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This article offers a detailed analysis of the policy design of the current fourth round of state-owned enterprise (SOE) corporate restructuring in China. This time, the state's efforts to improve SOE performance hinged on attracting private capital to take ownership shares in state firms—or so-called mixed-ownership reforms. The article relies on an analysis of policy documents, interviews with policy experts in China, and a case study of local mixed-ownership reform implementation in the city of Nanjing. It discusses implications of mixed ownership for corporate governance amid changing state–Party–business relations in China. It concludes that the reform agenda consolidates a hybrid political-economic system that organically blends planning and market modes of economic coordination, as well as public and private modes of ownership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's deepening ties to Iran, evident in the comprehensive strategic partnership (CSP) signed in 2021 after five years of stalled progress, is not an indication of a revisionist Chinese approach to the Gulf region. In fact, its CSPs with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, already activated and implemented, are at far more mature levels, commensurate with China's deep levels of economic and political engagement with the Arab side of the Gulf. This is consistent with a strategic hedging approach that Beijing has used to build a sustainable presence without disrupting a competitive and fragile regional order. With far larger and more diverse interests in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, China's partnership with Iran creates leverage due to the asymmetry inherent in the China‐Iran relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large-scale urban development projects have become the main vehicle by which targeted interventions for place- and scale-specific state initiatives unfold, triggering a series of processes that are associated with the rescaling of state space. This study aims to understand the place-specific conditions, pathways and strategies whereby states' spatial and scalar restructuring takes place in urban development projects (UDPs) within China's political economic contexts, and in turn how UDPs act as critical lenses for viewing the changing nature of state spatial strategy in China, through a case study of the Lingang New Town in Shanghai. The major findings are: UDPs in China function as tools not just for land value extraction but also for scale-making to cater to the state's pursuits of place-specific competitiveness in the global economy; the restructuring of the state apparatus and regulatory frameworks is driven by place-specific tensions and crises triggered by earlier rounds of state rescaling; the state chose state-agents rather than market-agents to reinforce its power, and thus the state space expands through development of UDPs; through developing UDPs, China's spatial strategies have explicitly and officially engaged with the discourse of globalisation while implicitly engaging with geographically variegated practices of neoliberalisation. At the theoretical level, this article facilitates an investigation of how China's state spatial strategy, characterised by geographically and chronologically variegated engagement with neoliberalism, is actualised through UDPs. It also demonstrates how, despite being a socialist polity, pragmatic market measures and downscaling are taken as transient measures in times of need. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What led to the boom of Chinese development cooperation in Latin America? This article provides a systematic analysis of China's foreign behavior, motives, and policies regarding development cooperation toward the region between 2000 and 2014. I propose a comparative framework that defines Chinese development cooperation as a tool of economic diplomacy. Drawing on empirical evidence from AidData's Global Chinese Official Finance Dataset and Chinese white papers on foreign aid, the findings evidence that China was motivated by multiple and conjunctural factors in providing development cooperation. In the realm of theory, the article contributes to the literature on economic statecraft—filling in gaps in understanding the relationship between economics and politics. Empirically, it provides a set of tools for understanding the important role that development cooperation plays in a nation's statecraft. Regarding Chinese foreign policy studies, it offers insight into the financial dimension of China's international economic relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does a state's source of wealth condition the domain in which it seeks to project influence? We argue that what a state makes conditions what they take. Specifically, the less states rely on land rents to acquire wealth, the less interested they will be in seeking control over territory and the more interested they will be in securing access to distant markets. We develop and test several observable implications that should follow whether this proposition is true. First, as states become less economically dependent on territory, they should be less likely to fight over territory; second, those states should be more likely to both invest in power projection capabilities and subsequently project power at greater distances. Our findings support our theory. These results are robust across a variety of model specifications that take into account potential confounds, such as regime type, economic development, threat, and geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the challenge posed by flawed democracies or political regime to the rise of China and its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Topics discussed are attempts of political leaderships in Nepal, Malaysia, Pakistan and Maldives to influence the direction of China's development efforts and flaws in the design of BRI including investment of China in corruption, scale of China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) financial obligations and demand for local participation in BRI projects.

