The effects of China's rural industry on agricultural environment

Rural industry is the fastest growing sector in China's economy and made up 27.52% of the GNP in 1990. The development of rural industry not only enhances the peasants’ living standard, but also demonstrates the advantages and potential of a new ownership system. Along with the development of the rural industry, however, some serious environmental problems have emerged in the agriculture. Traditional agriculture and farmers are rapidly disappearing in the developed rural industrial areas. Due to some unique characteristics of rural industry, such as its wide distribution, small size and frequent production change, a set of new environmental problems have arisen. These problems threaten a vast area of China's best cropping land. Solving those problems is beyond the capacity of current agricultural and industrial policies, because these problems are directly related to China's political system. The author proposes a set of strategies and policies that, under the current political constraints, may mitigate the negative effects of rural industry on the agricultural environment.     

Discussion of 'Four Contradictions Constraining China's Foreign Policy Behavior'

Chinese foreign policy behavior is constrained by different sets of contradictions, but at the same time these contradictions serve to inspire and focus Chinese foreign policy, both in negative and positive ways. As China transitions to a developed country that is fully integrated into regional and global economic, political and security regimes, these contradictions may become less salient, however. With the growth of China's comprehensive national power, the Chinese will come to view their country less as a poor nation and more as a great power and thus this dual-identity syndrome should diminish in importance as a factor constraining China's foreign policy behavior over time. The contradictory impetus behind Chinese foreign policy that derives from the desire to benefit from pursuit of 'open-door' policies and the compulsion to protect state sovereignty will similarly likely become less important as China's power grows, but only if there is mutually acceptable settlement to the Taiwan problem and Beijing's confidence in its ability to secure its territorial integrity is enhanced. A stronger, more confident China will also likely become more actively involved in regional and global issues on a pragmatic, rather than principled basis. Finally, while bilateral ties will remain important to Beijing, its participation in multilateral fora will no doubt increase, including in the security sphere, as it becomes more experienced and self-assured in multilateral interaction. Ultimately, bilateral and multilateralism may take on the role of parallel tracks in Chinese diplomacy with little tension between them.     

China–Africa Trade Patterns: causes and consequences

China's trade patterns with African countries have made Beijing the focal point of new anti-Chinese resistance narratives in Africa. Unlike the Maoist era, when China's trade policies served its leaders' political goals, now they aim to access markets as part of China's larger domestic development strategy. China's state-run firms can channel China–Africa trade through extra-market decisions that influence flows, yet, ultimately, Beijing's ability to direct trade with Africa is constrained by market forces. Despite suggestions that shared illiberalism drives China–Africa trade the author concludes that five interrelated causal factors overwhelmingly determine China–Africa trade: China's comparative advantage in labor-intensive and capital-intensive production; Africa's abundant natural resource endowments; China's rapid economic growth; China's emphasis on infrastructure building at home and in Africa; and the emergence of economies of scale in China's shipping and light manufacturing sectors.     

A Crisis is Looming: China's energy challenge in the eyes of university students

This paper uses a survey at six universities in China to analyze university students' views on China's energy problems. It finds that gender, the nature and location of a student's original community, and their level of education affects students' views about China's energy problems, as well as the types of solutions that are deemed to be most appropriate to manage this looming crisis. University students are quite concerned about China's energy situation. For them, it is already a crisis. They fear China will be controlled due to resource dependency, see the US as China's primary energy competitor, all the while advocating a more hawkish attitude towards Japan in the East China Sea. But, they look foremost to domestic solutions to this crisis, such as enhanced conservation, more efficient use of energy, new technologies, enhancing China's strategic reserve, and increased government taxation, particularly of large enterprises. When they look abroad, they support diversifying energy sources, increasing energy cooperation, particularly with Russia and Central Asia (but not with Japan), and some increase of the navy's role in enhancing sea lane and energy security.     

The China challenge: Theoretical perspectives and policy implications

Over the past few years there has been a heated debate in the West over the potential challenge of an increasingly strong and assertive China to the Asia‐Pacific region and to the world in general. This article offers a systematic analysis of the debate on China's emerging role in the international system and its security implications from the theoretical perspectives of realism and liberalism. While both international relations theories have provided valuable insights, neither of them alone is able to unravel the puzzle of whether a prosperous and powerful China will be a major force of stability or a threat to international peace. Drawing on the theory of trade expectations, this article shows the conditions under which high interdependence between China and its trading partners will lead to pacific or belligerent Chinese behavior. If Chinese decision‐makers’ expectations for future trade are high, they will be less likely to use force to deal with unresolved disputes with neighboring countries. If, however, they have a negative view of their future trading environment, they will be likely to take measures, including military actions, to remove any obstacles that might forestall the pursuit of great‐power status. For the moment, China's expectations of future trade are by and large optimistic, but there is evidence of growing Chinese suspicion of a Western ‘conspiracy’ to contain China which may alter Beijing's future perceptions. To ensure that the rise of China will not cause regional and global instability, the outside world should seek to integrate China into the international community by pursuing policies that will have a positive influence on China's expected value of trade. In the meantime, some elements of the balance of power strategy need to be introduced in order to curtail China's expected value of war.     

