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Between Separate Stoves and a Single Menu: Fiscal Decentralization in China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2004

Kai-yuen Tsui  and
Youqiang Wang
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Abstract

A recent body of literature with the paradigm of market preserving federalism at its core contends that China is a de facto federalist state. With the autonomy and tax rights of local governments entrenched in the reform era, local governments have allegedly become decentralized engines of growth. Scrutinizing the underlying premises of the above paradigm, this article arrives at a picture of China's local governments as less autonomous and the system of vertical bureaucratic control as more potent than that painted by the above paradigm. Emerging from our findings is an alternative interpretation of China's central–local fiscal relations that may help us understand such recent phenomena as the proliferation of arbitrary charges.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 177 , March 2004 , pp. 71 - 90
Copyright
© The China Quarterly, 2004

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Footnotes

The work described in this paper was fully supported by a grant from the Research Grant Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Project No. CUHK4119/99H). We thank Christine Wong and Thomas Rawski for their valuable and incisive comments.