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List of contents
List of Figures and Tables
Preface
1. China as a Centrifugal Empire: Size, Diversity, and Local Governance
2. China Goes Local (Again): Assessing Post-Mao Decentralization
3. The Subnational Hierarchy in Time: Institutional Changes (and Continuities)
4. The Center's Perceptions of Local Bureaucracy in China: A Typological First-Cut
5. The Center's Instruments of Local Control
6. Determinants of Local Discretion in Implementation: Exploring Policy-Contingent Variations
7. The Political Economy of Vertical Support and Horizontal Networks
8. Conclusion
Notes
Index
About the author
Jae Ho Chung is professor of international relations and director of the Program on U.S.-China Relations (PUCR) at Seoul National University. He is also the founding coordinator of the Asian Network for the Study of Local China (ANSLoC). His books include Assessing China's Power (2015) and Between Ally and Partner: Korea-China Relations and the United States (Columbia, 2006).
Summary
Despite the destabilizing potential of governing of a vast territory and a large multicultural population, the centralized government of the People's Republic of China has held together for decades, resisting efforts at local autonomy. By analyzing Beijing's strategies for maintaining control even in the reformist post-Mao era, Centrifugal Empire reveals the unique thinking behind China's approach to local governance, its historical roots, and its deflection of divergent interests.
Centrifugal Empire examines the logic, mode, and instrument of local governance established by the People's Republic, and then compares the current system to the practices of its dynastic predecessors. The result is an expansive portrait of Chinese leaders' attitudes toward regional autonomy and local challenges, one concerned with territory-specific preoccupations and manifesting in constant searches for an optimal design of control. Jae Ho Chung reveals how current communist instruments of local governance echo imperial institutions, while exposing the Leninist regime's savvy adaptation to contemporary issues and its need for more sophisticated inter-local networks to keep its unitary rule intact. He casts the challenges to China's central–local relations as perennial, since the dilution of the system's "socialist" or "Communist" character will only accentuate its fundamentally Chinese—or centrifugal—nature.
Additional text
Page after page, Centrifugal Empire becomes a constant source of inspiration and thoughts on China’s governance, and it reveals how the very evolution of the perpetual tension between the center and the provinces...is at the core of any possible speculation on China’s future.
