Organizer: Mark P. Dallas, Union College, USA Discussants: Mark P. Dallas, Union College, USA; Jonathan Hassid, Iowa State University, USA This “border-crossing” panel examines governance in China from several angles, with the goal of comparison across both space and time. It takes an inter-disciplinary and cross-regional approach to the study of governance, integrating work from Political Science, Public Administration, Media Studies, and Language and World Cultures to examine China both as a single country and in comparison to other regions of the world.
Each paper in the panel examines inputs that contribute to patterns of governance, focusing on the role of print media, economic development policy, legal practices and historical trajectories of change. Chang’s paper focuses on 18th century China, examining the means that Qianlong used to establish legitimacy and good governance during that period. Brass & Hassid interrogate the necessary and sufficient conditions for contemporary responsive government, comparing relatively responsive (yet authoritarian) China to unresponsive (but democratic) Kenya. Lahtinen’s paper deals with role and definition of good governance on provincial development, focusing on Western China. Dallas’s paper compares the current challenges of industrial governance in China’s textile industry with those experienced today in India and earlier by Japan and Korea during their respective transitions to export-orientation. Finally, Gong examines how governance was conceived and defined in late 1930s Shanghai, examined through the lens of the Shanghai Jewish community’s attempts to build a separate court system.
Taken together, the papers examine how the politics of governance in China have shifted over time and over issue area, interrogating the links between public opinion, governance and legitimacy.
This paper is co-authored by Jonathan H. Hassid, China Research Centre University of Technology, Sydney Australia, Jonathan.hassid@uts.edu.au
Political scientists, policymakers, civil servants and development experts generally consider a publicly engaged citizenry and an open media to be beneficial for good governance. As such, organizations like Reporters without Borders, the Heritage Foundation and Freedom House all measure levels of civic and press freedom in order to determine its impact on governance. However, while these two elements may be necessary for good or improving governance, it is not clear that they are sufficient to create it. This paper shows why a politically closed system – China – has been responsive to public opinion as expressed through the media, whereas a politically open system – Kenya – has managed to resist real changes in governance practices despite similar scandals. In China, the media, by publicizing and shaming transgressors, play a particularly important role in mobilizing public opinion and promoting good governance. For example, during incidents like Sun Zhigang’s death in 2004, media-mobilized public opinion led to social and political change in China. In Kenya, however, equivalent corruption scandals, like the Goldenberg Affair, have been festering for decades without successful mobilization for governance change. Ironically, then, public opinion seems to be a more powerful force for good governance in authoritarian China than in democratic Kenya. Our paper investigates this puzzle, concentrating on the role of the press and other social and political structures that together channel the public voice into political action.
My paper focuses on the theoretical framework of my PhD thesis, a multidisciplinary study about governance in China with a focus on Qinghai Province. In search for the reasons why Qinghai, the fourth largest province in China, has not better seized opportunities for economic development in the context of the western region development strategy, I conducted my research using both qualitative primary interviews and observations in China and elsewhere and secondary data from Western and Chinese sources. I discovered that while history, past development policies and geography all impact on Qinghai’s underdevelopment, governance has a decisive role on overall provincial development.
The theoretical framework of my study is built on the “Three Worlds” approach of post-modern social theory to analyze Qinghai’s environment, economic development and cultural diversity. Defining good governance in Western terms, this study seeks to understand how good governance is perceived in Chinese traditional thought, culminating in the Communist Party’s current goal of building a “harmonious society.” The paper attempts to outline a new model of good governance congruent with Chinese tradition. Does the new model of good governance provide guidance on how to govern in China? How viable is this model in solving the challenges in Qinghai and elsewhere in China? My paper discusses how the provincial government of Qinghai might best develop the province and how it can exercise better governance in Qinghai to develop it in a sustainable way.
