Political Development in China

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The Readings for week 6 were largely organized around the theme of political developments in China. To assess political developments in China, one has to be clear with the range of the definition “political”. In my view, there are mainly two types of political developments in post-1978 China: administrative reform and electoral reform. Administrative reforms aim at providing more effective governance without essentially altering the political institutions. Such reform measures include the continuous reorganization and downsizing of departments in State Council, introduction of various regulations addressing problems in many industries (coal mining and food safety etc.), innovations on policy-making process, and also what Cai (2004) described as “managed participation”. As Cai’s paper showed, Chinese government’s effort on administrative reforms, such as the appealing system which is increasingly gaining importance, have severe limitations. In dealing with emerging problems via administrative reforms, the government falls into a reactive pattern of reform: resolving problems mostly only when they come about. In the case of appealing system, the government’s reactive management of citizen’s grievances and complaints appeared to be haphazard (there’s no clear standard or procedure determining whose appeal get reviewed and to what extent can concerns be addressed) and ineffective (the case-by-case style of problem solving can not match the flooding appeals). Moreover, central government’s predicament in treating appeals had only created bigger problem: on one hand, central government wish to gather information from appellants, on the other hand, they fear too much appealing will tarnish official image and lead to instability (demonst...

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...ther discussions to examine the relationship between democracy and corruption, economic growth and public governance. However, Pan’s prescription in later half was really ambiguous and perplexing. In designing independent systems of civil service, judiciary and corruption inspection, Pan failed to elucidate the mechanisms that ensure the independence of those systems. In particular, he was not clear with CCP’s position in his self-designed structure, how to make sure that CCP will abide the law and respect the independence of other systems? It seemed that in suggesting the consultative rule of law, Pan is looking forward to governance with aristocratic/oligarchic characteristics, but to ensure that elites will not exploit mass public and abide by the law in a sustainable and continuous fashion, consultation may only be enough for Philosophical King, not for elites.

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