This is a study of peasant-state relations and village politics as they have evolved in response to the state's attempts to control the division of the harvest and extract the state-defined surplus. To provide the reader with a clearer sense of the evolution of peasant-state relations over almost a forty-year period and to highlight the dramatic changes that have taken place since 1978,1 have divided my analysis into two parts: Chapters 2 through 7 are on Maoist China, and chapters 8 and 9 are on post-Mao China. The first part examines the state's grain policies and patterns of local politics that emerged during the highly collectivized Maoist period, when the state closed free grain markets and established the system of unified purchase and sales (tonggou tongxiao). The second part describes the new methods for the production and division of the harvest after 1978, when the government decollectivized agriculture and abolished its unified procurement program.

State and Peasant in Contemporary China: The Political Economy of Village Government (Center for Chinese Studies, UC Berkeley)

History

Oi, Jean C.

Asia

University of California Press

In this incisive analysis of one of the most spectacular economic breakthroughs in the Deng era, Jean C. Oi shows how and why Chinese rural-based industry has become the fastest growing economic sector not just in China but in the world. Oi argues that decollectivization and fiscal decentralization provided party officials of the localities—counties, townships, and villages—with the incentives to act as entrepreneurs and to promote rural industrialization in many areas of the Chinese countryside. As a result, the corporatism practiced by local officials has become effective enough to challenge the centrality of the national state.Dealing not only with the political setting of rural industrial development, Oi's original and strongly argued study also makes a broader contribution to conceptualizations of corporatism in political theory. Oi writes provocatively about property rights and principal-agent relationships and shows the complex financial incentives that underpin and strengthen the growth in local state corporatism and shape its evolution. This book will be essential for those interested in Chinese politics, comparative politics, and communist and post-communist systems.

Rural China Takes Off: Institutional Foundations of Economic Reform

Business & Money

Economics

As its miracle growth continues seemingly unabated into a fourth decade, China's emergence as a global economic and political power is accepted as inevitable. China is changing and the world is changing in response. Yet such radical transformation has also brought challenges that China must face if it is to continue its upward trajectory.
 Some of problems that are thought to threaten China's reforms are in fact not as serious as many interpreters claim—only growing pains of development. Some have already been solved. Other widely noted problems truly are serious, and still others may loom on the horizon.
 Growing Pains seeks to present an accurate view—as opposed to an optimistic or pessimistic one—of China's current reforms. Sorting the evidence of the problems' actual severity, the contributors consider hot-button issues—privatization and markets; governance; and questions of health care, environmental degradation, and social inequality—and consider the likelihood of near-term solutions.

Growing Pains: Tensions and Opportunity in China's Transformation

Asia-Pacific Research Center

As the Chinese Communist Party(CCP) set about reforming its centrally planned economy, it faced the thorny policy question of how to reform its state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Should it support a shift from public to private ownership of the means of production? Such a shift would challenge not only the CCP's socialist ideology but also its very legitimacy. Mixing the business of corporate restructuring with the politics of socialism presented nothing short of a policy nightmare.
 With policy-relevant acuity, the contributors to this wide-ranging volume address the questions about reform programs that have plagued China—and East Asia more broadly—since the 1990s. While China, Japan, and South Korea have all been criticized for implementing reform too slowly or too selectively, this volume delves into the broader contexts underlying certain institutional decisions. The book seeks to show that seemingly different political economies actually share surprising similarities, and problems. While Going Private in China sheds new light on China's corporate restructuring, it also offers new perspectives on how we think about the process of institutional change.

Going Private in China: The Politics of Corporate Restructuring and System Reform

Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Oi, Jean C.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Oi, Jean C.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Oi, Jean C.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

State and Peasant in Contemporary China: The Political Economy of Village Government (Center for Chinese Studies, UC Berkeley)

Rural China Takes Off: Institutional Foundations of Economic Reform

Growing Pains: Tensions and Opportunity in China's Transformation

Going Private in China: The Politics of Corporate Restructuring and System Reform