Centrifugal Empire: Central-Local Relations in China (Hardcover)

Centrifugal Empire: Central-Local Relations in China By Jae Ho Chung Cover Image

Centrifugal Empire: Central-Local Relations in China (Hardcover)

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Despite the destabilizing potential of governing of a vast territory and a large multicultural population, the centralized government of the People's Republic of China has held together for decades, resisting efforts at local autonomy. By analyzing Beijing's strategies for maintaining control even in the reformist post-Mao era, Centrifugal Empire reveals the unique thinking behind China's approach to local governance, its historical roots, and its deflection of divergent interests.

Centrifugal Empire examines the logic, mode, and instrument of local governance established by the People's Republic, and then compares the current system to the practices of its dynastic predecessors. The result is an expansive portrait of Chinese leaders' attitudes toward regional autonomy and local challenges, one concerned with territory-specific preoccupations and manifesting in constant searches for an optimal design of control. Jae Ho Chung reveals how current communist instruments of local governance echo imperial institutions, while exposing the Leninist regime's savvy adaptation to contemporary issues and its need for more sophisticated inter-local networks to keep its unitary rule intact. He casts the challenges to China's central-local relations as perennial, since the dilution of the system's "socialist" or "Communist" character will only accentuate its fundamentally Chinese--or centrifugal--nature.
Jae Ho Chung is professor of international relations and director of the Program on U.S.-China Relations (PUCR) at Seoul National University. He is also the founding coordinator of the Asian Network for the Study of Local China (ANSLoC). His books include Assessing China's Power (2015) and Between Ally and Partner: Korea-China Relations and the United States (Columbia, 2006).
Product Details ISBN: 9780231176200
ISBN-10: 0231176201
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Publication Date: September 6th, 2016
Pages: 232
Language: English