In the early 1990s, China started to reform its telecommunications regime by removing barriers to foreign and private investment and encouraging competition. This text applies the "Public Choice Plus" theory (developed in the study of economics) to the analysis of the policymaking process of China's telecommunications reforms. Guan is a senior fellow at the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy at the U. of Toronto.
Openness and competition sparked major advances in Chinese industry. Recent policy reversals emphasizing indigenous innovation seem likely to disappoint.
From Iron Fist to Invisible Hand uses telecommunications policy as a window to examine major contradictions in China's growth as an economic and political superpower. While China policy analysts wonder why the government occasionally restrains growth and raises prices, technologists marvel at how the telecommunications industry continues to grow enormously despite constraints and unpredictability in the market. Frustration is pervasive in the business environment, where regulations are constantly changing. This book provides six policy-focused case studies, each centered on a question with implications for telecome stakeholders, such as: Who is the regulator?Who are the regulated? Which foreigners can enter China, thereby regulating wholesale prices, setting consumer prices, and introducing Internet and innovative technologies? These cases explain the government's liberal and conservative approach toward reform, the policies that both promote and constrain business, and the major hurdles that lie ahead in telecommunications reform.
This book examines China’s information and communications technology revolution. It outlines key trends in internet and telecommunications, exploring the social, cultural and political implications of China’s transition to a more information and communications rich society. It shows that despite remaining a one-party state with extensive censorship, substantial changes have occurred.
" In 1978, China launched economic reforms that have resulted in one of history’s most dramatic national transformations. The reforms removed bureaucratic obstacles to economic growth and tapped China’s immense reserves of labor and entrepreneurial talent to unleash unparalleled economic growth in the country. In the four decades since, China has become the world’s second-largest economy after the United States, and a leading force in international trade and investment. As the contributors to this volume show, China also faces daunting challenges in sustaining growth, continuing its economic ransformation, addressing the adverse consequences of economic success, and dealing with mounting suspicion from the United States and other trade and investment partners. China also confronts risks stemming from the project to expand its influence across the globe through infrastructure investments and other projects under the Belt and Road Initiative. At the same time, China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, appears determined to make his own lasting mark on the country and on China’s use of its economic clout to shape the world around it. "
Industrial policy has long been regarded as a strategy to encourage sector-, industry-, or economy-wide development by the state. It has been central to competitiveness, catching up, and structural change in both advanced and developing countries. It has also been one of the most contested perspectives, reflecting ideologically inflected debates and shifts in prevailing ideas. There has lately been a renewed interest in industrial policy in academic circles and international policy dialogues, prompted by the weak outcomes of policies pursued by many developing countries under the direction of the Washington Consensus (and its descendants), the slow economic recovery of many advanced economies after the 2008 global financial crisis, and mounting anxieties about the national consequences of globalization. The Oxford Handbook of Industrial Policy presents a comprehensive review of and a novel approach to the conceptual and theoretical foundations of industrial policy. The Handbook also presents analytical perspectives on how industrial policy connects to broader issues of development strategy, macro-economic policies, infrastructure development, human capital, and political economy. By combining historical and theoretical perspectives, and integrating conceptual issues with empirical evidence drawn from advanced, emerging, and developing countries, The Handbook offers valuable lessons and policy insights to policymakers, practitioners and researchers on developing productive transformation, technological capabilities, and international competitiveness. It addresses pressing issues including climate change, the gendered dimensions of industrial policy, global governance, and technical change. Written by leading international thinkers on the subject, the volume pulls together different perspectives and schools of thought from neo-classical to structuralist development economists to discuss and highlight the adaptation of industrial policy in an ever-changing socio-economic and political landscape.
Today's China is governed by a new economic model that marks a radical break from the Mao and Deng eras; it departs fundamentally from both the East Asian developmental state and its own Communist past. It has not, however, adopted a liberal economic model. China has retained elements of statist control even though it has liberalized foreign direct investment more than any other developing country in recent years. This mode of global economic integration reveals much about China’s state capacity and development strategy, which is based on retaining government control over critical sectors while meeting commitments made to the World Trade Organization. In China's Regulatory State, Roselyn Hsueh demonstrates that China only appears to be a more liberal state; even as it introduces competition and devolves economic decisionmaking, the state has selectively imposed new regulations at the sectoral level, asserting and even tightening control over industry and market development, to achieve state goals. By investigating in depth how China implemented its economic policies between 1978 and 2010, Hsueh gives the most complete picture yet of China's regulatory state, particularly as it has shaped the telecommunications and textiles industries. Hsueh contends that a logic of strategic value explains how the state, with its different levels of authority and maze of bureaucracies, interacts with new economic stakeholders to enhance its control in certain economic sectors while relinquishing control in others. Sectoral characteristics determine policy specifics although the organization of institutions and boom-bust cycles influence how the state reformulates old rules and creates new ones to maximize benefits and minimize costs after an initial phase of liberalization. This pathbreaking analysis of state goals, government-business relations, and methods of governance across industries in China also considers Japan’s, South Korea’s, and Taiwan’s manifestly different approaches to globalization.
In late 2015, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) initiated reforms that have brought dramatic changes to its structure, model of warfighting, and organizational culture, including the creation of a Strategic Support Force (SSF) that centralizes most PLA space, cyber, electronic, and psychological warfare capabilities. The reforms come at an inflection point as the PLA seeks to pivot from land-based territorial defense to extended power projection to protect Chinese interests in the "strategic frontiers" of space, cyberspace, and the far seas. Understanding the new strategic roles of the SSF is essential to understanding how the PLA plans to fight and win informationized wars and how it will conduct information operations.
This book attempts to draw lessons from the experiences of developed as well as developing countries in carrying out telecommunications reform. Contributors come from academia, as well as from stakeholders in telecommunications policy in a dozen countries, mostly in the Asia-Pacific region. Globally, the telecommunications industry is undergoing major changes: technological advances in the form of a vast number of new digitised services, ownership shifts as state-owned carriers in many countries become fully or partly privatized, and a general transition from monopolistic to more competitive market environments. The economic and regulatory experiences derived from these changes are explored and analyzed using the USA, the UK, Australia and Singapore to represent developed and newly industrialized countries, and China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam as examples of developing countries. The conclusions outlined in this timely volume hold important lessons for these as well as for other countries.
