China's Rural Market Development in the Reform Era


Book Description

The rural market in China is not only the venue where 60 per cent of the country's 1.3 billion inhabitants buy their daily necessities and sell agricultural products, but also a key area of conflict between government control and liberalization policies. Previous research on the topic has adopted a purely economic perspective, focusing on macro issues such as price control and grain procurement. This book focuses instead on peasants - the major participants in rural marketing activities. Illustrated by two comparative case studies with a diverse level of development from the Pearl River Delta - one of the most prosperous regions in coastal China - this book investigates the market hierarchy, its change of functions and the interactions between peasants and market outlets. In doing so, it shows how China's rural market district has changed since the Reform, and how these changes affect the marketing activities of peasants.




The Dragon and the Elephant


Book Description

China and India are the most extraordinary economic success stories of the developing world. Both nations’ economies have grown dramatically over the past few decades, elevating them from two of the world’s poorest countries into projected economic superpowers. As a result, the numbers of Chinese and Indians living in poverty have rapidly fallen and per capita incomes in China and India have quadrupled and doubled, respectively. This book investigates the reasons for these staggering accomplishments and the lessons that can be applied both to other developing nations and to the problem of poverty that remains in these two countries. The contributors pay particular attention to agriculture and the rural economy, examining how initial conditions and investments and the prioritization and sequencing of different policies and strategies have led to successes, and how the agricultural and rural sectors connect to overall economic expansion. They also emphasize the importance of anti-poverty programs and safety nets in helping poor people escape poverty. The book offers a set of policy and strategic options for future growth and poverty reduction. These include setting the right priorities for public spending, identifying trade and market reforms, building social safety nets for the poorest of the poor, and building accountable institutions that can provide public goods and services effectively. The book concludes by examining future challenges to China and India’s economic development, such as the need to ensure growth that is sustainable, equitable, and environmentally friendly. The Dragon and the Elephant offers valuable insights to development specialists anxious to multiply the benefits experienced by two of the greatest economic successes in recent times.




China’s 40 Years of Reform and Development: 1978–2018


Book Description

The year 2018 marks 40 years of reform and development in China (1978–2018). This commemorative book assembles some of the world’s most prominent scholars on the Chinese economy to reflect on what has been achieved as a result of the economic reform programs, and to draw out the key lessons that have been learned by the model of growth and development in China over the preceding four decades. This book explores what has happened in the transformation of the Chinese economy in the past 40 years for China itself, as well as for the rest of the world, and discusses the implications of what will happen next in the context of China’s new reform agenda. Focusing on the long-term development strategy amid various old and new challenges that face the economy, this book sets the scene for what the world can expect in China’s fifth decade of reform and development. A key feature of this book is its comprehensive coverage of the key issues involved in China’s economic reform and development. Included are discussions of China’s 40 years of reform and development in a global perspective; the political economy of economic transformation; the progress of marketisation and changes in market-compatible institutions; the reform program for state-owned enterprises; the financial sector and fiscal system reform, and its foreign exchange system reform; the progress and challenges in economic rebalancing; and the continuing process of China’s global integration. This book further documents and analyses the development experiences including China’s large scale of migration and urbanisation, the demographic structural changes, the private sector development, income distribution, land reform and regional development, agricultural development, and energy and climate change policies.




To Get Rich Is Glorious


Book Description

" In 1978, China launched economic reforms that have resulted in one of history’s most dramatic national transformations. The reforms removed bureaucratic obstacles to economic growth and tapped China’s immense reserves of labor and entrepreneurial talent to unleash unparalleled economic growth in the country. In the four decades since, China has become the world’s second-largest economy after the United States, and a leading force in international trade and investment. As the contributors to this volume show, China also faces daunting challenges in sustaining growth, continuing its economic ransformation, addressing the adverse consequences of economic success, and dealing with mounting suspicion from the United States and other trade and investment partners. China also confronts risks stemming from the project to expand its influence across the globe through infrastructure investments and other projects under the Belt and Road Initiative. At the same time, China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, appears determined to make his own lasting mark on the country and on China’s use of its economic clout to shape the world around it. "




Freeing China's Farmers: Rural Restructuring in the Reform Era


Book Description

A comprehensive analysts of China's rural reforms, this book links local experiences to national policy, showing the dynamic tension in the reform process among state policy, local cadre power and self-interest, and the peasants' search for economic growth. Key topics covered include: the responsibility system, privatization and changing property rights, industrialization, social conflict, cadre corruption, urban-rural relations, conflict over land, rural urbanization, and the impact of globalization. The introduction skillfully integrates the themes that run throughout this work and the concluding chapter focuses on current and future problems in rural China.




