Abstract
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London: Routledge, 2004, 193, £19.99, ISBN 0 415 30412 1
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London: Routledge Curzon, 2004, 263, £65.00, ISBN 0 415 32234 0
Readership: Postgraduates, academic/research
Rating: **
Reviewer: ELENA BARABANTSEVA
(University of Manchester)
Does China Matter? A Reassessment is a tribute to the work and memory of Gerald Segal by a group of prominent China scholars. Segal's colleagues re-visit and re-assess his last contested argument, which appeared on the pages of Foreign Affairs five years ago. In light of new developments, the contributors test Segal's assertion that China takes a secondary position in the world, and has somewhat more important standing in the region of Asia-Pacific. Preoccupied with measuring a state's power, a well-worn matter in international relations, the authors largely operate within the state-centric neo/realist paradigm. Goodman and Breslin move slightly away from this path to consider, respectively, the importance of culture and business networks in their assessment of China's importance in the world.
The contributors reach a consensus among themselves and with Segal on China's role as an influential regional power with a potential rather than real global authority. There is also a general agreement that China prefers a status quo position in adapting to the existing international system rather than attempting to change it.
The analysis of China's role at global and regional levels follows a traditional framework for evaluating state power: economy, politics, and military might. The authors might have offered deeper insight into the subject by breaking away from this pattern to incorporate other China-related topics beyond the realist agenda, for example China's role in sending out migrants, or how China as the worlds’ second polluter matters to the international community. Also, while the regional role of China is emphasised, the analysis concentrates on only one region that China is part of: south east Asia. The fact that China is also a central Asian player is ignored, apart from Gill's few references to China's participation in the Shanghai Group. Nevertheless, the book will, no doubt, be a frequent point of reference for postgraduate students interested in China.
Xiaowei Zang in Elite Dualism and Leadership Selection in China studies the nature of the PRC leadership in the reform period. The book adopts a new institutional approach to explain the patterns of formation of the ruling elite in China. Looking at the historical legacy and current processes of job assignment, promotion, mobility, and cooptation within the hierarchy of China's elite, Zang refutes earlier suppositions of its monolithic character. Instead, he consistently advocates the view that institutional constraints embedded in China's party-state system influence the character of the elite, which, in his opinion, is of dual nature. The dualism is reflected in the functioning of the state administration where the roles are divided between the party, responsible for ideological guidance and the formulation of policy directions, and the government implementing the formulated policies. This dual system affects the process of selecting the state's leadership. Zang emphasises the pertinence of the factor of political loyalty in the selection of the party officials, and the credentials of a high level of professionalism and solid education for government work candidates.
While Zang persuasively explores the effects of institutions on leadership selection and advocates the view that the regime survival in China relies on functional differentiation between the party and the government, he does not consider the question of whether elite dualism contributes to the regeneration of a one-party system in China or could, ultimately, undermine it. Nor does he contemplate the possibility of conflicts between the party and government leadership generated by the dual nature of the selection process, contrasting backgrounds in education, and the age gap. Despite these oversights, the volume will be of value to post-graduate students and scholars researching the evolution of the PRC political system in the reform period.
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Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004, 279, £20.95, ISBN 0 7425 1988 0
Readership: Advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, academic/research
Rating: ****
Reviewer: ATHAR HUSSAIN
(London School of Economics)
The book comprises of twelve chapters, including three by the editor. The contributors include Western analysts of the Chinese society and polity and a number of Chinese academics. The chapters cover a diverse selection of topics. Five of these are given over to issues concerning the government, such as the civil service, policies in particular areas and the functioning of the lowest government tier. Others cover the civil society, elections to the village councils, which perform governmental functions but are not a part of the government, the Falun Gong, a quasireligious movement initially tolerated and then ruthlessly suppressed by the government. In content, chapters divide into focused studies, such as the reform of the lawyers, profession or of the Falun Gong, or overviews, such as the illuminating survey of ‘New directions in Civil Society’.
The term ‘governance’ covers a broad range of meanings. It overlaps with the old term ‘government’ referring to both the state structure and policies. In its broader connotation, which has gained wide currency in recent years, the term covers the institutions and processes, both formal and informal, that steer collective activities, and lays special emphasis on the assessment of outcomes with reference to certain values. Certain themes recur in the discussion of governance in China.
Prominent amongst these are social stresses caused by the widening economic inequalities and labour retrenchment on a massive scale in the train of the transition to a market economy, and the slow pace of political reforms in contrast to the record growth rates and ‘globalisation’. The latter covers not only the impact of international trade and capital flows and the exigencies of the membership of the WTO but also cultural influences. The source of the malaise concerning governance in China, the concluding chapter argues, lies in the one-party state.
