The roads to politics: Chinese private entrepreneurs and China's policy-making processes
Date
2023
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This dissertation is a search for a better explanation of Chinese private entrepreneurs’ engagement and influence in China’s policy-making process, aiming to provide a nuanced picture that may aid our understanding of China’s evolving political economy and flourish the existing broader literature of comparative political economy. In particular, it attempts to examine the behavioral pattern of business lobbying and provide structural explanations on the business community’s policy influence. The central question of this study concerns through which pathways Chinese private entrepreneurs engage with policy-makers and conduct policy advocacy, as well as to what extent they exert influence in China’s policy-making process. To this end, this research has followed a historical trail through investigation of how and to what extent Chinese private entrepreneurs are able to vie for influence on China’s policy-making process by working cooperatively with two types of state-business engagement intermediaries in China—business association and think tank. ☐ This dissertation adopts a tripartite-embeddedness state-society interaction analytical approach on the premise of existing co-evolutionary analytical framework to trace how Chinese private entrepreneurs engage in China’s policy-making as well as assess business policy influence. It employs a mixed method approach that combines quantitative and qualitative methods to trace a wide spectrum of business lobbying and state-business interactions in China that take place through business associations and think tanks respectively. It informs that China’s policy-making is becoming progressively open and expanded. The shifting advocacy coalitions and policy advocacy patterns in terms of business lobbying might have some implications over state-society relations and the policy-making process in China. It is possible that Chinese private entrepreneurs, having leveraged more formal and official access to China’s policy process, will progressively push forward more institutionalized policy advocacy channels and gain increasing influence over China’s policy process. These changes might recalibrate allocation of resources and networks in Chinese policy and socioeconomic realms and disequilibrate the established distribution of policy-making power among state and societal actors. Although it is still not sure if the bottom-up dynamics in China’s business lobbying and policy-making process prepares the ground for the future surge of China’s political transformation, these changes do add a layer of complexity to China’s policy-making system and might increasingly push forward the broader reconfiguration of the state-society relations in China. ☐ Nevertheless, the completion of this dissertation comes at an unsettled time of period under Xi’s governance, during which the CCP-state’s power concentration makes its recent comeback while the collective policy-making leadership begins to wane since 2012. There is now still no sign of how long China will sustain its economic growth while remaining a strong state policy-making power. In current circumstance, while seemingly the policy advocacy channels for business community have been broadened while the chance of social influence in China’s political field increases, I thus far still remain cautious to reach much assertive conclusions on private entrepreneurs’ higher level of influence in China’s policy-making in the short-term.
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Keywords
Chinese private entrepreneurs, Business community, Policy-making leadership