China Studies

Despite little foreshadowing before he took office, President Xi Jinping has emerged as perhaps the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong.  This was reinforced in March 2018 when China’s National People’s Congress voted overwhelmingly to abolish presidential term limits, as had been stipulated under the 1982 PRC Constitution, a feature which had been understood to be critical to the new political settlement after the Cultural Revolution.  In this episode, Neysun Mahboubi discusses with UC San Diego political scientist Victor Shih the implications of Xi Jinping’s apparent longterm rule for Chinese governance—including for policymaking and bureaucratic incentives, for both domestic and foreign entrepreneurship, and ultimately for the very durability of Chinese Communist Party rule.  The episode was recorded on April 26, 2018. Victor Shih is an associate professor of political economy, and the Ho Miu Lam Chair in China and Pacific Relations, at the School of Global Policy & Strategy at UC San Diego.  He has published widely on the politics of Chinese banking policies, fiscal policies and exchange rates, and he was the first analyst to identify the risk of massive local government debt in China.  His book Factions and Finance in China: Elite Conflict and Inflation (Cambridge University Press, 2012) draws on his training in elite politics, as well as detailed statistical analysis, in providing the classic account of how the Chinese banking sector really works.  Professor Shih’s new edited book, Economic Shocks and Authoritarian Stability: Duration, Financial Condition, and Institutions, is in production at the University of Michigan Press.  Prior to joining UC San Diego, he was a professor of political science at Northwestern University, and also served as a principal for The Carlyle Group.  He is active on Twitter, where you can follow him @vshih2. Sound engineering: Nirvan West and Neysun Mahboubi Music credit: "Salt" by Poppy Ackroyd, follow her at http://poppyackroyd.com

Yasheng Huang, a prominent political scientist from MIT, delves into the complexities of China's state-led capitalism, particularly in the context of its recent economic slowdown. He critiques the 'China Model,' highlighting the successes of private entrepreneurship in the 1980s. Huang raises concerns about rising debts and trade tensions, while examining the socio-economic divide between urban and rural China. The discussion also explores the implications of Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign and the potential need for deeper economic reforms amidst the challenges of a market transition.

How do autocratic regimes secure political obedience, and implement unpopular policies, without always resorting to outright coercive tactics?  In a provocative new book, Yale University political scientist Dan Mattingly argues that, in China, state power exercised through local governments relies on local civil society groups—like temple organizations or lineage associations—to quietly infiltrate, observe, and thereby control Chinese rural society.  In this episode, he discusses his book and its core arguments about “soft” authoritarian repression with Neysun Mahboubi, in a conversation which extends to the basic nature of local governance in China and the various mechanisms by which it may (or may not) be held to account.  The episode was recorded on April 12, 2018. Dan Mattingly is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University.  His research focuses on the political economy of development, authoritarian rule, and Chinese politics.  His new book on “The Art of Political Control in China” is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, and his articles have previously appeared in Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, World Development, and World Politics.  He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and was later a postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University.  You can follow him on Twitter @mattinglee. Music credit: "Salt" by Poppy Ackroyd, follow her at http://poppyackroyd.com  Special thanks to Nick Marziani and Kaiser Kuo

At least since China’s 1994 fiscal and tax reforms, land-backed development has served as the greatest source of revenue for Chinese local governments—potentially almost 1 trillion US dollars in total this year—as well as a powerful engine both for rapid industrialization and for social discontent.  This circumstance reflects how the state allocation of land-use rights, in China, remains a vestige of the planned economy, and how fiscal pressures on local governments, combined with differential pricing of land for purposes of takings compensation versus resale to developers, incentivize what often looks to be predatory behavior.  In this episode, Neysun Mahboubi discusses China’s property rights regime, especially pertaining to land in rural areas, and how it informs the influential theory that economic growth requires stable property rights, with University of Washington political scientist Susan Whiting, a prominent scholar of China’s political economy of development.  The episode was recorded on March 16, 2018. Susan Whiting is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington, in Seattle, where she also holds appointments in the Jackson School of International Studies and the School of Law.  Her first book, Power and Wealth in Rural China: The Political Economy of Institutional Change, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2001.  She has published articles and chapters on authoritarianism, “rule of law,” property rights, fiscal reform, and rural development in volumes and journals such as Comparative Political Studies and The China Quarterly.  She has contributed to studies of governance, fiscal reform, and non-governmental organizations under the auspices of the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the Ford Foundation, respectively.  Her current research focuses upon property rights in land, the role of law in authoritarian regimes, as well as the politics of fiscal reform. Music credit: "Salt" by Poppy Ackroyd, follow her at http://poppyackroyd.com  Special thanks to Nick Marziani and Kaiser Kuo

