Category: Uncategorized
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On a gated globe, where are the walls?
Dan Drezner notes an amusing coincidence: an Economist special report on a “gated globe” is published on the same day that the NYT runs an op-ed entitled “The End of the Nation-State?” about a global free exchange led by cities (although the usual practice of headlines with question marks implies that even the NYT thinks…
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Student Blogging
I had my students write blog posts for class. Here’s what happened. While a fellow at Yale’s MacMillan Center for the academic year, I’m teaching a course on Contemporary Nondemocratic Regimes. It’s a seminar with a final paper rather than an exam. To encourage in-depth reading of the material and improve class discussions, I have…
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Multimedia Me
The nice people at Link Asia ran an interview with me looking into China’s urbanization plans. While it’s clear that I have a lot to learn about appearing on TV (sitting too close to the camera and nodding incessantly among other sins), I conveyed most of what I wanted to get across about my thoughts on…
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Zooming out and Zooming in on China’s Cities
The Atlantic, The Aspen Institute, and Bloomberg Philanthropies are putting on a fun event on cities, CityLab: Urban Solutions to Global Challenges. Having written a book on the political role of cities in the developing world and particularly in China, I thought that I would toss in a couple of thoughts to the conversation happening in the…
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Cities and Legitimacy
Why don’t citizens revolt against governments that fail them and lose their legitimacy? Governments care about their popular support, even in nondemocracies (Geddes & Zaller 1989). Jay Ulfelder, of the Dart Throwing Chimp empire, takes a skeptical view of legitimacy as used in political science in general. He includes a nice paragraph from Peter Hessler’s ruminations…
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Measured measures
Bill Bishop’s excellent Sinocism reminded me of a great anecdote from 2010. As the Wall Street Journal wrote at the time: BEIJING—China’s finance ministry changed the accounting of some government spending in a way that enabled Beijing to announce a deficit below the symbolic level of 3% of gross domestic product for 2010, an examination…
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Picturing Modernity in China’s Urbanization Drive
Fascinating pictures in the newest Ian Johnson NYT story on China’s urbanization, including these that are part of a government database tracking relocating families. The old home in black and white while the new one in color despite being taken the same day (the clothes are the same!) is a particularly nice modernizing touch.…
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A Middle Ground
State plans fail miserably, yet without state actions markets and economic development will not take place. This narrow path of industrial policy–but not too much–is what remains after contrasting Jim Scott’s Seeing Like a State with Joe Studwell’s new book, How Asia Works. The former focuses on the disasters of state planning’s “high modernist” era–famines, empty…
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Metaphorical Economy
While Egypt’s regime is upended today, unlike some, this blog remains pivoted towards China. Over the weekend, a very nerdy but important twitter back and forth occurred between Noah Smith (@noahpinion) and Damien Ma (@damienics) on the subject of a “hard landing” for China’s economy. Just what would entail such a hard landing was the real…
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The Center, the People, and Development
It is difficult to move away from what is comfortable, especially when it has brought you much success. The Chinese party-state has pushed the level of GDP in the country to heights unknown previously and has done so at a blistering pace since the beginning of economic reforms in 1978. Part of the way that the…
Jeremy Wallace 