity that needs to be defined and, for that purpose, that could be compared to other transnational zones in East Asia or even in Europe. Their common characteristic appears to be a functional approach to regional cooperation.
Notes: (1) This is an earlier, unedited version of 2004. (2) The 2nd, 3rd and 4th edition of this research, each of which has c. 40-50% new content more than its respective earlier edition, is published by Elsevier in 2012, 2018 and 2021, respectively.
See https://www.elsevier.com/books/cross-border-resource-management/guo/978-0-444-64002-4 for more details. (3) All figures and tables for this 3rd edition is available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312147451_CBRM-3E-BoxesFiguresTables
China’s urban land reforms are being implemented within a framework of general economic reforms which are gradualist in nature. Thus, the urban land reforms are moving step by step towards the establishment of a land market. This gradualism is developing in association with a redefinition of central-local intergovernmental relations in the reform era, and with the advent of localism. In this context, gradual urban land reforms have become an implicit programme to nurture local enterprises and developers, a means of fostering local government-enterprise coalitions and an instrument to strengthen local government’s position in local development. During the systematic transition toward a socialist market economy, booming Chinese cities are formulating informal local ‘urban regimes’ to compete for local growth by capitalizing on financial gains derived from a dual market of urban land and property development.
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Les réformes du sol urbaines en Chine sont mises en oeuvre dans une structure de réformes économiques générales de nature incrementaliste. Ainsi, les réformes agraires urbaines vont pas à pas vers l’établissement d’un marché de la terre. Cet incrémentalisme se développe en association avec une redéfinition des relations intergouvernementales centre-région pendant les réformes et avec l’arrivée du localisme. Dans ce contexte, les réformes du sol urbaines se sont implicitement transformées en un programme de support pour les entreprises et les promoteurs locaux, un moyen d’encourager les coalitions locales entre le gouvernement et les entreprises et un instrument de renforcement de la position du gouvernement local dans le développement local. Durant la transition systématique vers une économie de marché socialiste, les villes chinoises en plein essor élaborent des ‘régimes urbains’ locaux officieux pour améliorer la croissance locale par une capitalisation des gains financiers dérivés et du double marché du sol urbain et du développement immobilier.
This paper uses correlation of business cycles to gauge the degree of economic integration of the Chinese provinces. The more integrated the provincial economies are, the stronger their correlations should be. Only the correlations between some provinces in eastern China are found to be consistently strong, suggesting that an integrated national economy is yet to be shaped Secondly, the results imply that treating China as a single entity could be misleading, even at the macro level, especially in understanding China's business cycles.
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