The National Supervision Commission: A “Subaltern History”

This article explores the history of state supervision organs in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from the early attempts to establish supervision organizations in communist revolutionary base areas to the founding of the National Supervision Commission in 2018. In the PRC today, the power to supervise the activity of state organs is not autonomous but is rather part of the disciplinary powers of the Chinese Communist Party. This type of institutional arrangement does not result from any predetermined path of historical and institutional development. While institutions should ideally work as predicted or dictated by distinct political philosophies or by models of institutional design, their development can in practice be shaped by bureaucratic politics and by variables endogenous to both political philosophy and institutional modeling.

Whole of (coalition) government: Comparing Swedish and German experiences in Afghanistan

Whole-of-government (WOG) approaches have emerged as a blueprint for contemporary peace and state-building operations. Countries contributing civilian and military personnel to multinational interventions are persistently urged to improve coherence and enhance coordination between the ministries that form part of the national contingent. Despite a heated debate about what WOG should look like and how to achieve it, the causal mechanisms of WOG variance remains under-theorised. Based on 47 in-depth, semi-structured interviews, this study compares Swedish and German WOG approaches in the context of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). I argue that coalition bargaining drove the fluctuation in the Swedish and German WOG models. Strategic culture was an antecedent condition. In both cases, COIN and the war on terror clashed with foundational elements of the Swedish and German strategic cultures, paving the way for a non-debate on WOG on the political arena. Finally, bureaucratic politics was an intervening condition that obstructed or enabled coherence, depending on the ambition of the incumbent coalition government to progress WOG. Overall, the results suggest that coalitions face limitations in implementing a WOG framework when the nature of the military engagement is highly disputed in national parliaments.

Transnational blindness: International institutions and refugees’ cross-border activities

The Dollo Ado refugee camps, located close to the Ethiopian-Somali border, have been a major focus for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR)'s attempts to build livelihoods for refugees and the host community. The context presents an analytical puzzle: despite the importance of cross-border activity to refugees’ socioeconomic lives, such transnational activity has been institutionally invisible to and hindered by the international agencies seeking to assist them. The article explores how and why refugees’ cross-border activities have been systematically ignored by international institutions. As a theoretical starting point, it draws upon the post-development literature, and notably the work of James Ferguson, which explores how international institutions frequently misunderstand the agency and strategies of their subject populations. However, contra Ferguson's predominantly Foucauldian methodological and epistemologically approach, the article adopts a mixed methods approach, and emphasises the agency of aid workers, bureaucratic politics, and political economy in its account of the disjuncture between international institutions’ state-centric livelihoods programmes and refugees’ own cross-border economic strategies.

Bureaucratic Politics behind the Rise of Antitrust

This chapter discusses the bureaucratic politics behind the rise of Chinese antitrust regulation. Chinese antitrust agencies are seldom subject to judicial scrutiny, and as a result, have monopolized the administrative enforcement of the Anti-Monopoly Law (AML). The severe sanctions that can be imposed under the AML give high-powered incentives to both government enforcers who want to expand their policy control and businesses who wish to use the law strategically to sabotage rivals. Moreover, the three former Chinese antitrust agencies were not assembled from scratch but were pre-existing departments within large central ministries. Naturally, the bureaucratic mission, culture, and structure of each of these agencies had shaped their enforcement agendas. Much of the discussion revolves around the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), as the agency stood out as the most aggressive institution among the three former agencies. Its rich record of enforcement also allows one to assess the link between these institutional factors and the pattern of enforcement. In 2018, the three agencies were merged into a single bureau under a newly created central ministry. The chapter then elaborates on the continuing challenges faced by this new agency, including the bureaucratic hierarchy, the power fragmentation, and the regional inertia.

The Durability of China’s Lawmaking Process under Xi Jinping: A Tale of Two Foreign Investment Laws

On March 15, 2019, the National People’s Congress passed a long-anticipated Foreign Investment Law (FIL) after a short deliberation period of only three months. This expedited legislative process seems unusual, considering that the original draft of the FIL proposed by the Ministry of Commerce in January 2015 was tabled indefinitely after a brief period of public consultation. How can we explain this stark difference? Comparing the legislative processes and contents of the two laws, this paper shows that, as with many previous laws, bureaucratic politics likely contributed to an impasse in the 2015 draft, whereas external shocks—in this case, the escalating trade war between China and the United States—helped accelerate the deliberation process and the passage of the new FIL. These two cases demonstrate the durability of lawmaking institutions and procedures under Xi Jinping despite the recentralization of power in the executive after changes to the constitution.