This book brings together conceptual and empirical analyses of the causes and consequences of changing business–government relations in China since the 1990s, against the backdrop of the country’s increased integration with the global political economy. More specifically, it provides an interdisciplinary account of how the dominant patterns of interactions between state actors, firms and business organizations have changed across regions and industries, and how the changing varieties of these patterns have interacted with the evolution of key market institutions in China. The contributors to this edited volume posit that business–government relations comprise a key linchpin that defines the Chinese political economy and calibrates the character of its constitutive institutional arrangements.

Lobbying is not only the subject of ongoing, heated debates in politics and the public sphere but has also been a focus of the social sciences for decades. This edited volume provides an overview of the current state of research on lobbying from the perspective of Public Choice as a subfield of political science and economics. After a brief introduction to the field, Part I provides an overview of basic concepts and political-economic theories of lobbying from the standpoints of various subfields of Public Choice. Subsequently, Part II investigates the various channels used by interest groups to influence policymakers, such as party donations, informational lobbying, hiring politicians, etc. These chapters also discuss the possibilities and limits of regulating the respective channels. Lastly, Part III sheds light on lobbying in selected regions (i.e., the United States, European Union, Russia, and China).

Should Chinese energy investments be excluded from the liberal economic system based on geopolitical assessments only? This book explores the potential regulatory control by the Chinese government over foreign energy investments to achieve their perceived strategic objectives. Host states in which Chinese energy companies make investments have increasingly opposed Chinese energy investments in their national security reviews, based on concerns that these investments have strategic objectives. The book analyses China's investment-related law, regulations, and energy policies to examine how overseas energy investment-making is governed. The book also explores the role of the Chinese government in energy investment promotion and protection. Uniquely, the examination of China's potential regulatory control provides an objective criterion, rather than geopolitical considerations, for host states to assess the nature of Chinese energy investments. The book helps readers to open the 'black box' of Chinese energy investments from a regulatory perspective. It is a useful resource for researchers as well as practising lawyers assisting their Chinese clients through national security reviews, or when trying to determine whether China's SOEs can bring cases before investor-state arbitration tribunals.

This book provides a fresh perspective on the political agency of private entrepreneurs in contemporary China. Most Chinese scholarship describes this group as being politically acquiescent due to systematic co-optation by the party state. This book, however, argues that private entrepreneurs should be understood, and analytically conceptualized, as a 'strategic group' that makes use of different formal and informal channels to safeguard and expand its interests, though so far it has not challenged the current regime.State-business relations in contemporary China should thus be understood not in terms of mere clientelism, but as a dynamic symbiosis in which private entrepreneurs contribute substantially to policy and institutional change. This book is based on several years of comparative empirical fieldwork across China. With its rich and unique qualitative data and insights, this volume contributes significantly to our understanding of the political behaviour and impact of private entrepreneurs in contemporary China.

Industrial policy has long been regarded as a strategy to encourage sector-, industry-, or economy-wide development by the state. It has been central to competitiveness, catching up, and structural change in both advanced and developing countries. It has also been one of the most contested perspectives, reflecting ideologically inflected debates and shifts in prevailing ideas. There has lately been a renewed interest in industrial policy in academic circles and international policy dialogues, prompted by the weak outcomes of policies pursued by many developing countries under the direction of the Washington Consensus (and its descendants), the slow economic recovery of many advanced economies after the 2008 global financial crisis, and mounting anxieties about the national consequences of globalization. The Oxford Handbook of Industrial Policy presents a comprehensive review of and a novel approach to the conceptual and theoretical foundations of industrial policy. The Handbook also presents analytical perspectives on how industrial policy connects to broader issues of development strategy, macro-economic policies, infrastructure development, human capital, and political economy. By combining historical and theoretical perspectives, and integrating conceptual issues with empirical evidence drawn from advanced, emerging, and developing countries, The Handbook offers valuable lessons and policy insights to policymakers, practitioners and researchers on developing productive transformation, technological capabilities, and international competitiveness. It addresses pressing issues including climate change, the gendered dimensions of industrial policy, global governance, and technical change. Written by leading international thinkers on the subject, the volume pulls together different perspectives and schools of thought from neo-classical to structuralist development economists to discuss and highlight the adaptation of industrial policy in an ever-changing socio-economic and political landscape.

