Category: Uncategorized
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Resiliency, Vaccines, and Renewables
If the Covid crisis is a window into our climate change future as billionaire Bill Gates and journalist Emily Atkin have suggested, then it’s worth digging into this comparison. Deaths from the pandemic are down 1/3 from just a month ago as vaccines have become available and administered. In vaccine rollout’s early days, concerns centered…
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Names, numbers, and links
Someone mentioned to me yesterday that they had searched for my name and the link to my OSU site was broken. My department, Ohio State‘s Department of Political Science, has redesigned its homepage and website. While the old site seemed fine to me, I understand that these things do need to be updated constantly, lest…
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Multimedia Me
Watch me talking about my new book, Cities and Stability, while staring at a camera in a dark room. Thanks to Laura Chang and everyone at the Asia Society and ChinaFile for putting this together.
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Yet Again, Hukou System Not Abolished
The Chinese government has announced, and media have reported, another round of hukou reform. Here’s the first paragraph from the China Daily story: Chinese migrant workers living in cities will gradually have full access to schools and hospitals where they work, a significant move to improve social equality between rural and urban residents. Triumph! The end…
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Institutional Reform or Purge? A Middle Way on China’s Anti-Corruption Campaign
Two contrasting takes on China’s continuing anti-corruption campaign have appeared in the past couple of days that show the radical differences among perspectives on the nature of the campaign and its likely consequences. Li Chengyan, head of Peking University’s Research Center for Clean Government Construction, conducted an interview with Caixin (Chinese/English) where he argues that…
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Centralization and Mega-Beijing
Bill Bishop’s Sinocism today links to a nice SCMP story on a proposed “Beijing-Hebei-Tianjin integration.” I think that the piece gets at what is principally driving these discussions–centralization of power and control: China is readying an assault on the “fortress economies” of local governments by creating a super region around Beijing, with proposals that sources…
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Snowpiercer’s Underclass
Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer is a visually impressive and thought-provoking film. While many of the thoughts that it provokes are of plot holes, political themes are evident throughout. As Alyssa Rosenberg writes, “Snowpiercer,” the dystopian adaptation of a French graphic novel about the residents of a train that houses the last people alive on earth, has been…
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The CCP’s Third Act?
What would it take for conventional wisdom to accept that we are presently witnessing the beginning of the PRC’s third act: the Xi Era? Currently, analysts look at post-1949 Chinese domestic politics as falling into two distinct periods: a Mao Period from 1949 until the Chairman’s death in 1976 and a Reform Era after Deng…
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Chinese Real Estate, or Cities and Stability
Caricatures of the Chinese real estate market fall into two camps: bears view it as a remarkable bubble that is going to burst, while bulls believe that it is part of an economic engine that has every reason to keep humming along. Bears talk about ghost cities and empty apartment complexes and costs well beyond standard income:price…
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Dreaded Perspectives
Jeffrey Isaac was one of my favorite instructors during my undergraduate days at Indiana University long ago. He does an excellent job editing the APSA journal Perspectives on Politics. Along with interesting articles, Perspectives contains book reviews. Lots of them. Every quarter my RSS feed is filled with links to reviews of a large number of books that I…
Jeremy Wallace 