China has become the leading country to develop wind and solar energy industries. By presenting the institutional arrangement and interest constellations of China's regulatory system of renewable energy sectors, this paper argues that the reasons for China's swift expansion of wind and solar energy investment go beyond the notion of a state-led model. It also reveals that due to a series of internal power struggles and external shocks, the current regulatory system is undergoing significant restructuring. A new policy paradigm is emerging that is largely different from the previous decades of policy orientation that centred on capacity expansion and instrumental interests for renewable energy development. The new paradigm would face tremendous challenges from existing institutions and vested interests, and it requires new set of ideologies that can help renewable energy sector to truly competing with the energy incumbents in order to bring about meaningful lowcarbon energy transition in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As development is no longer simply conceived of as economic growth, but also as encapsulating human development, the role of the developmental state must be rethought. Focusing on the state's ability to deliver collective goods such as welfare has become an important task for developing and developed nations alike, and nowhere is this more important than in China. Consequently, intimate connections between the political and industrial elites are no longer sufficient and may actually be counterproductive to the success of the developmental state. Diverging from traditional developmental states, China shows that incorporation of new stakeholders is not premised on principles of human development. The novelty that China brings to re-thinking and re-articulating a new developmental state framework is that the development state of the twenty-first century can create new alliances such as with non-governmental organisations to meet human development objectives, but substantive change with regards to how the state is organised is not a precondition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article defines the key parameters of ‘state entrepreneurialism’ as a governance form that combines planning centrality and market instruments, and interprets how these two seemingly contradictory tendencies are made coherent in the political economic structures of post-reform China. Through examining urban regeneration programmes (in particular ‘three olds regeneration’, sanjiu gaizao), the development of suburban new towns and the reconstruction of the countryside, the article details institutional configurations that make the Chinese case different from a neoliberal growth machine. The contradiction of these tendencies gives room to urban residents and migrants to develop their agencies and their own spaces, and creates informalities in Chinese urban transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the effects of natural resource extraction on authoritarian governments' provision of public services, using subnational data from China. Facing no electoral constraint that would reflect the policy preferences of citizens, Chinese local leaders instead allocate public funds differentially based on their need for quality labor in local economic development, a critical criterion for their political success. When the local economy benefits from natural resources, the need for skilled local labor dissipates, and leaders invest less in social services that enhance labor productivity. Using panel data across all prefecture-level cities (1992-2010), I find evidence that mineral resource abundance leads local governments to provide fewer public services for education and health care. Meanwhile, services unrelated to labor quality remain unaffected. The results are robust to the inclusion of key confounding factors such as FDI inflows and state-owned enterprises' output contributions. Additional analyses reject alternative mechanisms including political turnover. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the Sino-British Joint Declaration and Basic Law, Hong Kong was to exercise a high degree of autonomy under the framework of “one country, two systems” after the British handover of its sovereignty to China in 1997. In the initial post-handover period, Beijing adopted a policy of nonintervention in Hong Kong, but the outbreak of the July 1, 2003 protest triggered a subsequent change of policy. Since then, Beijing has embarked on state-building nationalism, adopting incorporation strategies so as to subject Hong Kong to greater central control over the political, economic, and ideological arenas. Ironically, instead of successfully assimilating Hongkongese into one Chinese nation, Beijing’s incorporation strategies are leading to a rise of peripheral nationalism in the city-state and waves of counter-mobilization. This article analyzes mainland–Hong Kong relations on the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the handover and offers insights from an emerging case study that builds upon the nationalism literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When most of China's major cities are suffering from smog, people start to cry out for environmental improvement. The significance of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become one of the hottest topics in China. CSR and shareholder primacy are widely debated idiosyncratic areas of corporate legislation. China's approach has thus far been unclear in both areas. This paper first considers all related provisions in Chinese commercial law in order to identify China's approach (law on the books) from the legislative perspective. Then, based on this conclusion of the schizophrenic Chinese corporate law, it further examines the enforcement of shareholder primacy and CSR laws using empirical methods (law in action). Finally, the efficacy of the current approach is analysed and assessed from a political economy perspective. The article concludes that it would be efficient for China to follow existing statutory requirements and imperatives. Moreover, China must correct practitioners' modus operandi in order to improve the rule of law. Social responsibility issues should, for the time being, be tackled outside the corporate law box rather than by meddling with already confusing director duties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how China's economic cooperation affects authoritarian persistence elsewhere. For the period 1998-2008, the article assesses quantitatively whether the effects of economic cooperation from China vary, conditioned by the regime type of the recipient. The analysis finds that China's economic cooperation is associated with regime durability in party-based regimes. In non-party regimes, in contrast, it is associated with regime collapse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]