The Political Economy of Xi Jinping’s Political Rollback

2021 ◽  
pp. 2150007
Author(s):  
YI-FENG TAO

When Xi Jinping had just come to power in 2012, the world expected that he would continue the development trajectory of economic liberalization and political institutionalization set in motion by Deng Xiaoping. However, when the National People’s Congress abolished the presidential term limit in the Chinese Constitution in March of 2018, it suddenly became clear that Xi had chosen to “roll back” from Deng’s policy line in nearly every aspect of the Chinese Party-state system. How does one explain Xi’s sudden departure from Deng’s policy line? In comparison with the resurgence of other authoritarian regimes of the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America and East Asia, this paper argues that the cause of Xi’s political rollback lies in the exhaustion of the previous development model. More specifically, the exhaustion of export-led growth in the mid-2000s had made the existing distributive coalition unsustainable. The power struggle within the political coalition therefore intensified and finally led to Xi’s monopoly over political power. The argument of this paper will proceed through four parts. It will begin with a literature review of comparative authoritarianism with a particular focus on the impact of a development crisis on the survival of political coalitions. It is followed by an analysis of the contributions of China’s export-led growth to the sustainability of the political coalition during the eras of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. Then, it will explain how the exhaustion of export-led growth led to a power struggle within the political coalition and how through a re-orientation of the development model, Xi has gradually concentrated power into his own hands. Finally, it will discuss the theoretical implications of China’s case.

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 294-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chik Collins ◽  
Ian Levitt

This article reports findings of research into the far-reaching plan to ‘modernise’ the Scottish economy, which emerged from the mid-late 1950s and was formally adopted by government in the early 1960s. It shows the growing awareness amongst policy-makers from the mid-1960s as to the profoundly deleterious effects the implementation of the plan was having on Glasgow. By 1971 these effects were understood to be substantial with likely severe consequences for the future. Nonetheless, there was no proportionate adjustment to the regional policy which was creating these understood ‘unwanted’ outcomes, even when such was proposed by the Secretary of State for Scotland. After presenting these findings, the paper offers some consideration as to their relevance to the task of accounting for Glasgow's ‘excess mortality’. It is suggested that regional policy can be seen to have contributed to the accumulation of ‘vulnerabilities’, particularly in Glasgow but also more widely in Scotland, during the 1960s and 1970s, and that the impact of the post-1979 UK government policy agenda on these vulnerabilities is likely to have been salient in the increase in ‘excess mortality’ evident in subsequent years.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 189-216
Author(s):  
Jamil Hilal

The mid-1960s saw the beginnings of the construction of a Palestinian political field after it collapsed in 1948, when, with the British government’s support of the Zionist movement, which succeeded in establishing the state of Israel, the Palestinian national movement was crushed. This article focuses mainly on the Palestinian political field as it developed in the 1960s and 1970s, the beginnings of its fragmentation in the 1990s, and its almost complete collapse in the first decade of this century. It was developed on a structure characterized by the dominance of a center where the political leadership functioned. The center, however, was established outside historic Palestine. This paper examines the components and dynamics of the relationship between the center and the peripheries, and the causes of the decline of this center and its eventual disappearance, leaving the constituents of the Palestinian people under local political leadership following the collapse of the national representation institutions, that is, the political, organizational, military, cultural institutions and sectorial organizations (women, workers, students, etc.) that made up the PLO and its frameworks. The paper suggests that the decline of the political field as a national field does not mean the disintegration of the cultural field. There are, in fact, indications that the cultural field has a new vitality that deserves much more attention than it is currently assigned.


Author(s):  
Aled Davies

This chapter concerns the politics of managing the domestic banking system in post-war Britain. It examines the pressures brought to bear on the post-war settlement in banking during the 1960s and 1970s—in particular, the growth of new credit creating institutions and the political demand for more competition between banks. This undermined the social democratic model for managing credit established since the war. The chapter focuses in particular on how the Labour Party attempted in the 1970s to produce a banking system that was competitive, efficient, and able to channel credit to the struggling industrial economy.


