Years of Poems and Spirits

Yang Dali: Economic Transformation and State Building in China

Compared China today to the US after the Civil War: “a managerial and regulatory state arose to taskcle problems …”

Zhu Rongji traveled 17 provinces to bargain for the 94 Tax/Budget Reform (123)

Banking reform in the 1990s: local branches re-orged, central office retain personnel right. (127-128)

Mini financial crisis in China: Guangdong International Trust and Investment Corporation (131)

—The author seems to be a fan of direct, vertical control from the center. Gave profuse praises to such a scheme in Quality Control, piracy, etc. Has the problems gone away? Or are they just less attention-grabbing? (141)

Dorothy Solinger: Policy Consistency in the Midst of the AFC
–The most confusing article. She thinks market reform, economic forces shapes policy making at all levels.

However, she has an article “Why We Cannot Count the Unemployed” (China Quarterly, No. 167 2001) discussing why official numbers cannot be trusted. (161)

The inequality of Chinese as seen from hiring policy: urbanites before rualites, locals before outsiders, etc. (179)
–Reminded on of the immigration policy.

Huang Yanzhong: Population Control and State Coercion in China
The evolution of population policy (194)
A good history review. Strict policy enforcement only starts in early 80s. (196, 207)

Asked the question: how government can intrude into people’s bedrooms and monitor reproduction? (201)
Answer: through the combination of institutionalization and mobilization, the post-Mao Chinese state obtains high infrastructural power to implement its … program on a recalcitrant society. (205)

Underfunding, Peng Peiyun’s complain (204)

The validity of the birth control theory: notes about Johnson 1999 (205)

Cognitive coercion: (204-205) “many people have come to accept, internalize, and reproduce the hegemonic view of the state in their daily lives”

Discussion of Birth Control in the context of civic culture (206)

Enforcement methods: provider-controlled (IUD, sterilization) vs. client-controlled methods (condoms). Rural women knowledge of choices (209)

Su Fubing: Political Economy of Industrial Restructuring in China Coal Industry
Mutual distrust and monitoring:
In order to enforce mine closure, “officials from rival provinces have been recruited to cross-inspect the implementation of the policy. (246)

Closing mines … has also been factored in to the cadre evaluation system … whether or not the cadres have accomplished their targets would carry a heavy weight in cadres overall (rating). (247)

Barry Naughton: The Western Development Program
Naughton break the Western region into Northwest and Southwest (278)
His main point: different characters, different needs, different endowments, etc.

Sharp criticism of WDP:
Highly pulic, visible coverup of systematic inequality in resource, budgetary transfer. (286-287) Refered to C. Wong’s argument (”intergovernmental transfers tend to favor more developed provinces”) … “But in a sense, the WDP represents an alternative to an effort to reconstruct the fiscal system more thoroughly in a way that provides more resources to less developed provinces reliably and over the long term.”

The WDP is a highly visible, symbolically charged policy that sends messages to political audiences about the leadership’s commitment … (287)

The single factor most likely to reduce poverty in the West is outmigration (291)
–Has he proved that resources and/or capital endowment is not enough to support population?

Moral hazard problem: “As a result, it tends to solve resource problems but … not incentive” ones. Local governments in the West have much stronger incentives now to plead poverty. (292)

The more the WDP degeneratees into a pure patronage-type program, the greater is the danger that the scope of the program will become inflated. (293)