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Reviewed by:
  • Assessing the Extent of China's Marketization, and: The Revival of Private Enterprise in China, and: Entrepreneurship in China
  • Kun-Chin Lin (bio)
Xiaoxi Li , editor. Assessing the Extent of China's Marketization. The Chinese Trade and Industry Series. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006. xix, 330 pp. Hardcover $114.95, ISBN 978-0-7546-4878-9.
Shuanglin Lin and Shunfeng Song, editors. The Revival of Private Enterprise in China. China Trade and Industry Series. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007. Hardcover $114.95, ISBN 978-0-7546-4892-5.
Keming Yang . Entrepreneurship in China. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007. Hardcover $114.95, ISBN 978-0-7546-4668-6.

These three volumes signal the sustained commitment of Ashgate Publishing to contemporary Chinese political economy—the first two titles belong to a handful of edited volumes published in the past three years under the Chinese Trade and Industry Series; the latter is a monograph not classified under any Ashgate series.1 Series editors for the said series—Aimin Chen (Sichuan University) and Shunfeng Song (University of Nevada, Reno)—are well-respected economists with decades of experience in research and teaching in the United States and in China. Most volumes appear to be collections of conference papers by scholars from both sides of the Pacific, presented at symposiums supported by international funding agencies, corporate donations, and Chinese academic institutions.

Previous volumes in the series have received scant attention in major journals of economics and China studies.2 I suspect this neglect reflects the relative abundance of edited volumes on various aspects of the Chinese economy as well as inconsistencies within the series. Reviewers of earlier volumes have voiced concerns with the following problems: numerous editorial errors; outdated data, in particular pertaining to "post-WTO" discussions; context-insensitive applications of econometrics models; and inconsistent efforts at theory building and comparative analysis across sectors and countries.3 To varying degrees, these problems resurfaced in the two edited volumes under consideration here.

All three books address head-on the two most fundamental structural changes in the Chinese economy since the mid 1990s—the historic shift from a socialist economy of chronic shortage to one of overall oversupply, and the diminishing importance of the state and collective forms of ownership in face of various property right reforms and the surging private sector. These trends have fairly overtaken and made unfashionable earlier scholarly attention on the reform of state-owned enterprises and debates over soft-budget constraints. However, a close reading of these volumes strongly suggests that the evolving [End Page 330] complexities in state-nonstate relationships remain the central institutional variables for economic growth and system transformation. The earlier debate over whether ownership form and corporate governance or market competition and the overall external environment (including financing options and regulatory risks) matter more for improving the performance and governance of state-owned enterprise finds new relevance in application to the analysis of private enterprises. In addition, central and local governmental relations over the process of decentralization enter into discussion but do not receive systematic attention and theorization in these volumes. It is almost as if, after lavishing praises for the entrepreneurial local state in the 1990s, scholars have decided that the private firms and entrepreneurs are the central, autonomous agents for China's present dynamism. There is certainly a need to rethink the research agenda in light of structural changes in favor of the private sector, but one should keep in mind necessary continuities and comparisons with the earlier scholarship.

Assessing the Extent of China's Marketization, edited by Xiaoxi Li of Beijing Normal University and with twenty-eight of twenty-nine chapter contributors sourced from that university, is best read as issue-specific summaries of regulatory and institutional changes since 2000. Whether these changes actually translate into the development of robust political and institutional foundations for the market economy is largely implied through correlations to aggregate economic outcomes rather than through rigorous analyses. Anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists would look in vain for relevant qualitative research such as in-depth case studies, contextualized narratives, or historical-institutional analysis of long-term trends. The underlying perspective of this volume assumes a congruence of state-building and market-building projects...

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