Performance Legitimacy,State Autonomy and China's Economic Miracle

Theories that explain post-Mao China's economic success tend to attribute it to one or several ‘successful’ policies or institutions of the Chinese government, or to account for the success from economic perspectives. This article argues that the success of the Chinese economy relies not just on the Chinese state's economic policy but also on its social policies. Moreover, China's economic success does not merely lie in the effectiveness of any single economic or social policy or institution, but also in the state's capacity to make a policy shift when it faces the negative unintended consequences of its earlier policies. The Chinese state is compelled to make policy shifts quickly because performance constitutes the primary base of its legitimacy, and the Chinese state is able to make policy shifts because it enjoys a high level of autonomy inherited from China's past. China's economic development follows no fixed policies and relies on no stable institutions, and there is no ‘China model’ or ‘Beijing consensus’ that can be constructed to explain its success.     

China's Rise in Southeast Asia: implications for the United States

During the past few decades, China's economic success has permitted it to pursue a greater role on the international stage. China is recognized both as a regional and aspiring global power. Nowhere is this more evident than within Southeast Asia, where China's more active diplomacy is reflected in growing trade relations, proposals for stronger security ties, and the signing of numerous cooperative agreements on issues as varied as environmental protection, drug trafficking, and public health. As a whole, the region has received China's activism with both enthusiasm and trepidation. China has expended significant effort to assuage the fears of its neighbors by adopting a foreign policy approach that is active, non-threatening, and generally aligned with the economic and security interests of the region. This positive diplomacy has clearly yielded some success, most notably in the trade realm, where China is rapidly emerging as an engine of regional economic growth and integration that may well challenge Japanese and American dominance in the next three to five years. In the security realm, China's diplomacy, while rhetorically appealing to regional actors, has yet to make significant inroads in a regional security structure dominated by the United States and its bilateral security relationships. Most significantly, however, if China is to emerge as a real leader within Southeast Asia, it will also need to assume more of the social and political burden that leadership entails. As China continues to advance itself as a regional leader, its policies on issues such as health, drugs, the environment and human rights will face additional scrutiny not only for their impact on the region but also for the more profound question they raise concerning the potential of China's moral leadership. For the United States, China's greater presence and activism suggest at the very least that it cannot remain complacent about the status quo that has governed political, economic and security relations for the past few decades. Shared leadership within Southeast Asia will likely include China in the near future, with all the potential benefits and challenges that such leadership will entail.     

What Affects China's National Image? A cross-national study of public opinion

This paper investigates macro-level sources of variations across countries regrading China's national image, as measured by the proportion of the public in each of 35 countries that expressed a favorable view of China in the 2007 Pew Global Attitudes Survey. It turns out that several expected factors have no significant measurable impact on China's image: not the extent of strategic ties between China and a given country; not the political system of that country; not the extent of Chinese investment in the country; and not the number of Confucius institutes and classrooms in that country. The only macro-level factor we find to affect China's image in a country is that country's level of economic and social development, as measured by the UN Human Development Index. Controlling for the other factors, publics in poor or developing countries are much more likely to have a favorable image of China than publics in economically advanced countries. Some implications of our findings are discussed.     

River Politics: China's policies in the Mekong and the Brahmaputra in comparative perspective

China manages its transboundary rivers as a subset of its broader relations with other riparian states. This results in discernible differences in the way China approaches its international river systems. Although there is a limit to the extent of Chinese cooperation, in relative terms China is more cooperative in the Mekong than in the Brahmaputra. To China, Southeast Asian states are part of a hierarchical system where it stands at the apex. While problems exist, there are deep linkages between them, which help foster collaboration in the Mekong. India, which has greater power parity with China, is not part of China's hierarchical worldview. The territorial disputes and security dilemmas that characterize South Asian geopolitics further impede cooperation. Domestic considerations also impact on China's river policies. There is greater consensus among Chinese policymakers in managing the Mekong than the Brahmaputra, which explains the higher degree of clarity in Chinese policies towards the former compared to the latter.     

