Political Mobility of Chinese Regional Leaders by Liang Qiao

Author:Liang Qiao [Qiao, Liang]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General
ISBN: 9781315466637
Google: 6gYqDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-14T03:27:13+00:00

Furthermore, after 30 years of continuously prolific GDP growth, many regional governments have already mastered the techniques of improving their economic numbers and making their local GDP grow. That is, to evaluate a Chinese region’s economic resources, regional GDP growth rates must not be the sole criterion. Two reasons for this are evident.

Table 5.5 Regional Socioeconomic Development Compared with GDP Per Capita

First, GDP growth supported by strong investment and industrialization may have little to do with improvements in regional quality of life. For instance, GDP numbers can be boosted by exporting a region’s natural resources, but the negative effects would be environmental pollution, shocking interruption of people’s conventional way of life,19 and the regional government’s ignorance to social welfare such as public education and health care.

Second, as is true in China’s case, governmental officials can artificially inflate GDP numbers to look better than they actually are. Even a governor of a province sometimes has to use other indexes to correct GDP growth reports in order to reduce their artificial parts.20 Instead, we should rely more on the regional revenues index to evaluate Chinese regional economies, because the more revenues a province (or a city) surrenders to the center at the end of the year, the more gross revenues it has made during the fiscal year. Regional governments tend to keep more revenue for themselves, as is true for the central government as well. Thus, the regional revenues index can be a more reliable indicator of a region’s political importance to the center, which highlights more frequently those regions that give more revenue to it.

Both Tables 5.4 and 5.6 show the national rankings of annual revenues among Chinese regions. In Table 5.4, for example, in 2005 the top revenue generators among provincial units of China were Guangdong, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Beijing. All of them are located in the East of China. Beijing is politically crucial to the Communist government, while the remaining five are very industrialized regions with well-developed economic sectors. In Table 5.6, after comparing top 20 cities or municipalities in China that provide the most revenues for the center annually, we notice that Shanghai and Beijing, either as provincial-equivalent municipalities or as super-sized Chinese cities, make great financial contributions to the center. Meanwhile, bigger cities on the East Coast in general contribute more revenue to the center than do cities in the Midwest Chinese regions. Among the top 20 revenue providers, four of them are provincial municipalities (Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Chongqing), nine are sub-provincial cities (45 percent), and eight are provincial capitals (40 percent). A capital city is politically more important, because a political center can influence its region’s economic policy-makings. Therefore, it is safe to conclude that these top revenue providers for the center, as generators of Chinese economic growth, also occupy important positions in the political system of China. Even among low-ranked smaller cities, being able to generate additional revenues is considered a political achievement for its regional officials, as more revenues draw more attention from the top leaders.

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