Tuesday, 10. July 2007, 17:40:56
Political Economy, Religion
Joel Martinsen
Danwei.org
July 16, 2006Zhao Xiao is a government economist, the director of macro-economics research at SASAC. For the past few years, his career has been largely defined in the media by one essay, "Market Economies with Churches, and Market Economies without Churches" (有教堂的市场经济与无教堂的市场经济).
The essay originally appeared online at the end of 2002 shortly after Zhao returned from a several-month-long sojourn in the United States. It continued to circulate among forums and blogs, and appeared in print in a 2003 anthology of posts from the Doctor Cafe economics roundtable site.
In mid-2005, China Youth Daily's "Freezing Point" supplement ran a feature on Zhao that included further discussions about the role of religion in Chinese business. Zhao Xiao and his ideas about churches and the market economy have been in the news fairly often this year as well, corresponding with the popularity of Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and other texts on ethnicity and national development (see this bestsellers list for more details).
The essay is reprinted in an anthology titled Insights into Chinese Economic Sector that was published last month. Insights collects many of the most influential, interesting, and controversial essays written on Chinese economics issues over the past few years (see below for links to an annotated table of contents and excerpts).
Unsurprisingly, the essay also attracted attention among religious groups. The July edition of "Evangelism" (福传), a series of materials issued by the evangelism group at Beijing's North Church, reprints Zhao Xiao's piece, following a serialization earlier this year in China's leading Catholic paper, Faith 10-Day (信德, formerly Faith Fortnightly). The North Church pamphlet was privately financed, I was told; the piece is notable because it emphasizes the positive role the church can play in Chinese society.
The translation below is taken from the most common version circulating online [*] - this appears to be the version in Insights. Several short passages were deleted from Zhao's original version on the Doctor Cafe website.
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Monday, 9. July 2007, 18:30:10
Political Economy, Inequality, Poverty
By Martine Bulard
Le Monde diplomatique
Issue: January 2006 China has moved into fourth position in the league table of world economies, but only a third of its population has access to the new temple of consumerism. The rural poor, internal imigrants and laid-off workers suffer worst from the gross new inequalities.
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Monday, 9. July 2007, 18:21:04
China-US Relation, Politics
By Martine Bulard
Le Monde diplomatique
Issue: August 2005China has announced that the yuan will no longer be pegged to the dollar; greater currency flexibility will permit Beijing to use monetary policy to control its economy. And the entry of its enormous labour force into the global economy will change the world balance of trade. China wants to bypass the Japanese-United States alliance in Asia and at the United Nations, and, through asymmetrical diplomacy, become a different kind of world power.
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Saturday, 7. July 2007, 20:21:19
Political Economy
By Jianwu He, Shantong Li, Sandra Polaski
Carnegie Endowment
Carnegie Paper No. 83, April 2007 He Jianwu is a researcher in the Department of Development Strategy and Regional
Economy at the Development Research Center of the State Council of the People’s
Republic of China.
Li Shantong is a senior research fellow and was formerly director-general of the
Department of Development Strategy and Regional Economy at the Development
Research Center of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China.
Sandra Polaski is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she directs the Trade, Equity, and Development Program.A new report by the Carnegie Endowment and China’s Development Research Center shows that the health of China’s economy and trade over the next 15 years will have more impact on China’s rural poor than any other segment of Chinese society. The report also finds that while WTO accession has generally benefited China’s economy, it has further increased the already pronounced economic disparity between Chinese urban and rural households. Accession to the WTO has added only a net thirteen million jobs while an estimated 300 million jobs are needed to create full employment in China.
In China’s Economic Prospects 2006-2020, Sandra Polaski, Li Shantong, and He Jianwu use general equilibrium models to probe three possible economic paths for China—one projecting a benign international and domestic environment, one a continuation of recent trends, and one higher risk scenario.
The authors argue that poor rural households would see fewer job opportunities in the cities and continued low wages if trade tensions rise. As more farmers stay on the land and incomes rise less, China would import fewer agricultural products from the rest of the world, disappointing farm exporters.
The authors point to challenges that Chinese policymakers must address if they are to optimize China’s development to broadly benefit its population. They also suggest that some current approaches of China’s trade partners could be counterproductive for their own export interests.
The authors recommend policies that raise incomes widely, particularly for rural households, to generate broad-based domestic demand and reduce the economy’s reliance on trade. They suggest an emphasis on service sector development, particularly of education and health care services, to generate more labor-intensive jobs to absorb surplus labor from the agriculture sector.