A New Chinese Discourse of India

Conventional wisdom has held that China is a success and India is a failure, that India's democracy leads to its poverty and religious intolerance, and China's economic reform without political opening was the only correct path to development and stability. The success of the Indian domestic software industry awed many Chinese and contributed to recent online discussion of India among Chinese scholars. This article sheds light on the changing views of India in China through surveying online articles posted on two major Chinese websites. The new discourse focuses on the historical, cultural, and institutional roots, particularly government policies that have led to the current situation in India. The new Chinese discourse also reflects evaluations of China's own economic policies in the past few decades.     

America in the Eyes of America Watchers: survey research in Beijing in 2012

Based on an original survey conducted in the summer of 2012 in Beijing, we examine how China's America watchers—IR scholars who work on US-China relations—have viewed China's power status in the international system, US-China relations and some specific US policies in Asia. Our survey shows that almost half of the survey participants thought that America would remain the global hegemon in the next ten years. Meanwhile, a large majority was also optimistic that China is a rising great power, especially in the economic sense, in the world. More than half of the respondents saw Asian military issues, such as the South China Sea issue, as the most difficult problem between China and the US.     

China's Sovereign Wealth Funds: origins,development, and future roles

China has established two of the world's newer large sovereign wealth funds (SWFs): the official China Investment Corporation (CIC), and the non-official and less transparent State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) Investment Company (SIC). Both provide alternative investment opportunities for China's exploding foreign exchange reserves, at US$2.4 trillion at the end of 2009, the largest in world history. This paper will address how China has accumulated its huge and growing foreign exchange reserves, and what roles these reserves, until 2007 managed only by the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), have played in the establishment and development of China's two new SWFs. We will look specifically at why China's foreign exchange reserves have developed, and how the new SWFs are a part of broader efforts to provide investment alternatives for China's ballooning foreign exchange surpluses, particularly in light of the inflow of ‘hot’ foreign speculative funds. We will then point out some of the difficulties for China's financial officials of SWFs as they try to pursue multiple and sometimes competing goals, set by boards of directors representing different bureaucratic and economic interests, all within the context of a general lack of transparency and a rapidly growing economy. Finally, we will present our conclusions about the future roles of the two SWFs as well as of the policies being developed to decentralize foreign exchange reserve holdings while at the same time not slowing the growth of China's foreign trade surpluses, nor its foreign direct investments, nor its overall economic growth. We will also examine the effects of US-promoted Chinese currency appreciation on the future of China's foreign exchange reserves and its sovereign wealth funds.     

How East Asians View the Rise of China

Its newly acquired status as the world's second largest economy has entitled China to a more prominent role in global affairs, and increasingly, its behavior has drawn scrutiny from the world in ways that the country is ill-prepared for. The attention to China's rise, however, focuses not only on its economy but also on other aspects, including its military, diplomatic moves, domestic politics and its ‘soft power’, namely, its own image or self-projection and the world's perception or attitudes toward China. And yet, there has been no systematic investigation to evaluate how the world views a rising China. In this article, the authors applied the latest dataset from the Asian Barometer Survey to investigate whether East Asians recognize and welcome the rise of China. The findings suggest that geographical and cultural proximity have a great impact on people's perception of China. Countries which are territorially adjacent or culturally close to China tend to regard China as the most influential country in Asia. With the exception of Japan and Mongolia, most Asian countries hold positive views about the impact of China on the region. However, such benign evaluations are weaker in countries which have potential security conflicts with China, such as Taiwan and South Korea, when only the bilateral impact is considered. The overall picture shows that the rise of China has been largely recognized and welcomed by East Asians, despite some apprehension about China's strategic intentions to its neighboring countries.     

External Contradictions of the Chinese Development Model: export-led growth and the dangers of global economic contraction

China's development model faces an external constraint that could cause an economic hard landing. China has become a global manufacturing powerhouse, and its size now renders its export-led growth strategy unsustainable. China relies on the US market, but the scale of its exports is contributing to the massive US trade deficit, creating financial fragility and undermining the US manufacturing sector. These developments could stall the US economy's expansion, in turn triggering a global recession that will embrace China. This is the external constraint. These considerations suggest that China should transition from export-led growth to domestic demand-led growth. This requires growing the economy's demand side as well as its supply-side. To avoid stalling the US economic expansion, which is critical to China's growth, China should significantly revalue its currency as part of a generalized East Asian upward currency revaluation. Longer term, China should raise wages and improve income distribution. Under export-led growth, higher wages undermine employment. Under domestic demand-led growth, they support it. The challenge is to raise wages in an efficient decentralized manner. History shows that this requires independent democratic trade unions. However, such unions are currently unacceptable to the Chinese political leadership. Creating a domestic demand-led growth regime therefore requires solving this political roadblock.     

