This edited volume is motivated by an admirable and important goal: to bring studies of Chinese politics and political economy more squarely into the comparative politics subfield of political science. Written by leading scholars, the book moves beyond the typical focus on only China by engaging in small-n comparisons with countries across a wide spectrum, including France, South Korea, India, Brazil, South Africa and Russia. By placing China in an explicitly comparative context, new insights emerge about not only the nature and progression of economic reform in China, but also broad issues of interest to political scientists.
Thoughtfully synthesized in introductory and concluding chapters by editor Scott Kennedy and contributor Gregory J. Kasza, the volume forms a coherent whole. The seven empirical chapters – written by Margaret M. Pearson, Arthur R. Kroeber, Andrew Wedeman, Mark W. Frazier, Scott Kennedy, Kellee S. Tsai and Victor Shih – are consciously linked with one another, and with the book's two central themes: (i) economic policies and performance; and (ii) the sources and consequences of interest group activities in an authoritarian context. The discussion is pitched at a fairly high level in terms of both theory/concepts and empirical detail, making the volume most interesting to graduate students and scholars of political science and economics. While the comparative focus of the volume is new and some of the chapters break new empirical ground, the content of some chapters (for example, those by Frazier and Tsai) will be familiar to China scholars.
The most important contribution of the volume lies in its effort to move China out of its academic isolation. As discussed by Kennedy and Kasza, this isolation has derived from a number of factors. Along with the difficulty of mastering Mandarin, scholars have tended to view China as “unique,” and thus unsuitable for comparison. For the same reasons, non-specialists seldom have attempted comparative work that includes China. China's size and global importance also have contributed to its scholarly isolation. Along with breeding a sizeable community of China scholars who have enjoyed one another's intellectual company and have not been pushed to study more than “just” China, China's size has allowed for intra-country comparisons, and China's perceived importance has generated generous research funding. As a result, Kasza states, China has been “something of a worst case for comparative political research” (p. 183).
Having established the need for greater comparison, the next question is, “to what should China be compared?” The most obvious candidates have been “East Asian Developmental” (EAD) states (namely, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan) and “post-communist” states (particularly Russia and East/Central Europe). Chapters by Pearson, Kroeber, Frazier, Kennedy and Shih include comparisons with the former. They find that China's economic policy has been much more decentralized and “messy” than in EAD states. China also has been less successful at maintaining relative economic equality and stimulating innovation. In large part, these differences derive from China's communist legacy and size, and the current anti-protectionist international climate. Conversely, China's economic policy stacks up favourably when compared with post-communist Russia and Europe. This results from not only China's more gradual reform process, but also its unique form of communism, which – unlike in Russia and East/Central Europe – has been quite decentralized. The positive results of these differences are illustrated by Wedeman's chapter on the Russian and Chinese auto industries, and Frazier's chapter on welfare reform. Various contributors note that few existing works compare China to the advanced industrial democracies of the West. Pearson's chapter is a notable exception, including France in its comparison of governmental regulation of business and industry.
The volume finds that while China is indeed distinctive, it has many similarities with countries across the globe, and decidedly is not an outlier beyond the scope of meaningful comparison. A second general finding is that, as in other countries, China exhibits multiple domestic political economies that vary in terms of location, hierarchical level, and type (for example, public versus private). Yet the volume's most interesting general finding regards the extent to which regime type – particularly authoritarianism versus democracy – matters when it comes to interest group behaviour, and economic policy and performance. The answer is that sometimes it does, and sometimes it does not. Regarding welfare reform and provision (the subject of Frazier's chapter) and the ability of a regime to undergo adaptive institutional change (in part the topic of Tsai's chapter), regime type is not a crucial variable. Yet, when it comes to business lobbying (examined by both Shih and Kennedy), regime type is key. The impact – if any – of authoritarian versus democratic rule on particular aspects of a country's political economy is important because it gets at a bigger normative question: which type of political system is best, and why? To the extent that positive economic developments and outcomes can arise within authoritarian regimes, the desirability of democracy may be called into doubt. However, when it comes to the question of whether or not China can and should serve as a model to be emulated by other countries, most of this volume's authors seem to answer in the negative, either because China's experience is unlikely to be successfully replicated, or because its negative features should be avoided.
