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According to the conventional wisdom, the promise of the Chinese revolution of 1949 went unfulfilled in the Maoist era. Instead of taking off, the economy grew slowly, and widespread rural poverty persisted. The economic turning point was instead the famous political climacteric of 1976–78. But this metric of aggregates is the wrong criterion by which to judge China's economic record because industrial revolutions have regional beginnings. They invariably take place against a backcloth of slow aggregate growth and stagnant material living standards. Accordingly, we should dwell neither on China's slow overall growth nor its widespread poverty before 1978 but look instead for evidence of an emerging regional growth pole. This article argues that Jiangsu was such a growth pole in the late Maoist era, and that its record bears comparison with that of Lancashire and Yorkshire during the early years of Britain's industrial revolution. This holds out the intriguing possibility that a Chinese economic take-off, diffusing out of the Yangtze Delta, would have occurred even without post-1978 policy changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between the sent-down youth movement and economic development in rural China during the Cultural Revolution. It examines ways in which sent-down youth themselves initiated improvements in rural life, and more importantly, how local officials used both their presence to acquire equipment and technical training and their skills and education to promote rural industry. The sent-down youth offices established in the cities and the countryside inadvertently provided connections between remote rural counties and large urban centres that enabled the transfer of a significant quantity of material goods, ranging from electrical wires and broadcast cables to tractors and factory machinery. Ultimately, we show how individual sent-down youths, their families, and both urban and rural officials – none of whom had a role in determining government policies – identified and made use of resources that those policies unintentionally produced. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since 2005, central Chinese leaders have successfully encouraged local governments and commercial actors to expand their economic interactions with North Korea. However, the resulting expansion in commercial actors and economic interactions has intensified a principal-agent dilemma for Chinese leaders, exacerbating diplomatic tensions, eroding border security, and undermining popular support for Beijing's engagement strategy. In comparison with China's other neighbours, North Korea presents both a difficult case for stimulating economic engagement and a relatively easy case for enforcement. These dynamics are even more likely to emerge across China's 13 other land neighbours. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article carries a two-fold argument. First, Beijing's economic sanctions against Vietnam during the period 1975–1978 were mainly motivated by its desire to punish Vietnam for an anti-China policy that smacked of ingratitude for the latter's past assistance, fuelled further by Hanoi's closer relations with Moscow. They were also designed to extract Hanoi's accommodation of China's demand for territorial boundary concessions and to halt the persecution of ethnic Chinese residents in Vietnam. Second, the resultant meltdown of Sino-Vietnamese relations, as well as the making of the Soviet-Vietnamese alliance between 1975 and 1978, was gradual and contentious rather than swift and decisive as most existing studies contend. Hanoi's reluctance to forge a formal military alliance with the faraway Soviet Union against China was largely driven by the importance of China's remaining aid and economic potential to Vietnam's post-war economic reconstruction and the uncertainty of the Soviet commitment to aid Vietnam. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