Political Process and Widespread Protests in China: the 2010 labor protest

Existing studies of collective actions in China pay most attention to frequent but localized protests, but such protests are less likely to deeply drive China's political and social prospect. By contrast, widespread protests are more likely to affect the Chinese Communist Party's authority and policies once they emerge. The goal of this article is thus to probe the conditions under which a widespread protest can happen in China today. This article proposes four necessary conditions grounded in the political process model and tests them by explaining the successful outbreak of the 2010 labor protest. Identifying these conditions helps us understand and predict the political and social development of China.     

Is China's Western Region Development Strategy on Track? An assessment

China's government launched the Western Region Development Strategy in 2000 with the aim of boosting economic development in 12 provinces, municipalities and autonomous administrative regions in the western part of the country. This paper presents the results of an assessment of the progress made so far and makes suggestions for better performance in the future. We conclude that although the western region has experienced impressive rates of economic growth, regional disparities in China have continued to widen in spite of the western regional strategy. We also develop a regional growth model to determine the major drivers of regional economic growth in the western region of China. Furthermore, the sources of regional disparities are examined using Morduch and Sicular's regression-based decomposition approach. These models are used for suggesting a more targeted package of regional development policies for the period beyond 2010.     

China's WTO Membership and the Non-Market Economy Status: discrimination and impediment to China's foreign trade

This article provides a Chinese perspective on the terms of China's WTO accession, highlighting the negative impact of some discriminatory conditions that China accepted in order to join the WTO on its foreign trade and global competitiveness in the last decade. The author uses the non-market economy status of China as a case study to support the argument that these discriminatory conditions imposed on China upon accession have not only impeded the healthy development of China's foreign trade, but also violated the ‘non-discrimination’ principle of the WTO.     

Introduction to Colloquium on Women and Policy and Institutional Change in Rural China: Part II

Articles in the first part of this colloquium surveyed articulations between rural development policies, village politics and land reforms and women's capabilities in China's countryside. The second part of this colloquium focuses on policies and institutions affecting geographies of gendered power in China. Four articles detail the consequences for women, families and society of marriage migration and urbanization.     

China's Climate Change Policy Process: improved but still weak and fragmented

China has recently become the world's largest emitter of carbon and is already facing many harmful effects domestically from climate change. Chinese leaders have therefore made a high-level commitment to curb emissions, as evident in the 2007 National Climate Change Program. However, the government has missed many of its targets, in particular its goal of reducing energy intensity. This essay argues that China is missing its targets because of a number of factors which stem from the fragmented nature of China's authoritarian system. First, environmental policies are too broad and complicated, making it difficult for regulators to enforce the laws. Second, the current incentive structures of promotion and salary cause local officials to give higher priority to economic development than to environmental issues. Third, environmental regulators, such as the judiciary and environmental agencies, remain weak and impeded by enforcement obstacles. While positive changes have occurred, such as the emergence of NGOs and the media as environmental watchdogs and a burgeoning clean technology sector, much remains to be done to improve the long-term viability of climate change policies in China. Based on the preceding analysis, this essay recommends ways by which the government could improve the process of enacting and implementing climate change policies. It also urges the international community to sympathize with the Chinese government and, by leading the way, help the government gain greater compliance with climate change policies.     

China and Maritime Cooperation in East Asia: recent developments and future prospects

Future international relations in East Asia are likely to be largely shaped by the maritime strategies and policies of various actors. This paper examines China's policy and behavior in maritime cooperation in the East Asian region in recent years, a topic that has been insufficiently understood. I suggest that while it is necessary and useful to take into account China's naval power, more attention to Chinese intentions and policy on East Asian maritime issues is warranted to arrive at a more balanced, and arguably more accurate, understanding of China's role in East Asian maritime affairs. This paper takes stock of China's changing perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors in maritime cooperation in the region. I describe China's new policy moves in the South China Sea and East China Sea. I also address some of the major Chinese concerns for further maritime cooperation in East Asia. I conclude that while a grand cooperative maritime regime is still not possible from a Chinese perspective, China is likely to agree to more extensive and substantive maritime cooperation in many functional areas, most notably in the non-traditional security arena.