Economic reform since the late 1970s, as well as the dynamics of globalization unleashed in full by China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, have significantly complicated the relationship between the Chinese Party-state and Chinese workers.  Some of this complexity was made apparent in the 1990s, after millions of workers were laid off from state owned enterprises, and then it was highlighted again, in a different form, in connection with worker suicides at Foxconn plants and strikes at Honda factories in Guangdong Province in 2010.  Most recently, the gap between official rhetoric and state practice, as it relates to Chinese workers, has been most dramatically indicated by the crackdown on Marxist student groups and organizers at elite Chinese universities.  In this episode, Neysun Mahboubi discusses the evolution of workers’ rights in China, since the founding of the Chinese Communist Party after the May 4th student movement, and through the present day, with University of Michigan political scientist Mary Gallagher, one of the most influential scholars of Chinese labor and labor mobilization.  The episode was recorded on February 14, 2019. Mary Gallagher is Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, where she is also the Director of the Center for Chinese Studies.  Her core research explores the relationships between capitalism, law, and democracy, and her empirical research on China is used to explore those larger theoretical questions.  Her books include Authoritarian Legality in China: Law, Workers, and the State (Cambridge University Press 2017), Chinese Justice: Civil Dispute Resolution in Contemporary China (co-editor, with Margaret Woo; Cambridge University Press 2011), and Contagious Capitalism: Globalization and the Politics of Labor in China (Princeton University Press 2005).  In China, Professor Gallagher was a foreign student at Nanjing University in 1989; she also taught at the Foreign Affairs College in Beijing from 1996-97; and she was a Fulbright Research Scholar at East China University of Politics and Law in Shanghai from 2003-04.  You can follow her on Twitter @MaryGao. Music credit: "Salt" by Poppy Ackroyd, follow her at http://poppyackroyd.com  Special thanks to Nick Marziani and Kaiser Kuo

Over the past 16 years, there has emerged in China a community of self-identified "rights defense" (weiquan) lawyers, akin to "cause lawyers" in the United States, who select cases and frame legal advocacy with a goal of achieving wider societal impact.  Once celebrated in official discourse, these lawyers have increasingly come under scrutiny and pressure by the Chinese Party-state, that has intensified despite official promotion of "rule of law" concepts since the CCP Central Committee’s Fourth Plenum in 2014.  In this episode, scholar and activist Teng Biao, one of China’s earliest and most famous weiquan lawyers, discusses with Neysun Mahboubi the history and current predicament of "rights defense" lawyering in China, and charts possible future directions for this work.  The episode was recorded on April 11, 2018. Dr. Teng Biao is an academic lawyer and a human rights activist.  He was formerly a Lecturer at the China University of Political Science and Law, in Beijing.  Since first coming to wide public attention in connection with the Sun Zhigang incident in 2003, he has provided counsel in numerous human rights cases, including those of activists Chen Guangcheng and Hu Jia, religious freedom claims, and death penalty appeals.  He has also co-founded two groups that have combined research with advocacy in human rights cases, the Open Constitution Initiative (Gongmeng) and China Against the Death Penalty.  Most recently, he has visited at Harvard Law School, Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, and NYU’s US-Asia Law Institute.  He maintains an active blog in Chinese and you can also follow him on Twitter @tengbiao. Music credit: "Salt" by Poppy Ackroyd, follow her at http://poppyackroyd.com  Special thanks to Nick Marziani, Justin Melnick, and Kaiser Kuo

