Download or read book Mutual Empowerment of State and Peasantry written by Xu Wang and published by Nova Science Publishers. This book was released on 2013 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Mutual Empowerment of State and Peasantry written by Xu Wang and published by Nova Biomedical Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new and timely book addresses a series of questions regarding one of the most important political developments in contemporary China: the state-led democratic practice of village self-government in rural areas. Why would an authoritarian state promote grassroots democratic reform? To what extent has this reform changed the local power structures, grassroots governance, and state-peasant relations? What would be the implications of this grassroots democratic reform for China's democratisation in the long run? This book examines the origins, process, and impact of this paradoxical political development and explores the dynamics of political change and mutually transforming relations between the state and society in Post-Mao China. It argues that the practice of village self-government was promoted by the Chinese party-state to cope with the dual crises of legitimacy and governability it had faced in the countryside after a decade of rural economic reforms.

Download or read book Pro poor Land Reform written by Saturnino M. Borras and published by University of Ottawa Press. This book was released on 2007-09-06 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using empirical case materials from the Philippines and referring to rich experiences from different countries historically, this book offers conceptual and practical conclusions that have far-reaching implications for land reform throughout the world. Examining land reform theory and practice, this book argues that conventional practices have excluded a significant portion of land-based production and distribution relationships, while they have inadvertently included land transfers that do not constitute real redistributive reform. By direct implication, this book is a critique of both mainstream market led agrarian reform and conventional state-led land reform. It offers an alternative perspective on how to move forward in theory and practice and opens new paths in land policy research.

Download or read book Critical Perspectives in Rural Development Studies written by Saturnino M. Borras Jr. and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agrarian transformations within and across countries have been significantly and dynamically altered during the past few decades compared to previous eras, provoking a variety of reactions from rural poor communities worldwide. The recent convergence of various crises – financial, food, energy and environmental – has put the nexus between ‘rural development’ and ‘development in general’ back onto the center stage of theoretical, policy and political agendas in the world today. Confronting these issues will require (re)engaging with critical theories, taking politics seriously, and utilizing rigorous and appropriate research methodologies. These are the common messages and implications of the various contributions to this collection in the context of a scholarship that is critical in two senses: questioning prescriptions from mainstream perspectives and interrogating popular conventions in radical thinking. This book focuses on key perspectives, frameworks and methodologies in agrarian change and peasant studies. The contributors are leading scholars in the field of rural development studies: Henry Bernstein, Terence J. Byres, Saturnino M. Borras Jr, Marc Edelman, Cristóbal Kay, Benedict Kerkvliet, Philip McMichael, Shahra Razavi, Ian Scoones and Teodor Shanin. This book was previously published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Download or read book Tamed Village Democracy written by Guohui Wang and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-07-08 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wang's book offers an empirically rich and conceptually nuanced analysis of how local state agents maintain control over village self-governance in China. His careful analysis of primary documents enables him to explicate the formal mechanisms used by members of the local state to influence village affairs. Meanwhile, his rigorous and fascinating ethnographic data enable him to elucidate the manifold ways in which informal clientelist ties between local state officials and village elites permit the former to exert control. Overall, this excellent book powerfully demonstrates the need for scholars to go beyond attention to election processes when evaluating what village democracy means in a Chinese context. It is a must-read for all serious scholars of Chinese politics and society. —Rachel Murphy, University of Oxford Guohui Wang's highly original, in-depth case research vividly reveals the dynamics of contemporary Chinese village politics. By combining abundant empirical data with close observation as an "insider," his book illustrates the processes and consequences of transplanting 'democracy' into rural Chinese society. Particularly for those in the West who are keen on understanding the ongoing transformation of rural China, this book is a rich and revealing source. —Shukai Zhao, Development Research Center of the State Council, P.R. China

Download or read book Engaging the Law in China written by Neil Jeffrey Diamant and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores legal mobilization, culture, and institutions in contemporary China from a perspective informed by 'law and society' scholarship.

