Government is key to understanding China's future
Over the past three decades, China's government, economy, and society have been undergoing a transformation, the momentum of which has intensified in recent years. Stanford sociologist Xueguang Zhou has been conducting a detailed ethnographic study in a rural township a few hours' drive from Beijing in order to understand these changes, especially in terms of China's political institutions. He is also beginning research about the behavior of urban government organizations and about the trajectory of personnel mobility in the Chinese bureaucracy.
Zhou's rural governance study branched out into three interrelated directions.
He has been studying agricultural markets, including: how they have been taking
shape and evolving over time, how harvests are conducted, and where local
elites and farmers interact with large outside companies. China's rural
election system, which Zhou suggests has become more institutionalized in the
past six to eight years, has been another area of focus. He has examined how
the system was first established, and how it has evolved into its current
shape. Finally, he has followed patterns of government behavior within the
context of the significant changes now underway in China.
"From a research point of view, this is really a critical moment
in the Chinese economic transformation.
-Xueguang Zhou
FSI Senior Fellow and Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Economic Development
Gradually shifting his focus to the study of China's urban political
institutions, Zhou has been working with a doctoral candidate from Peking
University to study the behavior of urban government bureaus for the past three
years, and they are now working on articles highlighting the major findings
from this research. In addition, Zhou is in the process of selecting urban
sites in which to conduct a more prolonged and detailed study similar to his
rural township project. He is also working with a Stanford master's student to
analyze twenty years of government personnel data, tracing the movement of
specific individuals across offices and bureaus as they have been promoted
through the bureaucratic system. "It is all a public record," says Zhou, "but
once you piece these trajectories together, they shed light on the inner working
of, and dynamics in, the Chinese bureaucracy."
China's overall transformation has greatly accelerated in the past decade, and
even as urban life is changing, life in rural areas around China's coastal
megalopolises is perhaps changing even more quickly. Zhou suggests that within
the next five to ten years the contribution of China's shrinking rural areas
towards the country's GDP will become quite insignificant. "The speed is really
just astonishing," he emphasizes. As cities expand, local governments purchase
up land from rural residents for commercial development projects like shopping
centers and apartment complexes. Real estate is a huge source of income for
city governments and so there has been an aggressive push toward urbanization.
As a result, says Zhou: "Millions of rural residents lost their land and became
urban overnight without any relevant work skills." Although they are
compensated to various degrees for their land, the bigger question is how this
will affect the new city dwellers and their families in the future as they must
develop new skills and adapt to the social and environmental conditions of
urban life.
"From a research point of view," states Zhou, "This is really a critical moment
in the Chinese economic transformation: the way that they deal with the process
of urbanization will have tremendous consequences for the years to come because
it is creating so much tension and social conflict." Even away from coastal
areas, government-driven urbanization is taking place everywhere in China—even
in provinces with vast expanses of remote land like Xinjiang. "This is exactly
why you want to study government," maintains Zhou. "Because they play a key
role in this process." Understanding China's government institutional
structures, its decision-making processes, and the way that resources are
mobilized will lead the way to better understanding about the future impact of
these decisions that are now so rapidly changing both the rural and urban
landscape.