China's increasing, and increasingly visible, engagement in Latin America has led to a variety of analyses, many based on either international relations notions of realism or international political economy precepts of trade. Rather than seeing China's rhetoric on its relations with Latin America as fluff that conceals a harder reality, this article takes rhetoric seriously as a device of “framing and claiming”: a way in which political elites in China interpret the fast-changing developing world and China's place in it. The article explores how political elites have understood the sources of China's own domestic development and then projected those notions on to other parts of the developing world, through earlier “fractal” logics of development whereby each state repeats one model of development in its own way and a currently dominant “division of labour” logic that posits one integrated model of development whereby complementarity and comparative advantage hold sway. The article concludes with a comparison of China's relations with Peru and Brazil, suggesting that China's bilateral relations with Brazil indicate a newer, emerging rhetoric of global partnership based on equality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mexico's economic relationship with China has intensified substantially in the last decade. Based on an increasing literature on the overall and aggregate relationship, this analysis proposes a detailed examination of the auto parts-automobile chain, which is of utmost importance for both countries and will be significant for understanding the future trade relationship between them. In order to understand the industrial organization of Mexico and China, the article first gives an overview of the international trade and industrial organization patterns. After establishing the characteristics of Mexico's and China's legal framework, production, employment and trade, the analysis concludes with a group of proposals to improve binational co-operation. Both countries – China interested in increasing its export platform based on Chinese parts brands and Mexico supplying parts and components and providing decades of experiences in international networks – can benefit from these suggestions and overcome current tensions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There has been considerable concern in Latin America over the implications of increased competition from China for local industry. These concerns include the possibility of “deindustrialization,” the increased “primarization” of the region's exports and the difficulties of upgrading manufactured exports into higher technology products. This article examines the impact of Chinese competition both in the domestic market and in export markets on Brazilian industry. It documents the increased penetration of Chinese manufactures in the Brazilian market and the way in which Brazilian exports have lost market share to China in the US, European Union and four Latin American countries. Brazil, because of its more developed and locally integrated industrial sector, is not typical of other Latin American countries and the article also discusses the relevance of the Brazilian experience for the region as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Analyses of Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) sometimes question the investment criteria of Chinese firms, suggesting that market rules are not fundamental but secondary to political and geostrategic concerns. Questioning the apolitical nature of markets, the present article uses the internationalization of China's mining industry as a case study to ascertain the criteria that guide Chinese FDI. It first examines quantitative data from 2000 to 2010 which suggests that Chinese mining investment in Latin America and worldwide gravitates towards liberal economies. Second, by focusing on the projects of Chinese mining firms in Peru, the article illustrates how China's overseas mineral quest is best explained by probing into the integrated strategies of individual mining firms which seek to capitalize their comparative advantage in accessing Chinese markets and the political momentum of the “Going Out” strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents information from a variety of news sources on Chinese political, military, economic and social affairs as well as information on the 14th and 15th sessions of the 11th National People's Congress Standing Committee. It discusses changes in leadership in China's Military Districts and notes the presence of Chinese naval vessels in Asian waters. It reports on economic growth and the success of China's stimulus package, discusses the impact of droughts in Southern China and reports on labour conditions at Chinese companies.

An increasingly visible facet of China's commercial diplomacy has been its pursuit of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) with small and medium-sized economies outside Asia. China's PTAs, completed or under negotiation, have indicated both a conservative approach and an increasing comfort level with cross-regional trade negotiations. The China-Iceland PTA negotiations since 2006 illustrate this new thinking. Although the island state has a considerably smaller economy, China has perceived the negotiations as being undertaken between equals as well as an important bilateralism model. A successful deal will further demonstrate a new stage in Chinese commercial diplomacy and its approach to bilateral trade as well as a determination to engage the European economy even through a "side door" approach. However, in light of Iceland's banking crisis and deep recession in late 2008, Beijing has also had to address the uncertainties of negotiating with small states in a time of global economic uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how local resistance against government attempts to reduce poverty to a technical problem ironically reinforces the precarious state of the poor. It looks at the workings of the minimum livelihood guarantee (dibao) through mundane interactions between streetlevel officials and poor residents in a workers' village on the periphery of Harbin. As the party-state's primary policy for urban poverty, dibao has introduced a new rationality that poverty is calculable and flexible. Urban laid-off workers have resisted this by invoking the socialist claim that they are "the people." I examine how this resistance has led street-level officials to be preoccupied with the old socialist norm of "an ability to work" rather than with "income" as dibao's official criterion. The new local criterion has produced the ironic effect that urban laid-off workers, who were understood to be dibao's main target, have been mostly excluded from the scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's leading state-owned banks have undergone radical transformation in recent years, with six of the country's top seven players listed in both Hong Kong and Shanghai. We first consider how the banks were reorganized for initial public offering, in terms of the removal of non-performing loans and the massive recapitalization of their balance sheets. Second, and more importantly, we consider whether they have been able to retain market share, further commercialize and enhance overall financial positions post-listing. Through in-depth case analysis of the six state-owned banks, we show that post-initial public offering they have significantly improved profitability, loan book size, loan book quality and capital reserve protection. However, we caution that the debilitating effects of the global credit crunch may slow or even arrest further progress across these dimensions in the near term. We conclude that China's leading banks have benefited materially from their transition, and have accordingly developed a range of competitive and co-operative strategies not only to sustain domestic market advantage but also to penetrate overseas markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2006, China's National Bureau of Statistics undertook a benchmark revision of national income and product accounts statistics based on the findings of the 2004 economic census. The benchmark revision covers primarily the years 1993-2004 with revised economy-wide and sectoral output values. The new data have three implications. First, despite all the hype only a few years ago about data falsification by local statistical authorities in China, the 2004 economic census results validate the provincial aggregate output values and invalidate the centre's national ones. Second, at the national level, economy-wide as well as sectoral nominal values were revised but real growth rates of some sectors remained unchanged. That is not plausible, and implies that at least the secondary sector real growth rates are erroneous. And finally, the benchmark revision raises questions about the quality and meaning of a large body of official statistics. Ultimately, it casts doubt on the professionalism and sincerity of China's statistical authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines China's state sector reform through its agriculture. According to the article, the total statistics and broader reform measures show the declining role of the state. It claims that state and party policy makers aim to support the livelihoods of farmers and to pursue agricultural modernization in the context of rapid industrialization. Lastly, it claims that the state has maintained and developed new mechanisms of influence especially in the areas of service provision and enterprise development.