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Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003, 207, $32.95, ISBN 0 262 01198 0
Readership: Academic/research
Rating: *****
Reviewer: STEVE CHAN
(University of Colorado, Boulder)
How can a newly industrializing country sustain and upgrade its economic development? How has Taiwan positioned itself to reap the benefits of a ‘second mover’ in industries such as information technology and services? In Beyond Late Development, Alice Amsden and Wanwen Chu offer an informative account based on extensive interviews and rich statistics. As a latecomer, Taiwan's companies do not operate at the frontiers of technology but rather in maturing products for which profit margins have already begun to slip. How do these companies seek to survive and indeed thrive? For one thing, they emphasize time-effectiveness rather than cost-effectiveness, trying to beat competitors to the punch. Taiwan's firms have excelled in ramping up their operations quickly, an advantage that has been in part helped by their corporate structure empowering the top executives. As a second and related consideration, they try to capture economies of scale by increasing corporate size and building on in-house expertise. The industry leaders have become larger but also more efficient over time. Size has conferred upon them an advantage as subcontractors for foreign first-mover firms but has also provided the wherewithal for direct investment in foreign operations. Expatriate engineers and a large local talent pool contribute to overcoming the challenges of integrative design and managerial capital. Industry size has become more concentrated over time while the firms’ operations have concurrently become more diversified. Third, the government continues to play a vital role in encouraging import substitution and breaking technology bottlenecks. In contrast to an earlier era, however, it has focused its facilitation in developing research institutes and parks in order to promote positive externalities. This important book shows how successful latecomers engage in an ensemble of policies that often depart from western orthodoxies or, for that matter, conventional causal attributions of their own earlier development.
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Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 323, ISBN 0 19 925752 3
Readership: Advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, academic/research
Rating: ****
Reviewer: FLAVIA MONCERI
(Pisa University, Italy)
As Hill states at the beginning of his book, yakuza is an apparently paradoxical phenomenon, in that ‘a number of large, clearly identifiable criminal gangs’ operate ‘openly within a society widely regarded as one of the industrialised world's most crime-free societies’ (p. 1). In order to give a satisfying explanation of the interplay between yakuza and the Japanese law and institutional system, Hill moves from the assumption that yakuza is to be defined as a ‘mafia’. The Sicilian Mafia should namely be considered as an ideal type, whose patterns can be found in other parts of the world. The ‘central characteristic shared by mafias is their provision of protection to consumers who are either denied access to protection from the state or who desire types of protection that the state is unprepared to provide’, and ‘this role ensures complex and ambiguous relationships with other sections of society, not least with the state’ (p. 35). The following chapters provide a reconstruction of yakuza's historical evolution, the analysis of contemporary yakuza and its sources of income, and the yakuza countermeasures, particularly the so-called Bōtaihō or ‘Yakuza Countermeasures Law’ (1992). Hill's work is surely of the utmost importance in giving an updated account of yakuza, also considering the difficulty of doing research in so sensitive a field. From the viewpoint of further research his conclusions are also noteworthy, in that they stress the fact that contemporary yakuza has to contend with different challenges resulting not only from a changed and more difficult economic situation and the introduction of the yakuza law, but also from the increasingly hostile legal climate, inter- and intraorganisational fights, and the attacks by groups of men coming from less rich and safe countries in search of ‘ethnic succession’.
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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 267, ISBN 0 521 53750 9
Readership: Advanced undergraduates
Rating: **
Reviewer: DAVID BRAY
(University of Cambridge)
This book purports to focus on the relationship between globalisation and ‘state-building’ in China. In doing so, it explicitly challenges the view that globalisation has led to the decline of the nation state. Zheng argues that for China, globalisation has actually provided an opportunity for the state to transform and strengthen itself. Key Chinese leaders – Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji – achieved this by steering a tricky course between global integration and economic nationalism. Jiang in particular promoted a ‘realist’ discourse of global power, which argued that China could only prosper by strengthening itself for global competition. This discourse provided leverage for authorities in China to re-centralise much of the economic power devolved during the first phase of reform. Thus, the rapid development of a globally integrated market economy has been facilitated by the restructuring of state bureaucratic, financial and fiscal systems designed in a way that ensures macro control is lodged firmly in Beijing. Much of the book covers the history of this process, detailing the key policy debates and the main strategic initiatives. Later chapters also deal with opposition to restructuring from the key losers – farmers and state sector workers – and from an intellectual New Left, who martial many of the arguments familiar to the international anti-globalisation movement. As far as I can tell there are no major errors in this book, however I feel that its two potential audiences will both be disappointed: the China expert will discover almost nothing here that has not been developed in far more detail elsewhere; and the globalisation specialist will find only brief references to the mainstream literature and virtually no attempt to place the Chinese experience in a broader comparative perspective. Peter Nolan's China at the Crossroads (Polity, 2004) is far more successful in this regard.