2000 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 344-369
Author(s):  
David Goodhew

AbstractSouth Africa's churches grew or declined so quickly in the years after 1960 that by 1991 the country's religious map had been redrawn. This article charts and offers explanations for such developments. Almost all Christian churches grew substantially in the first half of the twentieth century but mainline churches were dominant. They continued to grow numerically into the 1960s and 1970s, but were beginning to shrink as a proportion of the expanding population. By contrast, Roman Catholic, African Independent and smaller independent denominations were growing quickly. By the 1990s, mainline Protestant churches were suffering considerable decline and Roman Catholicism's growth had stalled. African Independent and other churches continued to grow rapidly. A matrix of forces help to explain this phenomenon-including the political situation, socio-economic pressures, secularisation and particular religious factors. A comparative perspective shows South Africa's churches to have much in common with African and global trends.


2007 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 423-448 ◽  
Author(s):  
RICHARD WHITING

In the 1960s and 1970s both Conservative and Labour governments passed novel laws dealing with the rights of individuals at work. Overshadowed by conflicts over collective labour law, the political significance of this legislation has remained unexplored. This article suggests that the legislation struck a balance between recognizing the complexity of work in a modern society, and preserving managerial authority. It also argues that the reforms served a Conservative agenda in rooting an individual interest in work in a legal process. This was part of a pivotal challenge to the system of voluntary collective bargaining that had traditionally benefited the labour movement.


2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 196-212
Author(s):  
Martin Štefek

This article deals with the thus far unnoticed “intellectual origin” of the so-called Prague Spring. It summarizes tenets of behavioral revolution in the field of social sciences and documents its considerable influence on Czechoslovak scholars. From the mid-1960s, behavioral reasoning coexisted with other (mutually conflicting) perspectives. Literature on Czechoslovak reform has given evidence of the impact of Marxian revisionism, the Frankfurt school, and theories of industrial societies. This article stresses the significance of behavioral meta-theory not only in academia but also in the political arena. However, the process of normalization after 1968/1969 signified the inevitable end for this paradigm.


2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 453-475 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID M. CRAIG

ABSTRACTRecent claims about the convergence in methodology between ‘high politics’ and the ‘new political history’ remain unclear. The first part of this review examines two deeply entrenched misunderstandings of key works of high politics from the 1960s and 1970s, namely that they proposed elitist arguments about the ‘closed’ nature of the political world, and reductive arguments about the irrelevance of ‘ideas’ to political behaviour. The second part traces the intellectual ancestry of Maurice Cowling's thinking about politics, and places it within an interpretative tradition of social science. The formative influences of R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott are examined, and Mark Bevir's Logic of the history of ideas is used to highlight how Cowling's approach can be aligned with ‘new political history’.


Author(s):  
Andy Birtwistle

The chapter critically reappraises the work of the British experimental filmmaker John Smith, drawing on analyses of key films and interview material to explore his use of sound, music and voice. Smith’s films often engage self-reflexively with how sound creates or accepts meaning within an audiovisual context. Influenced by structural film practice of the 1960s and 1970s, and underpinned by a Brechtian concern with the politics of representation, Smith’s often humorous work both foregrounds and deconstructs the sound-image relations at work in dominant modes of cinematic representation. This analysis of Smith’s work identifies the political dynamic of the filmmaker’s use of sound, and addresses what is at stake—for both Smith and his audience—in the self-reflexive concern with audiovisual modes of representation. Examined within this context are Smith’s creative focus on the production of meaning and how this relates to aspects of musicality and abstraction in his work.


2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-187
Author(s):  
Christina Vagt

The article, speaking from the double perspective of media history and political aesthetics, discusses the impact of behaviourism and early computer technology on the design of learning environments in the United States after the Second World War. By revisiting B. F. Skinner’s approaches to behavioural techniques and cultural engineering, and by showing how these principles were applied first at US design departments, and later to prison education, it argues that cybernetic and behavioural techniques merged in the common field of design and education. Behavioural design of the 1960s and 1970s furthered the cybernetic dream of total control over the world by addressing the learning environment rather than the individual, and operated within a space of possibility that was governed equally by technology and aesthetics. Behavioural design can therefore be understood as a political technology.


2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 257-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rune J. Sørensen

In an influential study, Matthew Gentzkow found that the introduction of TV in the United States caused a major drop in voter turnout. In contrast, the current analysis shows that public broadcasting TV can increase political participation. Detailed data on the rollout of television in Norway in the 1960s and 1970s are combined with municipality-level data on voter turnout over a period of four decades. The date of access to TV signals was mostly a side effect of geography, a feature that is used to identify causal effects. Additional analyses exploit individual-level panel data from three successive election studies. The new TV medium instantly became a major source of political information. It triggered political interest and caused a modest, but statistically significant, increase in voter turnout.


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