This article traces the socioeconomic origins of the first generation of the visibly richest private entrepreneurs in China by analysing the roles of political background, family connections and culture capital. Based on a data set essentially reconstructed from two leading Chinese rich lists from 2003 to 2012, the author finds no clear evidence to support the hypothesis of “strong political capitalism”…
Political Confidence in the New Emerging Economies: A Comparative Analysis of the BRICS countries
The aim of this paper is to describe and analyze people’s confidence in political institutions in the so-called BRICS countries, that is, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. I argue that the quality of macroeconomic indicators cannot explain the variation in political confidence between the five most dynamic new emerging economies…
Wealthy-Gentry Politics: How are Capitalists in China Chosen for the “Houses”?
Choosing individual private entrepreneurs to be members of the People’s Congress (PC) or the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) is one of the most important mechanisms for “cooperative capitalism” in China…
The End of Post-communism? The Beginning of a Super-communism?
Some scholars think that the term post-communism is now useless, because the outcomes of transition are consolidated in those former state socialist European countries. But ongoing economic, social, and political transformations in China negate the theory of “end of postcommunism”…
Transformation of Intimate Relationship: The Birth, Break, and Revision of a Local Growth Coalition
This book is based on my Ph.D. dissertation but could not get published for almost 10 years due to many reasons. The positive side, however, is that it gives me a relatively enough time to observe the long impact of the case I studied. The original title of the book is Transformation of Government-Business Relationships in the Chinese “Middle East”,but I changed it to the transformation of intimate relationship, which looks like a book on family relationship…