De Facto Federalism In China: Reforms And Dynamics Of Central-local Relations

Download or read book De Facto Federalism In China: Reforms And Dynamics Of Central-local Relations written by Yongnian Zheng and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2007-01-23 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first attempt to conceptualize China's central-local relations from the behavioral perspective. Although China does not have a federalist system of government, the author believes that, with deepening reform and openness, China's central-local relations is increasingly functioning on federalist principles.Federalism as a functioning system in China is under studied. The author defines the political system existing in China as “de facto federalism”, and provides a detailed analysis of its sources and dynamics in the book. The system is mainly driven by two related factors — inter-governmental decentralization and globalization. While economic decentralization since the 1980s has led to the formation of de facto federalism, globalization since the 1990s has accelerated this process and generated increasingly high pressure on the Chinese leadership to institutionalize de facto federalism by various measures of selective recentralization.