Property Rights and Economic Development in China – Susan Whiting

03/22/19 • 65 min

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

Music credit: "Salt" by Poppy Ackroyd, follow her at http://poppyackroyd.com

Special thanks to Nick Marziani and Kaiser Kuo

Previous Episode

The Evolution of Workers’ Rights in China – Mary Gallagher

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

Next Episode

Local Governance and Accountability in China – Dan Mattingly

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