The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China

By Susan L. Shirk. 2023

929 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the past decade, China was able to carry out economic reform without political reform, while the Soviet Union attempted the opposite strategy. How did China succeed at economic market reform without changing communist rule? Susan Shirk shows that Chinese communist political institutions are more flexible and less centralized than their Soviet counterparts were. Shirk pioneers a rational choice institutional approach to analyze policy-making in a non-democratic authoritarian country and to explain the history of Chinese market reforms from 1979 to the present. Drawing on extensive interviews with high-level Chinese officials, she pieces together detailed histories of economic reform policy decisions and shows how the political logic of Chinese communist institutions shaped those decisions. Combining theoretical ambition with the flavor of on-the-ground policy-making in Beijing, this book is a major contribution to the study of reform in China and other communist countries.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/00af287b386f1968bab66963efcef365cfb28767

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Citations in the corpus

Does Performance Matter? Evaluating Political Selection Along the Chinese Administrative Ladder (2018, methodology): “Standard accounts of political selection in nondemocratic regimes are largely based on the “selectorate theory” (Besley & Kudamatsu, 2008; Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, Siverson, & Morrow, 2003; Shirk, 1993).”
Authoritarian Signaling, Mass Audiences, and Nationalist Protest in China (2013, background): “…protest+ Once a critical mass has gath- 9+ See Fearon 1994; Schultz 2001; Schultz and Weingast 2003; and Stasavage 2007+ 10+ Weeks 2008+ 11+ Putnam 1988+ 12+ See Shirk 1993; Roeder 1993; and Bueno de Mesquita et al+ 1999+ 13+ Geddes 1999+ 4 International Organization ered in the streets and…”
Show Me the Money: Interjurisdiction Political Competition and Fiscal Extraction in China (2014, neutral): “1 See for example Huang (2008); Montinola, Qian, and Weingast (1995); Naughton (1995); Oi (1999); Qian, Roland, and Xu (2006); Shirk (1993); and Xu (2011).”
Second Generation Fiscal Federalism: Political Aspects of Decentralization and Economic Development (2014, background): “19 China’s strategy in promoting economic reform was decentralization consistent with fiscal federalism; the central government devolved economic policymaking (policy authority condition) and fiscal authority (including the hard budget constraint) to the provinces (Montinola, Qian, & Weingast, 1995;”
The impact of knowledge spillovers and innovation on firm-performance: findings from the Balkans countries (2017, background): “…Chau (1995); Chow and Tsang (1995); Dana (1999c); Dandridge and Flynn (1988); Fan et al. (1996); Lombardo (1995); Overholt (1993); Peng (2000); Shirk (1993); Siu and Kirby (1995); Wei (2001); and Williams and Li (1993); Brown and Zasloff (1999) pioneered research about transition in Cambodia.”
Self-Enforcing Federalism (2005, background): “But in 1989, at a meeting of governors of the provinces, the governor of Guangdong province said no (Shirk 1993).”
The Political Economy of Development in China and Vietnam (2014, background): “Shirk (1993) best exemplified this discussion by showing how reciprocal accountability between local and central leaders allowed elite leaders to stay in power but also granted policy space for experimentation on the southern coast.”