Adaptive informal institutions and endogenous institutional change in China

World Politics

Volumn 59, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 116-141

  Tsai, Kellee S ^a  

^a JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COMMUNISM; COPING STRATEGY; ECONOMIC REFORM; INSTITUTIONAL REFORM; PARTY POLITICS; PRIVATE SECTOR;

ASIA; CHINA; EURASIA; FAR EAST;

EID: 34250689478     PISSN: 00438871     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/wp.2007.0018     Document Type: Article

References (91)

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13. China Daily, December 14, 2005. A 2006 report issued by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimated that in five years the nonstate sector would account for three-quarters of China's GDP and 70 percent of the country's firms would be privately owned.
14. See China Daily, September 22, 2006.
15. Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966).
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22. This notion of organizational appropriation may be traced back to Selznick's classic study of the Tennessee Valley Authority; Philip P. Selznick, TVA and the Grass Roots (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949).
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28. Mahoney (fn. 8).
29. Pierson (fn. 13), 84.
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32. and Eric Schickler, Disjointed Pluralism: Institutional Innovation and the Development of the U.S. Congress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
33. Lieberman (fn. 9).
34. Ibid., 704.
35. On political entrepreneurs as key sources of endogenous institutional change, see Adam Sheingate, "Political Entrepreneurship, Institutional Change, and American Political Development," Studies in American Political Development 17 (Fall 2003).
36. Kenneth G. Lieberthal and David M. Lampton, eds., Bureaucracy, Politics, and Decision-Making in Post-Mao China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
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38. Thelen (fn. 10).
39. Ibid., 292.
40. In the Chinese context, X. L. Ding refers to a similar phenomenon as "institutional amphibiousness." Ding, "Institutional Amphibiousness and the Transition from Communism: The Case of China," British Journal of Political Science 24, no. 3 (1994).
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47. North (fn. 12), 91.
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49. Five types of informal institutions are identified in Hans-Joachim Lauth, "Informal Institutions and Democracy," Democratization 7 (Winter 2000).
50. This definition draws from Helmke and Levitsky (fn. 30, 727) but also includes public policies because they typically have institutional consequences.
51. Pierson suggests: "[I]t makes good sense to think of public policies as important institutions. For the individuals and social organizations that make up civil society, public policies are clearly very central rules governing their interactions"; Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 165.
52. Kellee S. Tsai, Back-Alley Banking: Private Entrepreneurs in China (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002).
53. For example, distinct cycles of crackdowns on local financial institutions such as trust and investment companies were apparent and corresponded with the broader policy reform cycles through the late 1990s, when Zhu Rongji was premier. Correspondence with Yi-feng Tao, November 10, 2006.
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56. Cf. Greif and Laitin (fn. 16).
57. Pierson (fn. 31), 224-27.
58. The eight-employee limit has an ideological rationale: in Das Kapital (1867), Marx indicated that capitalist producers with more than eight employees were exploitative and surplus accumulating, while those with fewer than eight workers were nonexploitative household producing units.
59. For more detail, see Susan Young, Private Business and Economic Reform in China (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1995).
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61. Author interview with anonymous entrepreneur, Huizhou, Guangdong, October 16, 2002. As part of a larger project, I conducted interviews with more than three hundred Chinese entrepreneurs and officials over the course of 2001 to 2005. A list of interviewees is available in Tsai (fn. 7).
62. Author interview with anonymous entrepreneur, Nanjing, Jiangsu, October 10, 2002.
63. Kristin Parris, "Local Initiative and National Reform: The Wenzhou Model of Development," China Quarterly 134 (June 1993).
64. Zhongguo tongji nianjian (China Statistical Yearbook) (various years).
65. On local variation in the use of red hat strategies and development of private property rights, see Jean Oi and Andrew G. Walder, eds., Property Rights and Economic Reform in China (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1999);
66. and Susan H. Whiting, Power and Wealth in Rural China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
67. By the same token, Whiting (fa. 45) points out that local officials and entrepreneurs "shared a common interest in the security of shareholding cooperatives" as legitimate collective enterprises in localities that were dominated by genuine collective enterprises, as well as localities that were dominated by private businesses (pp. 163-64).
68. Jean C. Oi, Rural China Takes Off: Institutional Foundations of Economic Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
69. Author correspondence with anonymous government researcher, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, November 19, 2006.
70. Bejing Review, November 9-15, 1987,
71. cited in Rashid Malik, Chinese Entrepreneurs in the Economic Development of China (Westport: Praeger, 1997), 15.
72. Beijing Review (July 18-24, 1988), 6,
73. cited in Malik (fn. 49).
74. China State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC), Zhongguo siying jingji nianjian (China Private Economy Yearbook) (various years).
75. For example, "Deng Liqun, Others, Criticize Jiang Zemin for Agreeing to Admit Capitalists into the CPC," originally posted on http://www.renminbao.com on July 20, 2001, translated text from FBIS-China, July 28, 2001.
76. Dickson (fn. 7).
77. Author interview with anonymous entrepreneur, Liangfeng, Hebei, August 20, 2002.
78. SAIC, Private Economy Yearbook (2005).
79. These consultations "took place over a period of perhaps two years." Joseph Fewsmith, "Rethinking the Role of the CCP: Explicating Jiang Zemin's Party Anniversary Speech," China Leadership Monitor 1 (Winter 2002), 3.
80. Li Yan, "Qieshi jiaqiang fei gongyouzhi jingji zhuzhi dangjian gongzuo buduan guangda dang de gongzuo de fugai mian," in SAIC, Zhongguo siying jingii nianjian 2002-2004 (China Private Economy Yearbook) (Beijing: Zhonghua gongshang lianhe chubanshe, 2005), 107.
81. Ibid., 108.
82. As Whiting (fn. 45) points out, privatization of collectives was the result of changes in the fiscal system, the cadre evaluation system, and the national political economic environment. Furthermore, by 1999 the selling off of small and medium-size state-owned enterprises, announced at the 15th Party Congress in 1997, was gaining momentum.
83. Oi and Walder (fn. 45).
84. Donald Clarke, Peter Murrell, and Susan Whiting, "The Role of Law in China's Economic Development," The George Washington University Law School Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper no. 187 (2006).
85. Yu An, cited in "Constitutional Revision Requires Law Adjustment," China Business Weekly, March 8, 2004.
86. Whiting (fn. 45), 299.
87. Lian Xisheng, former vice chair of the China Constitution Society, cited in "Amendments Protect Private Property," China Business Weekly, January 4, 2004.
88. Author correspondence with Scott Kennedy, University of Indiana-Bloomington, November 2, 2006.
89. Author correspondence with anonymous government researcher, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, November 12, 2006.
90. Business owners lobby for narrower, sector-specific issues such as setting industry standards and prices. Scott Kennedy, The Business of Lobbying in China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).
91. Richard Baum and Alexei Shevchenko, "The State of the State," in Merle Goldman and Roderick MacFarquar, eds., The Paradox of Post-Mao Reforms (Cambridge: Harvard Contemporary China Series, 1999).