Andrew Martín Fischer

Subsidizing Tibet: An Interprovincial Comparison of Western China up to the End of the Hu–Wen Administration

This study estimates the extent of subsidization in the ten provinces of western China from 1990 to 2012 with the aim of highlighting the exceptionality of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) leading up to and following the widespread Tibetan protests that swept through four Chinese provinces in 2008. Although the Tibet development model was criticized by many Chinese economists in the 1980s and 1990s for being highly subsidy-dependent and inefficient, these aspects of dependence and inefficiency were exacerbated even further under the Hu–Wen administration, particularly following the 2008 protests. While subsidies and investment also increased in other western provinces, the exceptionality of the TAR stands out in terms of the levels of subsidization attained, the sheer disassociation of these subsidies from changes in the local productive economy, and the degree to which ownership in the local economy has come to be dominated by external interests. The recent phase of intensive subsidization has thereby exacerbated the dependence of local Tibetan livelihoods on these state strategies, while at the same time intensified the state-led economic integration of the region into the rest of China through externalized patterns of ownership and consolidated state control. Arguments that the resultant inefficiencies and social tensions are owing to a marketization of social relations or to cultural insensitivity and lack of adaptation to local circumstances de-emphasize the central role of the state in shaping the deeply structural character of these transformations.

Reconceiving social exclusion

Several ambiguities in the social exclusion literature – in both the fields of social policy and development studies – fuel the common criticism that the concept is redundant with respect to already existing poverty approaches, particularly more multidimensional and processual approaches, such as relative or capability poverty. In order to resolve these ambiguities and to derive value-added from the concept, social exclusion needs to be reconceptualised in a way that decisively opts for a processual definition, without reference to norms and/or poverty. Accordingly, a working definition of social exclusion is proposed as structural, institutional or agentive processes of repulsion or obstruction. This definition gives attention to processes occurring vertically throughout social hierarchies and opens up applications of the social exclusion approach to analyses of stratification, segregation and subordination in development studies, especially within contexts of high or rising inequality. Three strengths and applications include situations where exclusions lead to stratifying or impoverishing trajectories without any short-term poverty outcomes; where upward mobility of poor people is hindered by exclusions occurring among the nonpoor; and situations of inequality-induced conflict.

The Perils of Paradigm Maintenance in the Face of Crisis

In the wake of the global financial crisis, two ideas became new conventional wisdoms. One was that the mainstream economic consensus of the past decades had been shattered. The other was that the turbulence was beyond comparison to any other since the Great Depression. Both suppositions can be questioned, not for the sake of provocation but for remembering a more recent past — the 1960s and 1970s — as a guide to what might be around the corner. This was the last time that US hegemony was seriously challenged. But it was then aggressively revived through monetarism and militarism, effectively ending the ‘Golden Age’ of Keynesianism in the North and developmentalism in the South. The resulting economic policy package became known as neoliberalism or, in more innocuous terms, the ’Washington consensus’, that is, the consensus that is now supposed to be shattered. Then, as now, we tend to assume that systemic crisis signals the end of hegemony.

The Limits to Buying Stability in Tibet: Tibetan Representation and Preferentiality in China's Contemporary Public Employment System

Based on an entirely unexplored source of data, this paper analyses the evolution of Tibetan representation and preferentiality within public employment recruitment across all Tibetan areas from 2007 to 2015. While recruitment collapsed after the end of the job placement system ( fenpei ) in the early to mid-2000s, there was a strong increase in public employment recruitment from 2011 onwards. Tibetans were underrepresented within this increase, although not severely, and various implicit practices of preferentiality bolstered such representation, with distinct variations across regions and time. The combination reasserted the predominant role of the state as employer of educated millennials in Tibetan areas to the extent of re-introducing employment guarantees. We refer to this as the innovation of a neo- fenpei system. This new system is most clearly observed in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) from 2011 to 2016, although it appears to have been abandoned in 2017. One effect of neo- fenpei , in contrast to its predecessor, is that it accentuates university education as a driver of differentiation within emerging urban employment. The evolution of these recruitment practices reflects the complex tensions in Tibetan areas regarding the overarching goal of security and social stability ( weiwen ) emphasized by the Xi–Li administration, which has maintained systems of minority preferentiality but in a manner that enhances assimilationist trends rather than minority group empowerment.