Chairman Mao famously proclaimed that “women hold up half the sky,” and there are many ways in which women’s status, rights, and opportunities have improved under CCP rule.  That said, patriarchal ideas about the role of women have continued to find robust expression in China, in different and evolving ways, since 1949 and through the reform & opening period.  In this episode, Brown University sociologist Yun Zhou discusses with Neysun Mahboubi the landscape of gender inequality in China, with special attention to the implications of the one-child policy and its repeal, as well as the Chinese #MeToo movement and feminist advocacy more generally.  The episode was recorded on November 5, 2018. Yun Zhou received her PhD in Sociology from Harvard University.  She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University’s Population Studies and Training Center.  Her research examines social inequality through the lens of gender, marriage, family, and reproduction.  Her most recent work on China’s universal two-child policy, “The Dual Demands: Gender Equity and Fertility Intentions after the One-Child Policy,” was just published in the Journal of Contemporary China.  Dr. Zhou also writes extensively for popular audiences on the topics of gender inequality, sexual violence, and reproductive rights in China.  Her work has been featured in Tengxun Dajia, Pengpai, Renwu, The South China Morning Post, and Boston Metro, among other outlets.  She has also served as a volunteer with the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center since 2016.  You can follow her at @yunjulietzhou. Music credit: "Salt" by Poppy Ackroyd, follow her at http://poppyackroyd.com  Special thanks to Nick Marziani, Kaiser Kuo, and Yue Hou

The Chinese government is currently in the process of dismantling the family planning policies which it introduced in the 1970s, and developed alongside its program of reform & opening over the past 40 years—which are most famously associated with the one-child limit for most Chinese families, that was finally converted into a universal two-child limit starting in 2016.  In so doing, the government is attempting to defuse a ticking demographic time bomb, that is not entirely the fault of the one-child policy, but was certainly accelerated by its prolonged tenure.  Considering this looming crisis makes it a particularly appropriate time to ask why and how the one-child policy was introduced in the first place, why it has taken so long to abolish, and what lessons can be drawn that might be used to improve Chinese governance in the future.  In this episode, Neysun Mahboubi invites sociologist Wang Feng of the University of California—a leading expert on global demography, aging, and inequality—to reflect on the history and social impact of China’s family planning policies and their social impact.  The episode was recorded on March 22, 2018. Wang Feng is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine.  His research focuses on social inequality in post-socialist societies, global demographic change, and migration in China.  His books include Creating Wealth and Poverty in Postsocialist China (co-editor, with Deborah Davis; Stanford University Press 2008), Boundaries and Categories: Rising Inequality in Post-Socialist Urban China (Stanford University Press 2007), and One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities, 1700-2000 (co-author, with James Z. Lee; Harvard University Press 1999).  He also has served as Professor at Tsinghua University, in Beijing, and as a Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution. Music credit: "Salt" by Poppy Ackroyd, follow her at http://poppyackroyd.com  Special thanks to Nick Marziani, Justin Melnick, and Kaiser Kuo

What explains Taiwan’s outsized presence in our news headlines, especially over the first two years of the Trump administration?  What can be learned from its raucous process of democratization over the past thirty years?  How will it continue to forge its unexpected identity, against the backdrop of China’s ever-deepening shadow?  In this episode, Davidson College political scientist Shelley Rigger, one of the foremost authorities on Taiwan’s domestic politics and international standing, discusses these questions with Neysun Mahboubi, in relaying the dramatic modern story of Taiwan, and what it reflects about shifts in global ordering over time.  The episode was recorded on March 16, 2018. Shelley Rigger is the Brown Professor of East Asian Politics, and Assistant Dean for Educational Policy, at Davidson College.  She is also a Senior Fellow with the Asia Program of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, in Philadelphia.  Prof. Rigger is the author of Why Taiwan Matters: Small Island, Global Powerhouse (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), as well as two books on Taiwan’s domestic politics, Politics in Taiwan: Voting for Democracy (Routledge 1999) and From Opposition to Power: Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (Lynne Rienner Publishers 2001).  She has also published articles on Taiwan’s domestic politics, the national identity issue in Taiwan-China relations, and related topics.  Her current research studies the effects of cross-strait economic interactions on Taiwanese people's perceptions of mainland China. Music credit: "Salt" by Poppy Ackroyd, follow her at http://poppyackroyd.com  Special thanks to Nick Marziani and Anthony Tao

The following is a live recording of the 2019 Annual Public Lecture at Penn’s CSCC delivered by Susan Shirk, and introduced by the Center’s Director, Avery Goldstein. The event took place on January 31, 2019.  Music credit: "Salt" by Poppy Ackroyd, follow her at http://poppyackroyd.com  Special thanks to Justin Melnick and Christopher Passanante