East Asia & Pacific

David Dapice on boosting US economic competitiveness with China

David Dapice on boosting US economic competitiveness with China

June 10, 2021
As policymakers in Washington debate legislation intended to bolster the U.S.’s competitive standing against China, we sat down with David Dapice, Ash Senior Economist and recent author of an Ash Center Policy Brief Why the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Immigration Are Needed for the Middle Class to discuss his thoughts on how Washington can bridge the competitiveness gap.... Read more about David Dapice on boosting US economic competitiveness with China

David Dapice on boosting US economic competitiveness with China

Published June 10, 2021 

As policymakers in Washington debate legislation intended to bolster the U.S.’s competitive standing against China, we spoke with David Dapice, Ash Senior Economist and recent author of an Ash Center Policy Brief Why the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Immigration Are Needed for the Middle Class, about his thoughts on how Washington can bridge...

Read more about David Dapice on boosting US economic competitiveness with China
Why the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Immigration Are Needed for the Middle Class

David Dapice, June 2021 

The US population aged 20–65, according to US Census projections, will grow by 355,000 a year this decade, and of that number, only 225,000 new entrants a year will likely be working and increasing the labor force. Yet, even after prepandemic employment is reached later this year or early in 2022, labor demand will continue to grow by millions of jobs far more than will be supplied by new entrants. If immigration policy and automation adjustments are not enough to make up for the deficit, there will be shortages and inflation, forcing the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates and perhaps cause a recession. Such a recession hurts middle- and working-class families. 

The US has indicated it wishes to compete with China. China has already formed a large trade bloc in Asia, and the obvious alternative—the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—was negotiated by the US but was never even put up for approval, lacking support from politicians on both sides of the aisle. Given all this, it is worth asking: is the TPP actually bad for labor and the middle class?

 

Risk Mitigation and Creating Social Impact: Chinese Technology Companies in the United States

Wenchi Yu, April 2021

Chinese technology companies have become a topic of interest to not only the business and investor communities but also increasingly the national security and intelligence communities. Their scale and level of innovation present new possibilities and new competition as well as shape global trends. Yet the relationship of such companies to the Chinese government is often opaque. As a result, their growing integration into the global telecommunications system also casts doubt on their intentions and legitimacy.

This paper reviews key US policy developments under the Trump administration, both broadly toward China and more narrowly relating to trade and technology, and examines the business strategy of four Chinese technology companies operating in the United States. It outlines the benefits of a corporate risk mitigation approach that incorporates social impact creation as an integral part of business and nonmarket strategy for Chinese technology companies, in the United States, and elsewhere. However, this paper also argues that corporate actions can only go so far. Because technology necessarily involves concerns of national security, the role of government—and government cooperation—is essential. It is only through a combination of more locally engaged corporate actions and internationally agreed upon sectoral rules and standard settings that we will be better able to improve transparency and trust-building across borders.

Chinese Regional Planning Under Xi Jinping: The Politics and Policy Implications of the Greater Bay Area Initiative

Jason Jia-Xi Wu, April 2021

This paper seeks to explain the logic of Chinese regional planning pertaining to the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (粤港澳大湾区 , hereafter GBA) and the challenges it entails for spatial development. Three questions guide the inquiry of this research: First, what are the institutional underpinnings of the GBA initiative, and how is the path dependency of regional integration in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) unique compared to that in China’s other coastal macroregions? Second, how does Beijing’s changing strategy toward Hong Kong inform the costs and limits of the GBA initiative, and what are their policy implications for the future development of the PRD? Third, why is regional planning uniquely favored by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) central leadership, and what does this tell us about the changing policy parameters that govern center-local relations in China?

This paper argues that the GBA initiative is an overly ambitious plan with very few policy instruments and little regulatory flexibility. It contends that the tensions between the GBA’s intended goals and the means of policy implementation are jointly resulted by three factors:

  1. Beijing’s emerging inclination toward using regional planning as an instrument to police center-local relations and cement its national security interests rather than using it as a mere instrument of economic governance.
  2. The declining room for policy experimentation at the local level, which reduces the state’s responsiveness to local demands and capacity to learn from mistakes.
  3. The historical and strategic importance of the Pearl River Delta to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which causes Beijing to prioritize the political interests of PRD integration much more than its pursuit for regional development in China’s other macroregions.

These changes are reflective of a broader paradigm shift in Beijing’s regional developmental strategies, under the climate of power centralization in the Xi Jinping era (2012–present). Finally, this paper demonstrates that such changes in the CCP’s regional planning in relation to the GBA initiative will engender both the decline of adaptive governance and premature deindustrialization.