On the macroeconomics of universalistic social policy and economic and social rights

The UN Women (2015) flagship report, Progress of the World’s Women 2015–2016: Transforming economies, realizing rights (hereafter Progress), is an important contribution to global social policy making. Chapters 2 (on employment) and 3 (on social policy) are particularly inspired. More generally, the overarching emphasis that economic and social rights need to be conjoined with universalistic approaches to social policy is an especially important message. Progress stakes this position at the outset by asserting that a ‘comprehensive approach to social policy that combines universal access to social services with social protection through contributory and non-contributory transfer systems is the best way to realize economic and social rights for all without discrimination’ (p. 15; also see chapter 3, p. 132). This emphasis is crucial because, otherwise, the human rights based approach advocated by the report is sufficiently generic to be unhelpful for substantive policy-making. To clarify this point, human rights based approaches are arguably founded on universalistic principles of social provisioning and social security, as stipulated by Langford (2009), and many advocates of rights-based approaches implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) evoke a universalistic approach to social policy through their discourse of rights (as does Progress). However, in the quest to operationalize these approaches, a degree of ambiguity often enters into the translation from ethics to practice. For instance, does the principle of non-discrimination imply universalism (i.e. the same treatment for all) or targeting? As pointed out by Mkandawire (2005: 5), post-modern and/or feminist scholars have criticized universalism along these lines, in that purportedly universalistic policies have often reflected fundamental underlying societal biases, such as racial or gender biases. In turn, this implies that a degree of selectivity is required in order to allow for the practice of positive discrimination.1 Similarly, the principle that programmes should focus on marginalized, disadvantaged and excluded groups can be easily construed as a rationale for targeting, particularly when asserted in the absence of any substantive discussion of policy. The emphasis on reducing disparity does not, in itself, resolve debates between targeting and universalism given that proponents of targeting have posed it as more equalizing than universalism. The principle that people should be recognized as key actors in their own development, rather than as passive

Redistribution as social justice for decarbonising the global economy

Although the issue of redistribution is glossed over by Marglin, there are three reasons why decarbonisation must be accompanied by a massive scaling up of redistribution from the global North to South if the agenda is to be founded on a social justice approach. First, constructing a capital infrastructure in the South in a manner that maximises the potential for decarbonisation would tend to be very import-intensive. Hence, it would require external financing or else risk running aground through balance of payment constraints. Second, there is already a tendency in the global economy of siphoning resources from South to North, in particular through the increasing control over flows of value and wealth by Northern corporations from their commanding positions within international networks. Southern productivity needs to be contextualised from this perspective given the risk that climate negotiations lock in the subordination of Southern countries within these global networks, rather than seeking ways for Southern producers to leverage more value for the output and carbon emissions they are already producing. Third, population and labour transitions in the South place relatively greater pressure than in the past on employment generation in tertiary (service) sectors, in which distributive and redistributive processes play essential roles in bolstering labour demand. The neglect of global redistribution could undermine the capacity of Southern countries to face these broader development challenges, which are already immense even in the absence of decarbonisation. A key question is how to organise global redistributive transfers in a manner that does not continue to subordinate Southern populations to Northern interests. The challenge for decarbonisation is the forging of a political will for redistribution that is motivated by climate change rather than geopolitics, and that respects national ownership and self-determination.

Debt and development in historical perspective: The external constraints of late industrialisation revisited through South Korea and Brazil

Abstract Current debates about the role of external finance in development mostly overlook the insights from early development economics that late industrialisation generates a structural tendency to run trade deficits, thereby exacerbating rather than relieving external foreign exchange constraints. The developmental role of external finance is therefore based on its strategic marginal contribution to relieve such constraints. External debt in particular also allows countries to pursue industrial strategies without reliance on foreign direct investment. These insights are revisited in this paper as a critical input to both mainstream and heterodox contemporary scholarship on debt and development. While the mainstream generally avoids discussion of state‐led industrial policy, the heterodox has converged on a view that developing countries should avoid external finance. The contrasting external account histories of South Korea and Brazil are examined to demonstrate the validity of the classic insights and the contemporary fallacies. While the South Korean case speaks much to its geopolitical context, this does not necessarily refute the principle that post‐war late development engenders an intensive demand for external finance, which must be met if industrialisation strategies are not to be stymied, as in the case of Brazil, no matter how effectively domestic strategies are conceived and implemented.

‘Tibetanness’ under Threat? Neo-integrationism, Minority Education and Career Strategies in Qinghai, P.R. China .ADRIAN ZENZ.Leiden and Boston:Global Oriental,2013. xvi + 341 pp.

Review of: ‘Tibetanness’ under Threat? Neo-integrationism, Minority Education and Career Strategies in Qinghai, P.R. China ADRIAN Z E N Z Leiden and Boston: Global Oriental, 2013 xvi + 341 pp.

133.00. ISBN978-90-04-25796-2

133.00 ISBN 978-90-04-25796-2 doi:10.1017/S0305741014000927

Chinese savings gluts or northern financialisation? The ideological expediency of crisis narratives

Debates on the current financial crisis have been intense and ongoing, particularly among economists intent on squirming out from under the burden of responsibility with the convenient refrain that no one saw it coming (besides those whose work was being ignored by the mainstream). However, within this debate and despite its loosely substantiated evocations of Keynes, a broadly neoclassical consensus has reasserted itself, showing little or no variance from the mainstream views that brought us into crisis in the first place. As if a refrain from past crises, the narrative is focused on blaming the peripheries for crisis in the centre. The target is China, the most obvious surplus country within global economic imbalances (besides Germany, which somehow escapes similar castigation).