Into Leather: State-led Development and the Private Sector in Xinji

Extract

Students of the local state in reform-era China behold a host of different forms. Scholarly research reports debate their defining characteristics, speculate about the political participatory and non-participatory possibilities each type seems to hold out for the future, scrutinize their implications for economic development or for income distribution, and ponder if the very plurality of local governance types now seen in play across the country will prove to be a durable or only a transitory state of affairs. In a recent, commendably lucid “state of the field” essay, Baum and Shevchenko grouped the many disparate observations and models to date into four main sorts: in their relationships to economic activity, local states have been found to be entrepreneurial, clientelist, predatory or developmental.In entrepreneurial states, state agents and bureaucrats, even whole government bureaus, may go into business independently or enter into partnerships for profit; in clientelist states, officials promote and participate in the benefits of profit-making activity through personalized and particularistic ties to entrepreneurs in their localities; in predatory states, officials do not engage in business either directly or indirectly but utilize their positions instead to extract unproductive rents from producers and entrepreneurs through exorbitant fees, levies and fines; while in developmental states, officials intervene indirectly in the economy, “helping to plan, finance, and co-ordinate local projects, investing in local infrastructure, and promoting co-operative economic relations with external agencies.” In developmental states, local officials create an environment conducive to growth while not, themselves, engaging in business for profit and while “avoiding the formation of particularistic ties to ‘preferred’ enterprises and clients.” See Richard Baum and Alexei Shevchenko, “The state of the state,” in Merle Goldman and Roderick MacFarquhar (eds.), The Paradox of China's Post-Mao Reforms (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 344–45. The entrepreneurial state model has had its fullest elaboration in Jane Duckett, The Entrepreneurial State in China (London: Routledge, 1998), but see also Yimin Lin and Zhanxin Zhang, “Backyard profit centers: the private assets of public agencies,” in Jean C. Oi and Andrew G. Walder (eds.), Property Rights and Economic Reform in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 203–225. Clientelist state forms have been very widely reported. For just two urban examples, see Margaret M. Pearson, China's New Business Elite (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), and David L. Wank, “Bureaucratic patronage and private business: changing networks of power in urban China,” in Andrew G. Walder (ed.), The Waning of the Communist State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 153–183; and for a rural example, see Gregory A. Ruf, “Collective enterprise and property rights in a Sichuan village: the rise and decline of managerial corporatism,” in Oi and Walder, Property Rights, pp. 27–48. Predatory state forms have also been widely reported in the growing literature on corruption in China. They are often associated with poverty, the heavy tax and fee burden placed upon the peasantry and with peasant protest, as in Thomas P. Bernstein and Xiaobo Lu, “Taxation without representation: peasants, the central and the local states in reform China,” The China Quarterly, No. 163 (September 2000), pp. 742–763. But predatory abuses are found also in more prosperous localities, as reported in Nan Lin and Chih-Jou Jay Chen, “Local elites as officials and owners: shareholding and property rights in Daqiuzhuang,” in Oi and Walder, Property Rights, pp. 145–170. As for the developmental state model, note that Baum and Shevchenko correctly classify Jean Oi's concept of “local state corporatism” as a variant within the category of “developmental” states (p. 350). See Jean C. Oi, “The role of the local state in China's transitional economy,” The China Quarterly, No. 144 (December 1995), pp. 1132–49; Jean C. Oi, “The evolution of local state corporatism,” in Andrew G. Walder(ed.), Zouping in Transition: The Process of Reform in Rural North China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Jean C. Oi, Rural China Takes Off (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). For a recent critique and reassessment of the “local state corporatist” conception, see Sally Sargeson and Jian Zhang, “Reassessing the role of the local state: a case study of local government interventions in property rights reform in a Hangzhou district,” China Journal, No. 42 (July 1999), pp. 77–99. But new examples of developmental state forms also continue to be found, as reported in Jonathan Unger and Anita Chan, “Inheritors of the boom: private enterprise and the role of local government in a rural South China township,” China Journal, No. 42 (July 1999), pp. 45–74. Unger and Chan deal specifically, as we do here, with the relationship between local developmental states and the growing private sector.