Download or read book The Politics of Neighborhood Governance in China written by Jianfeng Wang and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 2008-03 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the nearly three decades of coexistence between economic liberalization and political authoritarianism, China remains as an anomaly to the liberal mantra of our time. This book explores a segment of the China Paradox, the state-society interaction channeled by the Residents Committee. Being the largest urban neighborhood organization, the committee deserves study because of its controversial status between ordinary residents it claims to represent and the authoritarian state. The committee enters the discourse as a directly congruent example of the same paradox that the whole China displays, when it is endowed with important, yet tension-changed statutory functions ranging from social control to service provision and neighborhood self-governance. How, and under what conditions, does the committee carry out its functions? What can be learned about changing state-society relations from the dynamics of neighborhood politics in China? This book draws its analytical framework on the theoretical models of state penetration, civil disobedience, corporatism, and synergy, as well as on the practices of American, Cuban, and Japanese neighborhood organizations and the Chinese Rural Villagers Committee. Four distinctive Residents Committees in Tianjin City are studied in detail, and their functions are identified and explained primarily through their structural connections with the lowest state organ in cities, the street office, and residents (including other neighborhood organizations and activists). The book reveals multiple possibilities of Chinese social/political transformation. Among them emerges a promising trend of state-society cooperation, which is realigning and accommodating political authoritarianism and economic openness into a seemingly sustainable pattern of development at the urban grassroots. Referred to as an "amphibian" organization spanning public-private division, the committee highlights the limits of the state-society antithesis in the study of political transformation. The observed patterns of neighborhood politics also raise caution against the universal applicability of the liberal norm of civil society to countries like China with distinctive conditions from which the original norm is present and constructed.

Download or read book Resolving Land Disputes in East Asia written by Hualing Fu and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-03 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fresh comparative perspectives on land disputes in East Asia, with a focus on the transitional societies in China and Vietnam.

Download or read book State Power and Social Forces written by Joel Samuel Migdal and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-08-26 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This eminently readable 1994 collection of high-quality, country-specific essays on Third World politics provides, through a variety of well-integrated themes and approaches, an examination of 'state theory' as it has been practised in the past, and how it must be refined for the future. The contributors go beyond the previously articulated 'bringing the state back in' model to offer their own 'state-in-society' approach. They argue that states, which should be disaggregated for meaningful comparative study, are best analysed as parts of societies. States may help mould, but are also continually moulded by, the societies within which they are embedded. States' capacities, further, will vary depending on their ties to other social forces. And other social forces will be capable of being mobilised into political contention only under certain conditions. Political contention pitting states against other social forces may sometimes be mutually enfeebling, but at other times, mutually empowering.

Download or read book Force and Contention in Contemporary China written by Ralph A. Thaxton, Jr and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-04 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is contemporary China such a politically contentious place? Relying on the memories of the survivors of the worst catastrophe of Maoist rule and documenting the rise of resistance and protest at the grassroots level, this book explains how the terror, hunger, and loss of the socialist past influences the way in which people in the deep countryside see and resist state power in the reform era up to the present-day repression of the People's Republic of China central government. Ralph A. Thaxton, Jr provides us with a worm's-eye view of an 'unknown China' - a China that cannot easily or fully be understood through made-in-the-academy theories and frameworks of why and how rural people have engaged in contentious politics. This book is a truly unique and disturbing look at how rural people relate to an authoritarian political system in a country that aspires to become a stable world power.

Download or read book Participation and Empowerment at the Grassroots written by Gunter Schubert and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph ties in the scholarly debate on Chinese village elections and their consequences for China's political system. It draws on comparative fieldwork conducted in six villages in two counties in Jiangxi and Jilin Provinces and one district in Shenzhen between 2002 and 2005, producing data from some 140 in-depth interviews of villagers and local officials up to the prefectural level. The major objective of this book is as much a critical assessment of the research literature of Chinese village elections published over the last fifteen years as to sharpen the reader's sight for the scope and limits of this important reform to generate regime legitimacy in the local state, an issue which has so far been neglected in the study of Chinese village elections. It hence contributes to our understanding of the nexus between political participation and cadre accountability at the grassroots, and highlights a number of factors ensuring the persistence of one-party rule in contemporary China.