Examines economic reforms and state sector bankruptcy in China. Impact of state-owned enterprises reform on government finances; Underpricing of issued shares at the initial public offering; Financing of government non-productive expenditures; Labor remuneration in the first decade of reforms.

Focuses on political factors that shape the capacity of China's central government in implementing the 1994 tax-assignment system. Critique of the theory of state extractive capacity; Normative theory of state capacity; Lack of consensus among central leaders on the urgency of tax reform; Fiscal decline under the tax-assignment system.

Focuses on the contractionary investment policies of 1988 and 1989 in China. Actual process of implementation; Effects of policies on all tiers of the state hierarchy; Existence and effect of provincial obstructionism; Role of central ministries during contractionary macroeconomic policy periods; Distinction between microeconomic and macroeconomic insights.

Examines the impact of economic liberalization on the segmented and cellular social structure, resource distribution and regulation characteristic of the Chinese Communist work unit system. Chinese Communist `danwei' as an institution which embodies social, governmental and cultural practices and norms; Case study of the high technology industry in Haidian district.

Analyzes the growth of employment outside the state-owned sector and within the private economy. Motivation behind the change which occurred after 1978 in official policy toward sectors outside the state economy; Chinese government's promotion of urban collectives, foreign-invested ventures and privately-owned firms; Movement of urban workers within a private labor market.

Discusses Deng Xiaoping as an economist who transformed China's economic system. Creation of a sustained program of economic reform; Deng's requirement for real incentives; Delegation of authority; Importance accorded toward economic issue; Need for rapid growth; Importance of non-intervention; Need to open to the outside world.

Examines the factors behind the shift in Xinjiang's bargaining position with China during 1989-1990 that allowed it to attain priority status in the Eighth Five-Year Plan (1991-95) after a decade of supporting the coastal region's priority status. Regionalization of China's foreign economic relations; Political economy of historical center-local differences over Xinjiang; More.

Argues that the concept of sporadic totalitarian state, which denotes a state with strong despotic power but weak infrastructural power, can best explain the vicissitudes of economic activities in Wenzhou since 1949. The private economy in Wenzhou; Explanation of the rise of private industry in Wenzhou; Local protection of private industry; The benefits of local authorities and cadres; The economic history of Wenzhou from 1949-1978; More.