It is often assumed that privatization leads to profit, and that well-delineated property rights and a strong private sector will help boost an economy. This book investigates the property rights in Chinese enterprises in the reform era, finding that distinction between the public and the private are blurred, that national reform policies are implemented unevenly across the country, and that enterprises owned by local governments, in Shanghai, for example, are actually extremely profitable.

It is often assumed that privatization leads to profit, and that well-delineated property rights and a strong private sector will help boost an economy. This book investigates the property rights in Chinese enterprises in the reform era, finding that distinction between the public and the private are blurred, that national reform policies are implemented unevenly across the country, and that enterprises owned by local governments, in Shanghai, for example, are actually extremely profitable.

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This volume is a collection of original studies based on one of the first research programs on comparative analysis of social capital. Data are drawn from national representative samples of the United States, China and Taiwan. The three societies selected for study allow the examination of how political-economic regimes (command versus market) and cultural factors (family centrality versus diverse social ties) affect the characteristics of social ties and social networks from which resources are accessed and mobilized.

China has witnessed numerous incidents of social protests over the past three decades. Protests create uncertainty for authoritarian governments, and the Chinese government has created, strengthened, and coordinated multiple dispute-resolution institutions to manage social conflicts and protests. Accommodating the aggrieved prevents the accumulation of grievances in society, but concessions require resources. As the frequency and scale of collective action are closely tied to the political opportunity for action, the Chinese government has also contained protest by shaping the political opportunity available to the aggrieved. Cai and Chen show that when the Chinese central government prioritizes social control, as it has under Xi Jinping's leadership, it signals that it will tolerate local governments' use of coercion. The result is an environment that is not conducive to the mobilization of collective action, large-scale occurrences of which have been uncommon in China in recent years.

Since the Chinese economic reform was realized in the early 1990s, a significant revolution has been launched socially, economically, and politically in China. At present, China is an indispensable actor in the international arena, so that the transitions domestically bring about substantial influence on the whole world. Dynamics of Local Governance in China during the Reform takes close look at China's current transformation and its broader implications. Through their thought-provoking essays, the contributors to this volume dissect China's transformation by examining various topics in the field of contemporary China studies, such as rural industrialization, development of civic society, socio-economic transformation and local self-governance.