State–Society Relations and Governance in China by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

A. Bureaucracy

There is widespread consensus that central bureaucracies with merit-based recruitment and promotion are critical for good governance. They are at once an expression of state capacity and a means for delivering public goods in a fair and equitable manner. As Dani Rodrick has put it, “the quality of institutions is key” for economic growth.[7]

Having said that, it is not altogether clear where such bureaucracies come from. It cannot be assumed that they are created as they are needed; on the contrary, many an economy has stalled in part because bureaucratic rationalization has not taken place. Douglass North’s argument about the importance of institutions applies here. Institutions set the “rules of the game,” and some institutional arrangements are compatible with, and encourage, the development of rational bureaucracies, and others do not.[8] But the causality seems to be the reverse of what North suggests, that is, that bureaucratic rationality stems from factors other than economic development or even the expansion of market forces, though both may well be restricted if bureaucratic rationality does not occur.

Although political scientists clearly recognize the importance of bureaucracy, there has been surprisingly little attention to when and why they are created. Perhaps the oldest thesis is that advanced by Charles Tilly. His argument is that competition between European nations—specifically military competition—led nations to develop more effective bureaucracies. His logic is that military expenses led states to develop more efficient means of collecting taxes, and the need to collect taxes led to the creation of more effective bureaucracies. His famous aphorism summing this up is, “States make wars, and wars make states.”[9]

This argument has been altered and extended by Doner, Ritchie, and Slater. Looking at Northeast and Southeast Asian states, they conclude that “systemic vulnerability,” which they define as the high probability of domestic unrest, the threat of external invasion, and the hard budget constraint created by the difficulty of raising revenues, led states such as Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea to create developmental states with strong bureaucracies. In contrast, the lack of such threats in Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia led to more personalistic, less bureaucratic governments. The difference in economic performance has been notable.[10]

The Doner, Ritchie, Slater argument puts an emphasis on circumstances facing states and gives short shift to history. Atul Kohli, on the other hand, thinks history is critical in understanding state and economic development in late developing states, particularly those that experienced colonization. He argues that Japan’s thorough and brutal reorganization of the Korean state and society, especially its building of a bureaucratic apparatus that could penetrate to the village level, laid the basis for Korean economic development in the post-war years. Although Kohli does not address Taiwan’s experience, much the same case could be made. Such instances of the legacy of the colonial state in the creation of the developmental state contrast with the much lighter hand the British exercised in India and the even more anemic effort they exerted in Nigeria. The circumstances a state faces no doubt influence

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