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London: Anthem Press, 2004, 333, ISBN 1 84331 123 2
Readership: Undergraduates, advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, academic/research, professional
Reviewer: LESLIE SKLAIR
(London School of Economics)
This collection of essays and book chapters by Peter Nolan provides a convenient summary of the work of perhaps the most accessible, and certainly one of the most prolific, scholars writing on contemporary political economy of China today. The point around which the book revolves is the quote from Chakravarty that introduces chapter 3 (Politics, Planning and the Transition from Stalinism: The Case of China): ‘The way out of the present problems lies not in giving up planning but in giving it new content’ (p. 77). This comment by an Indian economist on the Indian experience that Nolan uses to give context to the central issues of political economy in post-communist eastern Europe and China (my ambiguity intended) indicates that the transformation of China touches, at the very least, most of the poorest people in the world. This comparative theme is also explicitly tackled in chapter 1 (on Liberalization in China and the former USSR), chapter 4 (on Democratization, Human Rights and Economic Reform in China and Russia) and chapter 5 (on Privatization). Chapters 6 and 7 fill more than 100 pages with material from Nolan's monumental study of ‘China and the Global Business Revolution’ (Palgrave 2001), a book of almost 1,100 pages. This present work concludes with a reprinting of Nolan's little-known though quite devastating 1993 critique of A.K. Sen's famous work on famines, and a short and convincing Epilogue on how inappropriate (and often ignorant) is the hijacking of Adam Smith by the so-called free market neoliberals. There is little that is new here for those who already know Nolan's work, but for those who have not yet come across it, the book provides a fine introduction to the political economy of China and to the relations between state and economy in industrializing countries.
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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 383, ISBN 0 521 52788 0
Readership: Academic/research
Rating: ****
Reviewer: YOUNG MI KIM
(University of Sheffield)
As the editors note in the outset of the volume, ‘[C]onfucians have long been preoccupied with social and political change’ (p. 1). So are the contributors to this volume, as they investigates the ‘linkages between Confucian ideals and concrete practices/institutions […] in the existing Confucian societies’, paying particular attention to the cases of South Korea and China (p. 4). The need of a thorough investigation of Confucianism's relevance to the ‘modern world’ has become all the more pressing since the failure of established theoretical frameworks (liberalism, Marxism, etc.) to explain the economic success of the East Asian states (p. 2), and explain the often uneasy relationship with democratic practices.
The volume consists of three sections (Confucian perspectives on democracy, capitalism, and law, respectively), preceded by an introduction (by the editors) and followed by an epilogue. Each chapter explores and critically assesses the tension between Confucian ideals and norms with practices and institutions imported also from the ‘West’ (though adapted not without difficulty to the local context) with regard to a specific issue (including, among others, property rights, marriage, gender, social welfare, and affective networks).
While stopping short of elaborating an alternate theory of modernity suitable to the East Asian context (p. 27), the contributors convincingly advance a ‘creative synthesis’ between Confucianism and modernity. Without concealing the tensions between the two, the contributors seek to ‘articulate some Confucian values and practices that could shape modern political, economic, and legal institutions’ in a context-specific and context-sensitive way. Confucian values are an integral part of East Asian societies and, despite a sometimes conflictual relationship with modernity, are here to stay. The challenge therefore lies in accommodating them, not in hoping that one or the other will somehow vanish away.
The editors present the volume as a ‘starting point for debate’ (p. 28). More than that, the book contains much more food for thought, and is not only an insightful reflection on the challenges facing East Asian societies on their path to modernization, but more broadly on the tensions between local and global cultures, alongside a critical assessment of the relationship between ideals and norms, and actual practices. This reviewer has therefore no hesitation in recommending the volume to an academic (and research postgraduate) readership.
Asia-Pacific
New books received
Mark Elvin (2004) The Retreat of the Elephants: an environmental history of China. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 564, $39.95, ISBN 0 300 10111 2
Christopher W. Hughes (2004) Japan's Security Agenda: military, economic and environmental dimensions. London: Eurospan, 287, £40.95, ISBN 1 58826 260 X
Isao Miyaoka (2004) Legitimacy in International Society: Japan's reaction to global wildlife preservation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 224, ISBN 1 4039 1780 9
S.C.M. Paine (2003) The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895: perceptions, power, and primacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 423, £40.00, ISBN 0 521 81714 5
Vikram Patel and R. Thara (eds) (2003) Meeting the Mental Health Needs of Developing Countries: NGO innovations in India. New Delhi: Sage, 418, £39.99, ISBN 0 7619 9699 0
Ramesh Thakur and Edward Newman (eds) (2004) Broadcasting Asia's Security Discourse and Agenda. Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 357, ISBN 92 808 1094 4
Kenneth E. Wilkening (2004) Acid Rain Science and Politics in Japan. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 322, £16.95, ISBN 0 262 73166 5