Bureaucracy, Politics, and Decision Making in Post-Mao China

Bureaucracy, Politics, and Decision Making in Post-Mao China

Author: Kenneth G. Lieberthal

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2024-07-26

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 0520414004

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Using a model of "fragmented authoritarianism," this volume sharpens our view of the inner workings of the Chinese bureaucracy. The contributors' interviews with politically well-placed bureaucrats and scholars, along with documentary and field research, illuminate the bargaining and maneuvering among officials on the national, provincial, and local levels. CONTRIBUTORS:Nina P. HalpernCarol Lee HamrinDavid M. LamptonKenneth G. LieberthalMelanie ManionBarry NaughtonLynne PaineJonathan D. PollackSusan L. ShirkPaul E. SchroederAndrew G. WalderDavid Zweig This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.


Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy

Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy

Author: Etienne Balazs

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1967-03-11

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780300094565

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Born in Hungary, trained in Chinese studies in Germany, Etienne Balazs was, until his sudden and premature death in 1963, a professor at the Sorbonne and an intellectual leader among European specialists on China. In this book, a selection of Dr. Balazs’ essays are presented for the first time in English. Arthur F. Wright, professor of history at Yale, and John K. Fairbank, professor of history at Harvard, have written a joint Preface and Mr. Wright has written an Introduction. Scholars and interested laymen will find a rich feast here in essays ranging over two thousand years of China’s social, economic, political, and intellectual history. A wealth of data supports the various theories Dr. Balazs develops, in a graceful translation by Hope N. Wright. Because Etienne Balazs regarded the Chinese past not as a curiosity but as a repository of relevant human experience, his essays are significant for anyone interested in the past and future of civilization. "If a reader should disagree with some of the brilliant points, he would still find them challenging and refreshing."—Journal of Asian Studies.


The Bureaucracy of Han Times

The Bureaucracy of Han Times

Author: Hans Bielenstein

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1980-09-11

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0521225108

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This is a comprehensive and fully documented study of Chinese bureaucracy during the Han period, when many of the basic lines of Chinese government practice were laid down. It is also more detailed and wider in scope than similar works on other periods of Chinese history. The book covers the time from 202 BC to AD 9 and from AD 25 to 189, analysing and describing the central and local administrations, the army, official salaries, civil service recruitment and power in government. Professor Bielenstein translates all Chinese official titles and includes alphabetical lists of these titles with their English and Chinese equivalents. Thus his book will serve both as a description for the names of offices at every level of government. The book will be of interest to all scholars of Chinese history, as well as to experts in other fields of institutional history, government and political science.


Bureaucracy and the State in Early China

Bureaucracy and the State in Early China

Author: Feng Li

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2008-12-11

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0521884470

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This ook redefines the bureaucracy of Ancient Chinese society during the Western Zhou period. The analysis is based on inscriptions of royal edicts from the period carved into bronze vessels. The inscriptions clarify the political and social construction of the Western Zhou and the ways in which it exercised its authority.


The Government of Mistrust

The Government of Mistrust

Author: Ken MacLean

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres

Published: 2013-12-18

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 0299295931

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Focusing on the creation and misuse of government documents in Vietnam since the 1920s, The Government of Mistrust reveals how profoundly the dynamics of bureaucracy have affected Vietnamese efforts to build a socialist society. In examining the flurries of paperwork and directives that moved back and forth between high- and low-level officials, Ken MacLean underscores a paradox: in trying to gather accurate information about the realities of life in rural areas, and thus better govern from Hanoi, the Vietnamese central government employed strategies that actually made the state increasingly illegible to itself. MacLean exposes a falsified world existing largely on paper. As high-level officials attempted to execute centralized planning via decrees, procedures, questionnaires, and audits, low-level officials and peasants used their own strategies to solve local problems. To obtain hoped-for aid from the central government, locals overstated their needs and underreported the resources they actually possessed. Higher-ups attempted to re-establish centralized control and legibility by creating yet more bureaucratic procedures. Amidst the resulting mistrust and ambiguity, many low-level officials were able to engage in strategic action and tactical maneuvering that have shaped socialism in Vietnam in surprising ways.


