nda Chelan Li

Provincial Discretion and National Power: Investment Policy in Guangdong and Shanghai, 1978–93

Central-provincial relations are an old issue which have plagued successive Chinese leaderships both before and after 1949. Indeed the spatial dimension, with its ramifications regarding power distribution and the complications around policy formulation and implementation, has been a perennial issue of concern in comparative politics. This old interest has been, in recent years, intensified by incessant central-provincial conflicts since reform, to the extent that the integration of the Chinese state has been called into question.

The Prelude to Government Reform in China? The Big Sale in Shunde

This article discusses two aspects of government reform in Shunde County in Guangdong during the 1990s, ahead of national developments. One was the restructuring of the government, including: marketization; delinking of enterprises and government bureaus; rationalization of organizational boundaries; and streamlining of the top city leadership structures. The other involved the divestment of public assets and a substantial redefinition of the role of the government in the economy. The role of local agency is highlighted in the processes of change, and the national impact of Shunde’s early reforms is noted.

State and market in public service provision: opportunities and traps for institutional change in rural China

Abstract International experience tells that public services often fail to work for those in need. To make things work requires complex institutional changes that are difficult to come by, let alone sustain. This paper examines the situation of rural public service provision in China and a local attempt to revamp the service provision institution through adjusting the mix of state and the market. It reveals the dialectical process of policy evolution whereby innovation, and resistance to it, has emerged.

Community Governance Reform in Urban China: A Case Study of the Yantian Model in Shenzhen

A major feature of Chinas urban transformation has been the breakdown of the danwei system and the consequent efforts at community building. Since the early 1990s when a movement for neighbourhood-based community building was launched, different practices have appeared and the urban community has changed remarkably. Whilst a number of works have documented this transition, few revealed in sufficient detail the dynamics of shaping the profile of community space. This paper argues that the governments new-found priority on community building has facilitated the development of community autonomy and self-governance. The interplay of traditional administrative power and newly emerged community autonomous power drives the transition of the power structure at the grass-roots level in urban China. The Yantian Model of community governance in Shenzhen demonstrates how this transition unfolds as the reform of community governance embodies the interplay of these two different forces, probably with far-reaching impacts on state–society relations in urban China.

Pursuing Equity in Education: Conflicting Views and Shifting Strategies

Abstract Under what circumstances will governments in developing countries, infamous for their “bad governance” records, adopt “good governance” institutions and practices, as defined and advocated by international development and donor organisations? What meanings are attached to these initiatives in the adopting countries and to what extent are they similar to those as understood in the developed countries? These questions are discussed in this article in the context of education equity reforms in China and America. Despite their divergent histories and economic and political systems, their experience in terms of education equity reforms is more similar than one would anticipate. Penetrating these similarities is the observation that understanding the specific historical contexts wherein “good governance” reforms have evolved is essential to a proper appreciation of the meanings and significance of the reforms, as institutions and mechanisms, for the furtherance of good governance as an outcome. The nuances of tension and heterogeneity of internal developments in each country, respectively, have interestingly also exposed the parallels between the processes in both.

Shirkers or Toilers? Local Strategic Action and Education Policy Under Fiscal Abundance

Abstract Making sense of the behavior of local government officials is important for understanding the operation of large multi-tiered governance systems such as China. Local officials have often been seen as self-serving maximizers of the ‘local interest’, adopting the best possible strategies of action allowed by the circumstance of the time. A prevailing view in the literature, influenced by frames of analysis provided by principal–agent theory, is that local officials are shirkers and rent-seekers. In fiscal policy, where resources have normally been tight, this means local hoarding of resources, shirking of spending responsibilities and assertive bidding for central projects, resulting in inefficiencies in resource allocation. Recently a substantial inflow of central funding into local education offers an opportunity to reassess this characterization of local strategic behavior. How have local leaders responded at a time of relative fiscal abundance? Did they seek to increase ever more funding inflow and reduce local responsibility? Examining aggregate statistics at the national level and local case materials from the central part of the Chinese hinterland, this article finds that available evidence does lend some support to previous observations of local fiscal behavior, such as diverting funds. However, other expenditure patterns in the presence of relative abundance of central funds present strong evidence that this behavior masks a deeper motivation to act responsibly in the pursuit of shared education reform goals.

