Yunyun Zhou; Beichen Qin; Daiding Zhang
Yunyun Zhou
DPhil Candidate, Contemporary Chinese Studies, University of Oxford
Between the Party and Masses: the Dilution of Power and Collective Identity of Women Cadres in China’sLocal Politics
While theories on women’s political participation and representation in liberal democracies have been developed extensively in the last decades, few scholarly works have look at women’s political engagement in Leninist parties and authoritarian states. Using China’s post-socialist era as an example, my research aims to fill this gap in literature by presenting lively individual stories of women cadres in leading positions in China’s local politics and their negotiations with the male-dominated political world. Through the revelation of these less-known life stories, this research demonstrates the existential crisis of female cadres working on behalf of the Communist Party of China. Despite Chinese women cadres’ historical legacy of ‘socialist feminism’ during the revolutionary era, my research illuminates the fact that their collective identity has been diluted by a series factors such as gender tokenism, patriarchal authoritarianism and a general decline of class politics in China’s reform-era. Often, institutions and power that their predecessors have established to promote state-feminism must give way to the party-state’s new propaganda and pragmatic interests especially in Xi Jinping’s New Era such as the reconsolidating of familialism, nationalism and cultural conservatism.
The empirical basis for this research consists of political ethnography conducted over one year in three different provinces in China. The data collection involved carrying out continuous in-depth participant observations and interviews with over 48 female leading figures in China’s the local governments, party committees, party schools and women’s federations. Field notes, policy documents, press articles were collected during the course of the ethnography.
Beichen Qin
University of Oxford, Msc Contemporary Chinese Studies Candidate
The Politics of Economic Restructuring in China: the Case of Iron and Steel Industry in Hebei Province
The Politics of Economic Restructuring in China: the Case of Iron and Steel Industry in Hebei Province For a middle-income country like China, whether the state-led development model works well in the economic restructuring where economic activities are relocated from low value-added toward high value-added industries is far from clear. Whereas existing research generally portrays the elite politics in the central government, or government failure in general, as the key political factors impeding the effectiveness of state-led restructuring, this project will emphasis on the active role provincial governments could play in the politics of restructuring in China. I use the case of iron & steel industry in Hebei, by examining government documents, academic works, media reports and interviews, to explore how a provincial government exploits the central instructions concerning restructuring to meet its own interests, tracing efforts since 2000 to build the provincial champion Hebei Iron & Steel Group (hegang). Fearing a merger with Capital Iron & Steel (shougang) which is located in Hebei but is owned by Beijing and considering an enhancement of its control over local economies, Hebei exploited the central instruments of establishing corporation groups to foster series of mergers between locally-owned iron & steel companies within its prefecture and establish a monolith, hegang. The provincial government also exploited the central instructions of cutting over-capacity to restrict the activities of locally-owned and private iron and steel companies and to force them to merge with hegang. For the provincially-owned hegang, however, Hebei resisted any cross-border mergers, and kept increasing investment, despite the low returns.
Daiding Zhang
University of Hong Kong, Year 2 MPhil candidate in Politics and Public Administration
Governing Innovation under Authoritarianism: Institutional Development in Tianjin
In China, the innovation economy appears to receive full government support at the national level, leading to the rise of major innovation hubs like Shenzhen. However, innovation economy did not bloom in all major cities of China, especially in the north. We argue that competing economic and political goals create different incentives for other local governments, leading to regional divergence in regulatory choices. To examine how officials approach the expansion of innovation economy and what institutional choices they subsequently make to govern the sector, this paper maps the evolving institutions for the innovation economy in Tianjin. Owning a large proportion of state-owned enterprises, Tianjin’s socio-economic conditions and political challenges are more representative of the country than innovation hubs. We report evidence on three propositions. First, local officials are aware of the governance risks that the innovation economy presents despite they admire its potentials for sustainable growth, which is the main criterion to measure Chinese officials’ performance. Second, officials adopt changes in the governance regime to contain and direct growth away from these risks. Third, local government's industrial policies have a positive impact on the businesses in corresponding subcategories of the innovation economy. We measure the performance of local start-ups by applying a model with two independent variables: number of documents local governments forwarded from the central government and number of documents issued by local governments in the innovation economy. By examining cross-regional policy implications in Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei area, we interpret results as a part of China’s authoritarian resilience.