The liberal-democratic world order is confronting the rise of authoritarian state-led corporate interventions. This book explains how and why.

In Varieties of State Regulation, Yukyung Yeo explores how, despite China’s increasing integration into the global market, the Chinese central party-state continues to oversee the most strategic sectors of its economy. Since the 1990s, as major state firms were spun off from the ministries that managed them under the central planning system, the nature of the state in governing the economy has been remarkably transformed into that of a regulator. Based on over a hundred interviews conducted with Chinese central and local officials, firms, scholars, journalists, and consultants, the book demonstrates that the form of central state control varies considerably across leading industrial sectors, depending on the dominant mode of state ownership, conception of control, and governing structure. By analyzing and comparing institutional dynamics across various sectors, Yeo explains variations in the pattern of China’s regulation of its economy. She contrasts the regulation of the automobile industry, a relatively decentralized sector, with the highly-centralized telecommunications industry, and demonstrates how China’s central party-state maintains regulatory authority over key local state-owned enterprises. Placing these findings in historical and comparative contexts, the book presents the evolution and current practice of state regulation in China and examines its compatibility with other contemporary government practices.

This Element scrutinizes the attempts by the Chinese party-state bureaucracy since the 2000s to advance innovation and technological upgrading. It examines insights from the developmental state debate-the need for a bureaucracy to achieve internal coherence, and the capacity of that bureaucracy both to forge coalitions between bureaucrats, businessmen, and scientists, and to discipline domestic companies. Moreover, it assesses efforts to foster technological upgrading in semiconductors and electric vehicles. While there are significant differences between China and earlier successful developmental states, with the former facing problems such as the legacies of short-termism, limited monitoring capabilities, and flawed discipline over business, the authors find that, compared with other emerging capitalist economies, the Chinese bureaucracy has developed relatively strong capabilities to advance 'innovation-driven development'. This Element seeks to provide avenues for comparing it with other late developers.

There has been a major revival of interest in State Capitalism: What it is, where it is found, and why it is seemingly becoming more ubiquitous. As a concept, it has evolved from radical critiques of the Soviet Union, to being deployed by neo-liberals to describe market reforms deemed imperfect, to settle into a middle ground, as a pragmatic way to describe the state assuming a role as an active economic agent, in addition to its regulatory, social, and security functions. The latter is the central focus of this book, although due attention is accorded to the origins of state capitalism and how it has changed over the years, as well as contemporary ways in which state capitalism may be theorized. This economic agency may assume direct forms, for example, via state owned enterprises. However, it may also be indirect, for example, actively serving private interests through promoting insider firms, who may occupy monopolistic market positions and perform outsourced state functions. In turn, this leads to raise salient governance questions. The latter may encompass agency tensions between public ownership, and political or even private interest control; it may also include issues of transparency and monitoring. Although state capitalism has often been depicted as the preserve of states in the global south, be they developmental or predatory, many forms of state capitalism are visible in mature economies, be they liberal or coordinated, and this is not always associated with superior governance arrangements; indeed, this is an area where clear and easy divisions between the developing or emerging world and the developed or mature world may increasingly be breaking down. This volume brings together the accounts of leading experts from around the world; it is explicitly multi-disciplinary, and both consolidates the exiting knowledge base, and provides new, novel, and counter-intuitive insights.

99 entries written by leading China scholars. Topics include: The China Model, Future Prospects, Global Economy, Trade, Macroeconomics and Finance, Urbanization, Industry and Markets, Agriculture, Land, Infrastructure and Environment, Labour, Wellbeing and Inequality, Health and Education, Gender, Regional Divergence, and Provincial studies.