Women’s Political Participation in Bangladesh: Role of Women’s Organizations

Reviewing the history of women’s movement, this article expects to find a large role of women’s organizations in the process of change that has helped to increase participation of women in local government political process of Bangladesh. While there is considerable support for the presence of the women’s movement, there is much ambivalence as to the specifics of such influence: its objects, means, and magnitude. The difficulty in assessing influence may stem from the reliance on informal channels, which makes tracing and tracking influence a great challenge, and calls for more grounded research to expose the intricate interactions between actors.

The Identity Shift in Hong Kong since 1997: Measurement and Explanation

Abstract This article addresses the challenges of understanding, measuring and explaining political identities in post-1997 Hong Kong. It shows that national and local identities are better conceptualized as two distinct attitudes and captured with separate scaled items than as opposite poles of one attitude measured in a single categorical item. This approach reveals that the key shift occurred not in local identity, but in nationalistic sentiments, which have initially increased but have been on a downward trend since 2008. It also shows that national and local identities were perceived as robustly compatible for most years since 1997, but have begun to drift apart in recent years. Considering competing accounts to explain national identity strength, trust in the central government stands out as the dominant factor. Discontent with livelihood conditions and socio-structural variables either have no significant effect or are to a large part the result of differences in political trust.

Multiple Trajectories and "Good Governance" in Asia: An Introduction

Abstract Conventional wisdom in the international aid community has been that governance systems and practices in developing countries require reform in order for aid catering to economic development or poverty alleviation to be successful. Despite criticisms, the good governance agenda has remained unscathed in international development policy until the recent economic crisis in the advanced economies. This feature section of this issue provides in-depth analysis of the nuances at the critical linkage between institutional reforms and development, based on empirical case studies of the logic of governance reforms in the Asian context. This introductory essay surveys the intellectual background of discussion over the concepts of governance, good governance and development, and the linkage between governance reforms as process and development as outcome. It highlights the significance of discussing Asian reform experiences for the ongoing reflection over the global institutional agenda. The message is not that we do not need governance reforms, or that international learning is impossible or counterproductive. Reform efforts in developing and advanced economies will benefit, however, from a better understanding of the linkage between reforms and the diverse historical conditions they are embedded in.

Meeting Governance Challenges in China: Between the State and Society — An Introduction

The power to name and define is of great importance in the maintenance of hegemony (Foucault, 1984; LaDuke, 2005; Olson, 2002). The Chinese state has jealously guarded its monopoly on defining problems and formulating solutions – to retain its role as themain actor in meeting its governance challenges. The battle is acute as other developments in recent decades have run in an opposite direction, also owing to the state’s decisions – the state has seen a wholesale retreat from societal activities under the umbrella of reform, and centres of influence beyond the traditional state proliferated. The role of the state in the new situation have since been put under “review” and become a subject of experimentation, rather than a definitive position to be protected and defended. The tug of war between an instinct to monopolize within the state and an empirical and pragmatic decentralization of powers beyond it means that the state–society interface is a highly charged field of tension and struggles. The debate over the “appropriate” role of the Chinese state in society has raged over the years. Meanwhile, challenges from the emergent alternative “centres” to the state’s diagnosis of governance challenges are routinely crushed. The result is a shifting and unstable state–society boundary, as one social experiment follows another. The variations in the specific configurations of experiments across geographical and administrative units in the vast physical expanse of the Chinese country and the five tiers of administrative hierarchy add further complexity to the picture. Nevertheless, as in the case of “cumulative decentralized powers” in administrative decentralization, which sees local powers surge over time after