Category: Uncategorized
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Fresh from the Journals
Jonathan Hanson has a paper coming out in the International Studies Quarterly (ISQ) titled “Forging then Taming Leviathan: State Capacity, Constraints on Rulers, and Development.” The article shows that countries with low levels of GDP per capita are aided by strong states rather than harmed by them. As Hanson writes: The New Institutional Economics (NIE) […]
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Complexity and Currency
The Financial Times has two stories today referring to possible consequences of China’s falling renminbi. Unfortunately they appear to point in completely opposite directions. The titles give away the game: Falling renminbi heightens derivatives risks Beijing guides renminbi lower in effort to manage financial risks Does the falling renminbi mean greater or smaller financial risks? […]
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Sentence of the Day
From Patricia Thornton‘s chapter in Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China (edited by Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth Perry): Through the new practice of polling, the reform-era public is more readily assembled as a legible aggregate subject that thinks and desires without contradiction and whose complex and shifting pluralities are largely […]
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Happy New Year
I will be wading this year–into debates and arguments and theories–in deep waters. I am turning most of my energies to my second book project that can be characterized in part as about the nature of the Chinese regime. Because so many have said so much on these and related topics, I will be going […]
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Governance is just another increasingly common word
Tom Pepinsky has written a fascinating paper claiming that colonial era Chinese migration to certain locales in Indonesia accounts for variation over space in governance that country today. Yet it is very clearly stated that the nature of governance explained is not “good governance” but “accommodative governance.” After having written such a paper, he reflects […]
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Crisis by the Numbers
The excellent ChinaFile project has a new conversation based on the following question: Why’s China’s Smog Crisis Still Burning So Hot? The core answers are already provided by Alex Wang, Isabel Hilton, Jeremy Goldkorn, and Shai Oster. China has developed in a way that allows it to show rapid growth in GDP but has come […]
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Fresh from the Journals
Profiling the Victims: public awareness of pollution-related harm in China Relational Repression in China: Using Social Ties to Demobilize Protesters Can China Bring Back the Best? The Communist Party Organizes China’s Search for Talent All China today.
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Fresh from the Journals
Second of a regular series. Also note that these aren’t truly that fresh since I’m going through the backlog of my unread RSS. 1. Participation in IMF-sponsored economic programs and contentious collective action in Latin America, 1980-2007 2. Non-state actors in civil wars: A new dataset [I’m unsure if referring to the dataset as “the NSA data” is […]
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Fresh off the Firstview
There was a time not so long ago that I would go through dozens of RSS feeds on a near daily basis using Google reader. Then google reader died. I set up feedly and digg reader but rarely used them. I realized that a subscription to Sinocism (support Sinocism!) already presented me with a great […]
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Big ships turn slowly
I am on the record as being skeptical that the Chinese regime is going to change its urbanization policies radically in the upcoming Third Plenum. Sinocism‘s continuing coverage of news related to the twists and turns of this debate has not changed my mind yet. Two pieces from today’s compilation reinforce that view. John Marshall […]
Jeremy Wallace 