China’s Foreign Aid Training: Targeting Becoming an Influential Culture Sharer

Since the 1990s, China has formalized its short-term foreign aid training for foreign officials and technological personnel. This type of training often lasts for 21 days and participants from invited countries arrive in China for a period of condensed study, with all fees covered by the Chinese government. By the end of 2009, China had organized more than 4000 short-term training programs for over 120,000 personnel from more than 50 countries. Along with the establishment of the Twelfth Five-Year Plan and the constructional needs of the Belt and Road Initiative, China has gradually increased the export of its cultural products in foreign aid training. Surprisingly, such national-scale training is largely omitted from current scholarly research. Employing the “fragmented authoritarianism” model, we look at the administrative structure of China’s foreign aid training and provide rudimentary research into the field.

Water Management

Nature did China few favors in its allocation of water, either spatially or seasonally. The South has abundant water but little land that is easy to cultivate, while the much drier North and Northwest have extensive plains but limited rainfall, which when it comes is concentrated strongly in the summer months, followed by long dry winters. Under these circumstances, water management in China is a holding company of wicked problems, including floods, droughts, pollution, climate impacts, hydropower development, environmental degradation, urbanization on an unprecedented scale, and, recently, international waters. It is fair to conclude that the nature and fate of the Chinese state has been linked in large degree to extensive and continuous intervention in the hydraulic cycle, both to prevent harm (shuihai水害) and to make beneficial use of water (shuili水利). Methods adopted for that intervention, discussed in separate entries in this chapter, have included dikes, irrigation, dams, interbasin transfers from water-abundant to water-scarce areas, and institutional reform. Attempts at institutional reform can themselves confront wicked problems of implementation in a polity of the size and complexity of China, with a governing system that, while changing in many ways under the People’s Republic, and especially in the recent reform period, remains one that is perhaps best characterized as one of “fragmented authoritarianism.” In the 21st century, the water needs of a globalized market economy and the growth of megacities, the exploitation of international waters (notably for hydropower), gigantic interbasin transfers, and water pollution have added to the complexity of water management, and to a fragmentation of scholarship on what falls under the expanding rubric of water management. An entrée to this expanding literature may be found in the individual sections of this bibliography.

Introduction

This chapter serves as an introduction for the reader. It will familiarise them with the topic of the Minimum Livelihood Guarantee (dibao) in China, the existing academic literature on the topic, the overall argument of the book, and a rundown of the structure of the book. It will set out the case that fragmented authoritarianism explains the development of dibao. Each of the three aspects of fragmented authoritarianism will be discussed, related to dibao, and linked to the relevant chapter.

Urban Dibao: The Resolution of Unwanted and Unintended Outcomes, 1999–2003

This chapter first highlights the problems faced by both central and local government in shaping dibao into the programme it was intended to be after the initial national roll out in 1997. The discussion focuses on three unintended outcomes which attracted the most from policy actors: exclusion; resource dependencies; and variation. This is then followed by two discussions related to how the features of fragmented authoritarianism contributed to the outcomes discussed. The first discussion argues that fragmented authoritarianism, especially the structure of the state and decision making, contributed to the emergence of what I identify as unintended consequences. I will argue that the MCA struck a compromise with local government in the 1990s achieving implementation of dibao systems by allowing local variation. The second discussion argues that the MCA played a game where policy goals sought by Premier Zhu Rongji, primarily the moving of xiagang workers to dibao, were used to also resolve some of the unintended consequences which had emerged post-1999. This shows that while the assumptions of fragmented authoritarianism hold, especially the importance of resource allocation and hierarchical authority, policy actors lower down the hierarchy cannot use these circumstances to achieve their own goals.

Urban Dibao: Emergence and Transition to National Policy, 1992–1999

The chapter covers two analytical discussions. The first discusses the emergence and spread of the MLG from the early 1990s. Through analysis of the relationship between the Ministry of Civil Affairs, in particular Minister Duoji Cairang, and local government it will show how two aspects of fragmented authoritarianism in particular, values and political structure, shaped the spread of the policy. This is followed by an analysis of the campaign to achieve national implementation in 1999. This shows how a ministry lacking in resources achieved implementation, addressing one of the criticisms of the fragmented authoritarianism model raised by Michel Oksenberg. It will argue that while the MCA made extensive efforts to achieve implementation without expending resources these appear to have had little impact. Rather successful implementation was achieved through the intervention of the highest tiers of the state and subsidies. This shows that appealing to shared values under fragmented authoritarianism has limitations and these can be overcome, eventually, through use of political structure, decision making authority, and the allocation of resources.

International Influences on Policymaking in China: Network Authoritarianism from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao

Previous research has credited China's top leaders, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, with the social policies of their decade in power, arguing that they promoted these policies either for factional reasons or to achieve rational, problem-solving goals. But such arguments ignore the dominant “fragmented authoritarian” model of policymaking in China that centres on bargaining among bureaucratic agencies. This article asks whether top leadership factions, rational problem solving, or “fragmented authoritarianism” can explain the adoption of one of the Hu and Wen administration's flagship policies, New Rural Cooperative Medical Schemes. Based on a careful tracing of this policy's evolution, it finds little evidence for these explanations, and instead uncovers the role played by international events and organizations, and ideas they introduced or sustained within policy networks. The article highlights some of the effects that China's international engagement has had on policymaking and the need to go beyond explanations of the policy process that focus solely on domestic actors. It proposes a new model of policymaking, “network authoritarianism,” that centres on policy networks spanning the domestic–international, state–non-state, and central–local divides, and which takes account of the influence of ideas circulating within these networks.