This book considers how identity informs the nature of economic participation among ethnic minority entrepreneurs in China’s remote Northwest through interviews with entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds, including Tibetan, Han and Muslim Chinese. It will be useful for students and scholars of Chinese Studies, Ethnic Studies and Economics.
In the last two decades, China's western inland region has largely been left out of the nation's economic boom. While its 355-million population accounts for 28% and its land area for 71% of China's total, the region's share of the national GDP is under 20%. Since 1999, Beijing has implemented the West China Development Program to boost the region's growth. To study the major domestic issues and the global implications of this program, the University of Victoria's Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives organized and hosted a multidisciplinary international conference on March 6?8, 2003. This volume of papers presented at the conference offers perspectives on the issues by leading experts of diversified academic disciplines from China, Canada, the US, and other countries.
Under the ethnic affairs management regime established by the People’s Republic of China, every Chinese citizen is classified within one of 56 state-recognised ‘nationalities’. Government policy assumes that these nationalities differ from one another primarily in their levels of economic development, and asserts that ethnic divisions and identities fade with the gradual achievement of economic and social equality. As a result, economic development policy in minority nationality areas has often constituted a replica of the model which has already proven successful in China’s Han-Chinese dominated east. Research conducted across five locations in China’s Northwest paints a far more complex picture, however. This book considers for the first time how identity informs the nature of economic participation among ethnic minority entrepreneurs in China’s remote Northwest. Through interviews with entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds, including Tibetan, Han and Muslim Chinese, this book highlights how ethnic—and other—identities inform the nature of economic participation. Furthermore, it explores the broader implications of this de-facto economic segregation for China’s ongoing social harmony and political stability. Ultimately, this book demonstrates how economic participation, even when successful in achieving its economic outcomes, may actually serve to reinforce and strengthen minority national identity—perhaps even at the expense of national Chinese identity. This book will be useful for students and scholars of Chinese Studies, Ethnic Studies and Economics.
Monograph on the re-orientation of China's economic policy since 1977 towards rapid modernization based on "market socialism" and expansion of external economic relations - evaluates foreign policy changes, forecasts prospects in the 1980s for trade and economic growth, and discusses technology imports, international relations, international borrowing, role in world food and energy balances, trade relations and technology transfer prospects for developed countries, partic. USA, and international organizations, etc. References and statistical tables.
China's extraordinarily rapid economic growth since 1978, driven by market-oriented reforms, has set world records and continued unabated, despite predictions of an inevitable slowdown. In The State Strikes Back: The End of Economic Reform in China?, renowned China scholar Nicholas R. Lardy argues that China's future growth prospects could be equally bright but are shadowed by the specter of resurgent state dominance, which has begun to diminish the vital role of the market and private firms in China's economy. Lardy's book arrives in timely fashion as a sequel to his pathbreaking Markets over Mao: The Rise of Private Business in China, published by PIIE in 2014. This book mobilizes new data to trace how President Xi Jinping has consistently championed state-owned or controlled enterprises, encouraging local political leaders and financial institutions to prop up ailing, underperforming companies that are a drag on China's potential. As with his previous book, Lardy's perspective departs from conventional wisdom, especially in its contention that China could achieve a high growth rate for the next two decades—if it reverses course and returns to the path of market-oriented reforms.
The study provides a major reassessment of the scale and scope of China’s resurgence over the past half century, employing quantitative measurement techniques which are standard practice in OECD countries, but which have not hitherto been available for China.
The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is China’s largest province, shares borders with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia and Mongolia, and possesses a variety of natural resources, including oil. The tensions between ethnic Muslim Uyghurs and the growing number of Han Chinese in Xinjiang have recently increased, occasionally breaking out into violence. At the same time as being a potential troublespot for China, the province is of increasing strategic significance as China’s gateway to Central Asia whose natural resources are of increasing importance to China. This book focuses in particular on what life is like in Xinjiang for the diverse population that lives there. It offers important insights into the social, economic and political terrains of Xinjiang, concentrating especially on how current trends in Xinjiang are likely to develop in the future. In doing so it provides a broader understanding of the region and its peoples.
From about 1600 to 1800, the Qing empire of China expanded to unprecedented size. Through astute diplomacy, economic investment, and a series of ambitious military campaigns into the heart of Central Eurasia, the Manchu rulers defeated the Zunghar Mongols, and brought all of modern Xinjiang and Mongolia under their control, while gaining dominant influence in Tibet. The China we know is a product of these vast conquests. Peter C. Perdue chronicles this little-known story of China's expansion into the northwestern frontier. Unlike previous Chinese dynasties, the Qing achieved lasting domination over the eastern half of the Eurasian continent. Rulers used forcible repression when faced with resistance, but also aimed to win over subject peoples by peaceful means. They invested heavily in the economic and administrative development of the frontier, promoted trade networks, and adapted ceremonies to the distinct regional cultures. Perdue thus illuminates how China came to rule Central Eurasia and how it justifies that control, what holds the Chinese nation together, and how its relations with the Islamic world and Mongolia developed. He offers valuable comparisons to other colonial empires and discusses the legacy left by China's frontier expansion. The Beijing government today faces unrest on its frontiers from peoples who reject its autocratic rule. At the same time, China has launched an ambitious development program in its interior that in many ways echoes the old Qing policies. China Marches West is a tour de force that will fundamentally alter the way we understand Central Eurasia.