Brokering Collaboration: Involving Officials in Community Scorecard Programs
Kosack, Stephen, Jessica Creighton, Courtney Tolmie, Fatu Conteh, Eric Englin, Linda Gassama, Hannah Hilligoss, et al. 2021. “Brokering Collaboration: Involving Officials in Community Scorecard Programs”. Read the full report Abstract

Transparency for Development Team, April 2021 

Programs to improve the transparency and accountability of public services are an increasing focus of international commitments to sustainable development. We ask whether involving officials in one common approach—community scorecard programs—brokers state-society collaboration that improves public services. We compare two scorecard programs focused on improving maternal and newborn health care that were offered in 215 communities similarly stratified across five countries. The first program, offered in 200 communities in Indonesia and Tanzania, involved facilitated meetings among community members. A similar program in 15 communities in Ghana, Malawi, and Sierra Leone involved facilitated meetings among community participants as well as between community members and hereditary authorities (in Malawi) or district-level elected and appointed officials (in Ghana and Sierra Leone). Interviews, focus groups, and systematic observations consistently suggest that in the program in Malawi, participants took similar approaches to improving their health care to participants in Indonesia and Tanzania—focusing primarily on improving care themselves and with health-care providers and others in their communities—and that the results of their efforts were similar to the program in Indonesia and Tanzania, where a randomized controlled impact evaluation found that average community outcomes did not improve significantly faster than in a control group of communities. In both Ghana and Sierra Leone, participants collaborated more with officials and saw tangible changes to health care that they and others noticed and remembered in nearly twice the proportion of communities as in the program in Indonesia and Tanzania. We conclude that involving officials in these programs may increase their effectiveness.

Orange skies in Beijing in 2013

Orange Skies in Beijing

March 23, 2021

A spring sandstorm and worsening air pollution came to a head last week in Beijing, causing the city and surrounding area to become enveloped in an orange smog. To better understand the storm and its impact on the environment, Chinese citizens and government, the Ash Center sat down with Jesse Turiel, Ash Center China Energy Postdoctoral Fellow. 

Advice to the New Administration on China

Advice to the New Administration on China

November 20, 2020

There's a general consensus in Washington that China presents the most significant geopolitical and strategic challenge to any administration moving forward. However, there are considerable differences in how to deal with that challenge. Should it be through competition? Should it be through confrontation? Or should it be with containment? Or should it be a mixture of any one of those three?

Disciplining of a Society: Social Disciplining and Civilizing Processes in Contemporary China

Thomas Heberer, August 2020

In this paper, we specifically focus on the social disciplining process in China since 2012, i.e., in the Xi Jinping era, although we also briefly touch upon historical aspects of disciplining (Confucianism, Legalism, New Life Movement” in the 1930s political campaigns in the Mao era, etc.). The approach adopted in this paper is to conduct an analysis of the disciplining/civilizing top-down project of the state.
 
We argue that the function of the current Chinese state as a disciplining and civilizing entity is the connecting link tying policies such as the state’s morality policies, its anti-corruption drive or the so-called “social credit system” together under a specific governance logic: to discipline and civilize society in order to prepare the people to become modernized. In fact, modernization and modernity encompass not only a process of economic and political-administrative modernizing but concurrently one related to the organization of society in general and the disciplining of this society and its individuals to create people with “modernized” minds in particular.
 
Our principal research questions in this paper are twofold: (1) How should disciplining and civilizing processes in general and in contemporary China in particular be understood? (2) What kind of policies and tools does the Chinese state use to pursue and implement its disciplining objectives?
 
A Turbulent Decade: The Changes in Chinese Popular Attitudes toward Democracy

Yinxian Zhang, August 2020 

In light of the increasingly aggressive policies and rhetoric of the Chinese government, many came to believe that China may pose a severe threat to democracy and the international order. However, less attention has been paid to Chinese popular attitudes toward democracy and authoritarianism. How does the Chinese public think of democracy in the changing domestic and international environment?

 

This paper uses a novel data set of Chinese social media posts generated between 2009 and 2017 and investigates the changes in popular attitudes toward democracy in the past decade. Results show that online discussion around democracy has decreased and voices questioning democracy have become pronounced since 2013. While tightened state control is a critical factor shaping popular attitudes, this paper demonstrates that people’s increasing exposure to two types of foreign information has also played into this trend. These information lead to a perception of dissatisfying performance of other countries and an awareness of racial attitudes of the West. Lastly, increasing doubts about democracy are not necessarily translated into a strong authoritarian legitimacy. Instead, online discussion presents a sense of ambivalence toward the two models, and the Chinese regime has continued to face a predicament of legitimacy.

 

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