UPenn Center for the Study of Contemporary China

Whatever the likelihood or implications of a potential truce in the US-China trade war, it seems clear that the overall relationship between the two countries has lately entered into a new, more harder-edged phase, defined by competition and perhaps even conflict in multiple areas: economic, technological, ideological, strategic, and conceivably military as well.

Dramatic protests in Hong Kong over the past four months, initially over a now-withdrawn draft law that would permit extraditions to mainland China, have brought to worldwide attention broader fears amongst Hong Kong residents that their city is losing its distinctive legal and political characteristics, that were supposedly to be preserved under Chinese rule, according to the principle of “One Country, Two Systems”.  A critical juncture in Hong Kong’s fascinating history appears to have been reached

Dramatic protests in Hong Kong this month, over a draft law that would permit extraditions to mainland China, underscore broader fears amongst Hong Kong residents that their city is losing its distinctive legal and political characteristics, that were supposedly to be preserved under Chinese rule, according to the principle of “One Country, Two Systems”. A critical juncture in Hong Kong’s fascinating history appears to be fast approaching, with ramifications extending far beyond the city itself.

Today, the reality and consequences of China’s rise have come to dominate news headlines the world over. Along with China’s growing wealth and power have come new tensions, with the United States and other countries, that further require better understanding of China’s story, in all its different facets. Given the stakes, there may never have been a more important time for us to think about how we think about China, whether as professional “China watchers” or more casual observers.

Despite little foreshadowing before he took office, President Xi Jinping has emerged as perhaps the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong.  This was reinforced in March 2018 when China’s National People’s Congress voted overwhelmingly to abolish presidential term limits, as had been stipulated under the 1982 PRC Constitution, a feature which had been understood to be critical to the new political settlement after the Cultural Revolution.

As Chinese economic growth slows to its lowest rate in 30 years, there is rising concern (including among some Chinese scholars and officials) about the long-term viability of China's distinctive form of state-led capitalism, sometimes characterized in terms of a "China Model". Nevertheless, the Chinese government still appears committed to the approach marked by heavy state intervention in the economy that has driven China's growth since the 1990s, and especially since the global financial crisis of 2008.

How do autocratic regimes secure political obedience, and implement unpopular policies, without always resorting to outright coercive tactics?  In a provocative new book, Yale University political scientist Dan Mattingly argues that, in China, state power exercised through local governments relies on local civil society groups—like temple organizations or lineage associations—to quietly infiltrate, observe, and thereby control Chinese rural society.

At least since China’s 1994 fiscal and tax reforms, land-backed development has served as the greatest source of revenue for Chinese local governments, as well as a powerful engine both for rapid industrialization and for social discontent.  This circumstance reflects how state allocation of land-use rights, in China, remains a vestige of the planned economy, and how fiscal pressures on local governments, combined with differential pricing of land, incentivize what often looks to be predatory behavior.

Economic reform since the late 1970s, as well as the dynamics of globalization unleashed in full by China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, have significantly complicated the relationship between the Chinese Party-state and Chinese workers.  Most recently, the gap between official rhetoric and state practice, as it relates to Chinese workers, has been most dramatically indicated by the crackdown on Marxist student groups and organizers at elite Chinese universities.

Over the past 16 years, there has emerged in China a community of self-identified "rights defense" (weiquan) lawyers, akin to "cause lawyers" in the United States, who select cases and frame legal advocacy with a goal of achieving wider societal impact.  Once celebrated in official discourse, these lawyers have increasingly come under scrutiny and pressure by the Chinese Party-state.

Chairman Mao famously proclaimed that “women hold up half the sky,” and there are many ways in which women’s status, rights, and opportunities have improved under CCP rule.  That said, patriarchal ideas about the role of women have continued to find robust expression in China, in different and evolving ways, since 1949 and through the reform & opening period.

The Chinese government is currently in the process of dismantling the family planning policies which it introduced in the 1970s, and developed alongside its program of reform & opening over the past 40 years—which are most famously associated with the one-child limit for most Chinese families, that was finally converted into a universal two-child limit starting in 2016.  In so doing, the government is attempting to defuse a ticking demographic time bomb.

What explains Taiwan’s outsized presence in our news headlines, especially over the first two years of the Trump administration?  What can be learned from its raucous process of democratization over the past thirty years?  How will it continue to forge its unexpected identity, against the backdrop of China’s ever-deepening shadow?  In this episode, Davidson College political scientist Shelley Rigger discusses these questions with Neysun Mahboubi, in relaying the dramatic modern story of Taiwan.

The following is a live recording of the 2019 Annual Public Lecture at Penn’s CSCC delivered by Susan Shirk, and introduced by the Center’s Director, Avery Goldstein. The event took place on January 31, 2019. 

Amidst various commentaries on the 10th anniversary of the Sichuan earthquake, this past summer, a prominent theme has been the sense of possibility for civil society in China that was initially generated by the outpouring of social volunteerism, unprecedented in Chinese history, which followed the disaster.