Decentralized Authoritarianism in China

Decentralized Authoritarianism in China

Author: Pierre F. Landry

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2008-10-16

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1139472631

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China, like many authoritarian regimes, struggles with the tension between the need to foster economic development by empowering local officials and the regime's imperative to control them politically. Landry explores how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) manages local officials in order to meet these goals and perpetuate an unusually decentralized authoritarian regime. Using unique data collected at the municipal, county, and village level, Landry examines in detail how the promotion mechanisms for local cadres have allowed the CCP to reward officials for the development of their localities without weakening political control. His research shows that the CCP's personnel management system is a key factor in explaining China's enduring authoritarianism and proves convincingly that decentralization and authoritarianism can work hand in hand.


Learning from SARS

Learning from SARS

Author: Institute of Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2004-04-26

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 0309182158

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The emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in late 2002 and 2003 challenged the global public health community to confront a novel epidemic that spread rapidly from its origins in southern China until it had reached more than 25 other countries within a matter of months. In addition to the number of patients infected with the SARS virus, the disease had profound economic and political repercussions in many of the affected regions. Recent reports of isolated new SARS cases and a fear that the disease could reemerge and spread have put public health officials on high alert for any indications of possible new outbreaks. This report examines the response to SARS by public health systems in individual countries, the biology of the SARS coronavirus and related coronaviruses in animals, the economic and political fallout of the SARS epidemic, quarantine law and other public health measures that apply to combating infectious diseases, and the role of international organizations and scientific cooperation in halting the spread of SARS. The report provides an illuminating survey of findings from the epidemic, along with an assessment of what might be needed in order to contain any future outbreaks of SARS or other emerging infections.


Understanding China's Political System

Understanding China's Political System

Author: Susan Lawrence

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2012-05-10

Total Pages: 38

ISBN-13: 9781477566725

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This report is designed to provide Congress with a perspective on the contemporary political system of China, the only Communist Party-led authoritarian state in the G-20 grouping of major economies. China's Communist Party dominates state and society in China, is committed to maintaining a permanent monopoly on power, and is intolerant of those who question its right to rule. Nonetheless, analysts consider China's political system to be neither monolithic nor rigidly hierarchical. Jockeying among leaders and institutions representing different sets of interests is common at every level of the system.


The Logic of Governance in China

The Logic of Governance in China

Author: Xueguang Zhou

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-10-20

Total Pages: 605

ISBN-13: 1009179748

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Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork, The Logic of Governance in China develops a unified theoretical framework to explain how China's centralized political system maintains governance and how this process produces recognizable policy cycles that are obstacles to bureaucratic rationalization, professionalism, and rule of law. The book is unique for the overarching framework it develops; one that sheds light on the interconnectedness among apparently disparate phenomena such as the mobilizational state, bureaucratic muddling through, collusive behaviors, variable coupling between policymaking and implementation, inverted soft budget constraints, and collective action based on unorganized interests. An exemplary combination of theory-motivated fieldwork and empirically-informed theory development, this book offers an in-depth analysis of the institutions and mechanisms in the governance of China.


Brothers in Arms

Brothers in Arms

Author: Andrew Mertha

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2014-02-25

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0801470730

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When the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia in 1975, they inherited a war-ravaged and internationally isolated country. Pol Pot’s government espoused the rhetoric of self-reliance, but Democratic Kampuchea was utterly dependent on Chinese foreign aid and technical assistance to survive. Yet in a markedly asymmetrical relationship between a modernizing, nuclear power and a virtually premodern state, China was largely unable to use its power to influence Cambodian politics or policy. In Brothers in Arms, Andrew Mertha traces this surprising lack of influence to variations between the Chinese and Cambodian institutions that administered military aid, technology transfer, and international trade. Today, China’s extensive engagement with the developing world suggests an inexorably rising China in the process of securing a degree of economic and political dominance that was unthinkable even a decade ago. Yet, China’s experience with its first-ever client state suggests that the effectiveness of Chinese foreign aid, and influence that comes with it, is only as good as the institutions that manage the relationship. By focusing on the links between China and Democratic Kampuchea, Mertha peers into the “black box” of Chinese foreign aid to illustrate how domestic institutional fragmentation limits Beijing’s ability to influence the countries that accept its assistance.