Historical Dictionary of the People's Republic of China


Book Description

When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) assumed power in October 1949 China was one of the poorest nations in the world and so weak it had been conquered in the late 1930s and early 1940s by its neighbor Japan, a country one-10th its size. More than five decades later, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is an emerging economic, political, and major military power with the world’s fastest growing economy and largest population (1.35 billion in 2015). A member of the United Nations Security Council since the early 1970s and a nuclear power, China wields enormous influence in the world community while at home what was once a nation of largely poverty-stricken peasants and urban areas with little-to-no industry has been transformed into an increasingly urbanized society with a growing middle class and an industrial and service sector that leads the world in such industries as steel and textiles while becoming a major player in computers and telecommunications. All the while the country has remained under the tight political control of a one-party system dominated by the Chinese Communist Party that despite periods of intense political conflict and turmoil governs China with a membership in 2014 of 88 million people—the largest single organization on earth. This third edition of Historical Dictionary ofthe People's Republic of China contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about China.




Rural Migrants in Urban China


Book Description

After millions of migrants moved from China’s countryside into its sprawling cities a unique kind of ‘informal’ urban enclave was born – ‘villages in the city’. Like the shanties and favelas before them elsewhere, there has been huge pressure to redevelop these blemishes to the urban face of China’s economic vision. Unlike most developing countries, however, these are not squatter settlements but owner-occupied settlements developed semi-formally by ex-farmers turned small-developers and landlords who rent shockingly high-density rooms to rural migrants, who can outnumber their landlord villagers. A strong state, matched with well-organised landlords collectively represented through joint-stock companies, has meant that it has been relatively easy to grow the city through demolition of these soft migrant enclaves. The lives of the displaced migrants then enter a transient phase from an informal to a formal urbanity. This book looks at migrants and their enclave ‘villages in the city’ and reveals the characteristics and changes in migrants’ livelihoods and living places. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the book analyses how living in the city transforms and changes rural migrant households, and explores the social lives and micro economies of migrant neighbourhoods. It goes on to discuss changing housing and social conditions and spatial changes in the urban villages of major Chinese cities, as well as looking into transient urbanism and examining the consequences of redevelopment and upgrading of the ‘villages in the city’; in particular, the planning, regeneration, politics of development, and socio-economic implications of these immense social, economic and physical upheavals.




How China Escaped Shock Therapy


Book Description

China has become deeply integrated into the world economy. Yet, gradual marketization has facilitated the country’s rise without leading to its wholesale assimilation to global neoliberalism. This book uncovers the fierce contest about economic reforms that shaped China’s path. In the first post-Mao decade, China’s reformers were sharply divided. They agreed that China had to reform its economic system and move toward more marketization—but struggled over how to go about it. Should China destroy the core of the socialist system through shock therapy, or should it use the institutions of the planned economy as market creators? With hindsight, the historical record proves the high stakes behind the question: China embarked on an economic expansion commonly described as unprecedented in scope and pace, whereas Russia’s economy collapsed under shock therapy. Based on extensive research, including interviews with key Chinese and international participants and World Bank officials as well as insights gleaned from unpublished documents, the book charts the debate that ultimately enabled China to follow a path to gradual reindustrialization. Beyond shedding light on the crossroads of the 1980s, it reveals the intellectual foundations of state-market relations in reform-era China through a longue durée lens. Overall, the book delivers an original perspective on China’s economic model and its continuing contestations from within and from without.




Agricultural Development in China and Africa


Book Description

First Published in 2011. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.




Asian Cities, Migrant Labor and Contested Spaces


Book Description

This volume explores how migration is playing a central role in the renewing and reworking of urban spaces in the fast growing and rapidly changing cities of Asia. Migration trends in Asia entered a new phase in the 1990s following the end of the Cold War which marked the advent of a renewed phase of globalization. Cities have become centrally implicated in globalization processes and, therefore, have become objects and sites of intense study. The contributors to this book reflect on the impact and significance of migration with a particular focus on the contested spaces that are emerging in urban contexts and the economic, social, religious and cultural domains with which they intersect. They also examines the roles and effects of different forms of migration in the cauldron of urban change, from low-skilled domestic migrants who maintain a close engagement with their rural homes, to highly skilled/professional transnational migrants, to legal and illegal international migrants who arrive with the hope of transforming their livelihoods. Providing a mosaic of insights into the links between migration, marginalization and contestation in Asia’s urban contexts, Asian Cities, Migrant Labor and Contested Spaces will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian studies, migration studies, urban studies and human geography.