Download or read book Grassroots Political Reform in Contemporary China written by Elizabeth J. Perry and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Observers often note the glaring contrast between China's stunning economic progress and stalled political reforms. Although sustained growth in GNP has not brought democratization at the national level, this does not mean that the Chinese political system has remained unchanged. At the grassroots level, a number of important reforms have been implemented in the last two decades. This volume, written by scholars who have undertaken substantial fieldwork in China, explores a range of grassroots efforts--initiated by the state and society alike--intended to restrain arbitrary and corrupt official behavior and enhance the accountability of local authorities. Topics include village and township elections, fiscal reforms, legal aid, media supervision, informal associations, and popular protests. While the authors offer varying assessments of the larger significance of these developments, their case studies point to a more dynamic Chinese political system than is often acknowledged. When placed in historical context--as in the Introduction--we see that reforms in local governance are hardly a new feature of Chinese political statecraft and that the future of these experiments is anything but certain.

Download or read book Local Governance Innovation in China written by Jessica C. Teets and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-10-30 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite a centralized formal structure, Chinese politics and policy-making have long been marked by substantial degrees of regional and local variation and experimentation. These trends have, if anything, intensified as China’s reform matures. Though often remarked upon, the politicsof policy formation, diffusion, and implementation at the subnational level have not previously been comprehensively described, let alone satisfactorily explained. Based on extensive fieldwork, this book explores how policies diffuse across China today, the mechanisms through which local governments actually arrive at specific solutions, and the implications for China’s political development and stability in the years ahead. The chapters examine how local-level institutions solve governance challenges, such as rural development, enterprise reform, and social service provision. Focusing on diverse policy areas that include land use, state-owned enterprise reform, and house churches, the contributors all address the same overarching question: how do local policymakers innovate in each issue area to address a governance challenges and how, if at all, do these innovations diffuse into national politics. As a study of local governance in China today, this book will appeal to both students and scholars of Chinese politics, comparative politics, governance and development studies, and also to policy-makers interested in authoritarianism and governance.

Download or read book Political Booms written by Lynn T. White and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2009 with total page 748 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why have Taiwan, rich parts of China, and Thailand boomed famously, while the Philippines has long remained stagnant both economically and politically? Do booms abet democracy? Does the rise of middle “classes” promise future liberalization? Why has Philippine democracy brought no boom and barely served the Filipino people? This book, unlike previous books, shows that both the roots and results of growth are largely political, not just economic. Specifically, it pays attention to local, not just national, power networks that caused or prevented growth in the aforementioned countries. Violence has been common in these politics, along with money. Elections have contributed to socio-political problems that are also obvious in Leninist or junta regimes, because elections are surprisingly easy to buy with corrupt money from government contracts. Liberals should pay more serious theoretical attention to the effects of money on justice, and Western political science should focus more clearly on the ways non-state local power affects elections. By considering the role of local money and power (above all, from small- and medium-sized firms that emerged after agrarian reforms) on elections and justice, this book asks democrats squarely to face the extent to which electoral procedures have failed to help ordinary citizens. Students and scholars of Asia will all need this book — as will students of the West whose methods have become parochial.

Download or read book Problems of Democratization in China written by Thomas G. Lum and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-01-28 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While evaluating competing theories of why countries become democratic, this study argues why China has not democratized. Also discusses are the Communist Party's methods of social control and examines four groups-Party and government cadres, intellectuals, workers and peasants.

Download or read book China State Sovereignty and International Legal Order written by Phil C.W. Chan and published by Hotei Publishing. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China’s rise has aroused apprehension that it will revise the current rules of international order to pursue and reflect its power, and that, in its exercise of State sovereignty, it is unlikely to comply with international law. This book explores the extent to which China’s exercise of State sovereignty since the Opium War has shaped and contributed to the legitimacy and development of international law and the direction in which international legal order in its current form may proceed. It examines how international law within a normative–institutional framework has moderated China’s exercise of State sovereignty and helps mediate differences between China’s and other States’ approaches to State sovereignty, such that State sovereignty, and international law, may be better understood.

Download or read book Grassroots Elections in China written by Kevin J. O'Brien and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-22 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty years after the launch of village elections, the time is ripe to assess the progress and impact of China’s most notable political reform. Where have elections been conducted well and where have they been conducted poorly? How have procedures changed over the years and have elections truly transformed how power is exercised in the countryside? What methods are researchers employing to study elections and how have scholars from different disciplines contributed to our knowledge of grassroots politics in China? This book carefully examines the implementation and effects of China’s village, township, and people’s congress elections, both in terms of democratizing the polity and spurring other changes in state-society relations. The chapters in this book have been published across several issues of the Journal of Contemporary China.