Jennifer Y. J. Hsu and Reza Hasmath, The Chinese Corporatist State: Adaption, Survival and Resistance
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Jennifer Y. J. Hsu and Reza Hasmath, The Chinese Corporatist State: Adaption, Survival and Resistance (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 150pp. $114 Hardcover Baogang Guo
Published online: 29 September 2013 # Journal of Chinese Political Science/Association of Chinese Political Studies 2013
As Howard J. Wiarda suggested, corporatism is an alternative ideology to liberalism and Marxism and was widely used to study various forms of consensus democracy in Western Europe and Latin America. Since the 1990s, there has been renewed interest in applying corporatist concepts to the study of Chinese politics, alongside theories of developmentalism and neo-authoritarianism. The return to corporatist paradigm is a sign of increasing frustration over the inability of liberalist paradigms such as pluralism to explain and predict the political development in this fast-changing communist state. This edited volume by Hsu and Hasmath is one of latest attempts in the scholarly exploration of corporatist analytical framework, and its power as well as limits is apparent in analyzing a complex political system such as China’s. In this book, scholars from Canada, China, Denmark, United Kingdom and United States bring together some very convincing empirical and historical evidence of the corporatist elements in Chinese state-society relations. Hsu and Hasmath state in Chapter 1 and Chapter 9 that the Chinese government still practices a top-down style of state corporatism, although there are signs of loosening control of social organizations at the local level. What is unique, according to the editors, is that social organizations have carefully cultivated a closer relation with government agencies at various levels in order to gain maximum influence (p. 3). In Chapter 2, Barbara Shulte studies the rise of a civic organization in early days of Republican China. We see how the civic organization, Chinese Association for Vocational Education, acted in the absence of a strong state and some of the essential interest group functions, such as coordination, networking, lobbying, and interest articulation. However, once the new state consolidated its power, this civil organization
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“ended up acquiescing to the co-optation of the government” (p. 22). Gerry Group’s chapter on the Communist Party of China (CCP)’s United Front work and institutionalization is a thought-provoking piece. It documents once again how the incorporation of various social groups and minor parties into this corporatist system has led to what others have characterized as “bureaucratization” of these organizations and resulted in the alienation of the center from the masses that each of these political entities is supposed to represent (p. 30). Xian Huang’s study of collective bargaining in Chapter 4 showcases how the state corporatist system works: the top-down process of decision
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