My project investigates the production and consolidation of political legitimacy by the Qing state during the eighteenth century. Borrowing concepts such as Joseph Nye’s concept of soft power and Foucault’s notion of governmentality to frame my analysis of Qing sources, I argue that this approach to governance was more subtle than previous studies indicate. This subtlety was due not only to the type of image that the Qianlong emperor sought to portray in his works, but also in the variety of participants and channels involved in circulating such works. I investigate how Qianlong authored works on rulership and literary criticism that go beyond touting standard Confucian values to expound on the need of the ruler to concede to authority. In doing so he established a relatively accommodating image of himself, one that changed during the course of his reign. I then explore the process of circulation, which included not only official, but also non-official channels, notably the commercial book market and academies. Cooperation between different groups was also necessary for maximizing circulation of this ideal and added to the multi-directional nature of the circulation process. This involved the bureaucracy working together not only with the emperor, but also with the local elite. My project pertains to debates concerning the nature of the Qing state, state-society relations, and ethnic identity. This study will enable us to revise conceptions of the Qing state as despotic, or paralyzed by virtue of bureaucratic inertia.
Whether national institutions shape the governance of industries, or industrial production and technology generate particular institutional structures is a long-standing debate in contemporary political economy. This paper investigates China’s changing governance of the textile industry during its transition to export-orientation, and compares it with Japan, Korea and India during their respective periods of export-orientation. In doing so, it finds that both sides of the debate present overly narrow and unhistorical accounts of industrial governance. First, the paper expands on the definitional boundary of ‘industry’ governance to incorporate raw materials, such as cotton, and illustrates its central importance in industrial governance and institution-building through comparing the cotton-cultivating countries of China and India with cotton-poor Japan and Korea. Secondly, given that each country was a ‘late developer’ at distinct historical periods with textiles as their leading industry, a comparison across time highlights the changing context of international production. In particular, it underscores the shift in global manufacturing over the 1980s and 1990s in which production has disintegrated within national borders and re-integrated globally through production networks, a hallmark of the East Asian regional economy. Given China’s integration into East Asia in the 1990s and India’s relative exclusion, I argue that these transformations in production have shaped the challenges of China’s industrial governance in ways that distinguish it from prior late developers, with implications for agricultural cultivators, industrial labor and industrial structure. The paper relies on fieldwork and primary sources on China and India, and secondary sources on Japan and Korea.
In 1939, the Shanghai Bar Association sued the German Jewish community of Shanghai for establishing its own “Arbitration Court for European Emigrants” to hear civil disputes among members of that community. The Bar Association challenged the legitimacy of the Arbitration Court on the basis that the Germans had lost their consular jurisdiction in Shanghai at the end of WWI, and as residents of Shanghai, should be subject to Republican China’s laws and legal process. As both a claim of self-governance and a statement of identity, the establishment of their own court system was a bold step for the Jewish refugees. What motivated their decision to take this action, and with what rationale did they claim legitimacy for the Arbitration Court? What were the responses from different communities in Shanghai? This paper will answer these questions against the larger background of Shanghai’s colonial status as a city under competing national claims (with separate court systems for the French concession, the international settlement and the Shanghai municipality) and the status of Jews as German refugees in Diaspora. Using court records as well as additional legal documents and periodicals gathered in the Shanghai Municipal Archive and other sources, the paper will address legal issues on governance such as the practice of extraterritoriality in colonial Shanghai and the definition of citizenship for refugee communities. Finally, the paper will make the argument that the events of this legal case provide a basis for understanding the law and politics of identity in governance in 1939 Shanghai.
Political scientists, policymakers, civil servants and development experts generally consider a publicly engaged citizenry and an open media to be beneficial for good governance. As such, organizations like Reporters without Borders, the Heritage Foundation and Freedom House all measure levels of civic and press freedom in order to determine its impact on governance. However, while these two elements may be necessary for good or improving governance, it is not clear that they are sufficient to create it. This paper shows why a politically closed system – China – has been responsive to public opinion as expressed through the media, whereas a politically open system – Kenya – has managed to resist real changes in governance practices despite similar scandals. In China, the media, by publicizing and shaming transgressors, play a particularly important role in mobilizing public opinion and promoting good governance. For example, during incidents like Sun Zhigang’s death in 2004, media-mobilized public opinion led to social and political change in China. In Kenya, however, equivalent corruption scandals, like the Goldenberg Affair, have been festering for decades without successful mobilization for governance change. Ironically, then, public opinion seems to be a more powerful force for good governance in authoritarian China than in democratic Kenya. Our paper investigates this puzzle, concentrating on the role of the press and other social and political structures that together channel the public voice into political action.
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