Full Text (PDF)
Saturday, 7. July 2007, 20:14:03
Politics, Globalization
By Thomas Carothers
Journal of Democracy
January 2007In the second half of the 1990s, a counterreaction emerged to the heady enthusiasm about democracy and democracy promotion that flourished during the peak years of democracy’s “third wave” in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Believing that the global democratic wave had been oversold, several policy experts and scholars produced a series of influential articles articulating a pessimistic, cautionary view. Fareed Zakaria, alarmed by what he saw as a dangerous rash of newly elected leaders restricting rights and abusing power from Peru and Argentina to the Philippines and Kazakhstan, warned that rapid democratization was producing a plague of “illiberal democracy.”1 Troubled by violent conflicts breaking out in former Yugoslavia, the former Soviet Union, and elsewhere, Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder argued that democratizing states are in fact more conflict-prone than stable autocracies.2 Disturbed by the specter of ethnic conflict in different parts of Asia, Amy Chua asserted that the simultaneous pursuit of democracy and market reform in countries with “market-dominant minorities” leads to ethnic conflict and antimarket backlashes.3
To read full article click here (PDF)
Saturday, 7. July 2007, 20:05:58
Politics, Globalization
National Interest
July/August 2007Thomas Carothers is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His latest book is Confronting the Weakest Link: Aiding Political Parties in New Democracies (2006).AS ATTENTION in Washington begins to turn to the likely or desired shape of a post-Bush foreign policy, calls for a return to realism are increasingly heard. A common theme is that the United States should back away from what is often characterized as a reckless Bush crusade to promote democracy around the world. Although it is certainly true that U.S. foreign policy is due for a serious recalibration, the notion that democracy promotion plays a dominant role in Bush policy is a myth. Certainly, President Bush has built a gleaming rhetorical edifice around democracy promotion through invocations of a universalist freedom agenda. And many people within the administration have given serious attention to how the United States can do more to advance democracy in the world. Overall, however, the traditional imperatives of U.S. economic and security interests that have long constrained U.S. pro-democratic impulses have persisted. The main lines of Bush policy, with the singular exception of the Iraq intervention, have turned out to be largely realist in practice, with democracy and human rights generally relegated to minor corners.
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Saturday, 7. July 2007, 19:43:13
Book Review
EMMANUEL LINCOT
China Perspectives n°67
september-october 2006Book reviews:
Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing. Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space
Wu Hung has made a major contribution to the understanding of the history and anthropology of contemporary Chinese memory. His works builds on the specificities of the University of Chicago, which combines theoretical thought with studies in the field. An art historian by training, and the author of ten books, Wu Hung is looked on as a pioneer in the field of American sinology for his analyses of Chinese culture from the most ancient to the most recent periods through a systematic comparison of texts and visual signs; the daring of this approach sometimes brings to mind, in contemporary French historiography, Georges Didi-Huberman. To quote Wu Hung: "This book is not written for a particular academic field, but is located in a network of disciplines including art history, the history of architecture, modern Chinese history, urban studies, cultural studies and autobiography. In fact, one of my purposes in writing this book is to forge this interdisciplinary network" (p. 10). In approaching Tiananmen and the metamorphoses of the site through more than a century of the history of Beijing and of China, Wu Hung opens up new epistemological and pragmatic perspectives. Displacing the temporal totality towards the present and towards action, Wu Hung shows, based on a study of this site in its particularity, that the past is not closed, that it is not a dead thing to be mummified in a museum, but on the contrary that it still remains open to new meanings.
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Saturday, 7. July 2007, 19:32:23
Party Politics, Book Review
Wu Guoguang
China Perspectives n°68
November- December 2006Book reviews:
Kjeld Erik Brodsgaard, Zheng Yongnian (éd.), The Chinese Communist Party in Reform
Although China has undergone profound changes since economic reforms and marketisation were introduced in the late 1970s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) still represents a niche surviving from before this period, not only in politics but also in many other dimensions of life in China. This simple fact has for a long time been virtually ignored, intentionally or not, in academic studies on China, as most of the energy in the field is, reasonably, devoted to following the fast-changing reforms that are expected to reduce the importance of the CCP. These expectations are not entirely wrong, as the CCP itself is now reported to be under reform; they are not accurate, however, as the Party carries out reforms simply for the sake of maintaining and even strengthening its unchallenged ruling position, rather than in order to open the political market for the party competition and popular participation that are often assumed to accompany economic marketisation. In this context, how can one assess the CCP today and its efforts to adapt, while keeping its monopoly on ruling post-economic reform China? The volume under review is a timely contribution to answering this question.
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Saturday, 7. July 2007, 19:24:25
Book Review, Religion
Katiana Le Mentec
China Perspectives n°68,
November- December 2006Book reviews:
Thomas David Dubois, The Sacred Village. Social Change and Religious Life in Rural North China
Examining the varied expressions of religious life in a rural district of North China, the historian Thomas David Dubois, in The Sacred Village, gives us a glimpse of the world of such practices and beliefs at local level, as well as their evolution since the end of the Qing dynasty. This book is the result of archival research enriched with interviews conducted in the district of Cang (in southeastern Hebei province) at the end of the 1990s, with the author seeking to combine the understanding of the anthropologist with a historical perspective on social change.
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Thursday, 5. July 2007, 19:14:25
Politics
A quarterly journal of revolutionary Socialism Issue: 115
2 July 07Kim Moody is the author of a new book on the American working class: US Labor in Trouble and Transition. He spoke to Martin Smith and Chris Harman about his research
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