Category: Uncategorized
-
Has China Reached a Turning Point? No. It’s reached four.
I was invited to participate in a symposium hosted at Quinnipiac University on “A Resurgent China.” The suggested topic was “Has China Reached a Tipping Point?” After ensuring that I could slightly edge the discussion away from Malcolm Gladwell, I agreed. For a business school audience, I went a bit broad and tried to bring up…
-
Sub-national Data in International Relations
We live in a complex world and tell all kinds of different stories about its machinations. Social science can be thought of as attempting to systematize and improve our knowledge of the way that the world works. Sometimes this involves creating new stories or finding connections between events in vastly different times or places. Often,…
-
Chinese Groundhog Day
The joint sessions of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), a.k.a. the lianghui (两会), are a key event in the annual Chinese political calendar. They are also a Chinese Groundhog’s day, in the Bill-Murray-movie rather than the six-more-weeks-of-winter sense. For someone interested in China’s urbanization, hukou reform is…
-
Ideas, Interests, and Iteration
While blinking from the sunlight that enveloped me during one of the rare moments when I allow myself to come up from the “finish-the-book” cave, I happened upon a conversation about the relative importance of ideas and interests in political economy. Dani Rodrik’s column from last year, and then again from last month, sparked the…
-
On Chinese urbanization – 城市化 vs. 城镇化
Bill Bishop sparked an interesting conversation with something that he caught and passed along in his Sinocism email from earlier this week. 李克强论城镇化|李克强|城镇化_21世纪网 – should we be paying more attention to fact that li keqiang uses 城镇化 and not 城市化 for “urbanization”? Following a brief discussion on Twitter, it seems clear that this is an open question…
-
Confidence, Austerity, and the Great Leap Forward
Policies that critically rely on belief in the policy’s effectiveness can lead to disaster. Those who questioned the Great Leap were attacked not only for attacking the party line but indeed for undermining its success. The energy and spirit involved in moving China forward was supposed to move China forward. Questioning whether it was working…
-
Defending the job talk
See Dan Nexon on the Duck of Minerva kicking off the discussion and Nate Jensen’s defense of the job talk. This then moved to twitter with interesting nuggets but with too few characters to discuss them, e.g. Daniel Nexon @dhnexon @jerometenk @tompepinsky @irfan23 @natemjensen point of post was to get ppl to brainstorm cost/bens of alts. w/o discussant might work?…
-
On Estimating the Probability of the End of the CCP Regime
I began my course on contemporary Chinese politics today with this. As a China scholar, I am often asked variants of the following: “When is China going to democratize?” or “When will the CCP going to lose power?” Perhaps, you are taking this class in order to learn the answer to such questions. Indeed, as…
-
On Twitter as a City
Ai Weiwei remarked in August of 2012 for Foreign Policy’s “Cities Issue” that “Twitter is my city, my favorite city.” He continued: “I can talk to anybody I want to. And anybody who wants to talk to me will get my response. They know me better than their relatives or my relatives. There’s so much…
-
On Chinese Kleptocracy: Stationary versus Roving Bandits
Analysis of the John Hempton argument that “China is a kleptocracy.” The individuals that make up the regime in China steal, but they also think about maintaining control of the country over the long-term. The people under their rule overwhelmingly remain poor but are still better off in economic terms than they were 30 years…
Jeremy Wallace 