Li, Quan: The Idea of Governance and the Spirit of Chinese Neoliberalism
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BOOK REVIEW
Li, Quan: The Idea of Governance and the Spirit of Chinese Neoliberalism Springer, 2017, 248 p, $119.99 Hardcover; $89.00 eBook Zhihang Ruan1 Received: 23 July 2018 / Accepted: 30 August 2018 Fudan University 2018
How do scholars of politics and public administration react to and advocate for government reforms in an authoritarian state like China? Quan Li’s book on the spread of governance theory and the rise of neoliberalism in China provides an interesting case for an exploration of this question. Based on textual analysis of articles by governance scholars in China and interviews with them, Li argues that the idea of governance introduced by political scholars from the mid-1990s was incorporated into the neoliberal reform in China. In Li’s telling, after 1989, political scholars in China no longer had the political space to spread liberal and democratic ideas and advocate for political reforms as they once did in the 1980s (p. 128). To provide new momentum to the study of political science as well as social (and possibly political) change, political scholars in China were eager to find something new that could fit into the political discourse of the Communist Party and also pave the way for future political changes. In the 1990s, they saw the rise of civil society as the hope for political reforms. In the same period, the theory of governance was introduced to China, as Li demonstrates in the book. Initially, the idea of governance did not capture significant attention, because of its radical implication for reconstructing the government. Not until 2000 did scholars like Yu Keping first synthesize the idea of governance and studies of civil society in China. The idea of governance soon gained popularity, because its call for cooperation between state and non-state actors was seen to echo the idea of harmony and cooperation in Chinese culture, and more importantly, fitted into the broad academic interests in civil society among Chinese political scholars. But with these new efforts to contextualize governance, the radical implication of the idea was discarded, as well as the perceived significance of civil society for democracy. Civil society was then seen as the distinctive third sector which could contribute to good governance through its & Zhihang Ruan [email protected] 1
Department of Political Science, Northwestern University, Scott Hall 2nd Floor, 601 University Place, Evanston, IL 60208, USA
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cooperation with the state and the market, but not something which could pave the road to democracy or challenge the authority of the government and the power of the market. The new interpretation of governance has served to justify the neoliberal reform of China. Li determines that the defining feature of Chinese neoliberalism is ‘‘the presence of a strong, aggressive and entrepreneurial state controlled by the cadre capitalist class’’ (p. 48). According to Chinese governance scholars, market reform promotes civil society, which later cooperates with local governments
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