Scott Kennedy’s makes the case for the importance of a previously unexplored Chinese political economy fueled by domestic and foreign industry lobbyists. Kennedy uses a comparative case study approach to explore lobbying in the context of three industries – steel, consumer electronics, and software – which he deems representative, respectively, of China’s past, present (as of 2005, when the book was published), and future economic drivers. The research is based largely on first person interviews conducted between 1998 and 2003; a period that included three extended stays in China. The interviews were conducted with senior executives from firms in the above-mentioned industries, leaders of business associations and other intermediaries between government and business, as well as junior and midlevel officials from various parts of the national and local bureaucracy. The interviews are further supplemented with two other categories of sources. The first is additional interviews with other firms and observers tangentially involved or otherwise familiar with the material being covered. The second is primary and secondary written materials from both Chinese and Western information outlets.
Kennedy focuses on two overarching questions, (1) How do certain economic factors affect business-government interaction? And, (2) To what extent do these patterns affect the relative influence of firms on the policy-making process? In explaining his use of case studies to address the questions posed, Kennedy claims not to be using the cases as variables in their own right. Rather, he explains, the cases are representative of a basket of myriad economic variables, such as ownership structure (private or state-owned), size, industry concentration, and technological sophistication. In considering the cases in light of these economic variables, Kennedy uses several classical model frameworks of business-government interaction as “guideposts” which function to orient his case-based inquiry. Kennedy goes to great lengths to stress that he is using these framework guideposts as a starting point and not and ending point. By doing so he hopes to strike a balance between conducting a focused inquiry, and an inquiry unburdened by the discussion paradigms framing debate business-government relations in China.
Being able to convincingly strike this balance is critical to Kennedy’s research design because the question he poses is partly intended to address two gaps in literature related to China business-government relations. On the one hand, there has not been a proper accounting of variation in business-government relations because of the dominance in the literature of the neoclassical tradition. Said school of thought views the market as a seller-buyer exchange entirely free of state interference, while it views a state-controlled planned economy as the polar opposite of a market-based mechanism. In sum, there is only a market economy, a state planned economy, and a transition period, with no sort of settled paradigm in between this dichotomy. Kennedy seems to be aware that in order to break this dichotomy he also must be able to unshackle himself from existing framework models.
On the other hand, Kennedy claims there has been too much emphasis in the literature on the search for civil society, a term defined in relation to the degree of a party’s autonomy from the state. The assumption is that the more autonomy from the government that a business or association has the more it is able to criticize or challenge the state. The reason that this sort of search creates gaps in the literature is that it assumes away the possibility that a business or association may actually gain influence by giving up some autonomy, and that consequently, civil society need not be the natural conclusion of a transition that begins with an all-powerful authoritarian government. Moreover, the focus tends to subsume other potential avenues of academic discussion within the decades old focus on predicting the autonomy tipping point that will lead to widespread democratization of China. Creating separation between his model and previous framework models gives Kennedy the freedom to establish a new paradigm, and to ultimately avoid the discussion of democratization, which he rightly flags as the echo in nearly every study of China politics.
Certainly, Kennedy’s stated purpose for his choice of research question is one that Barbara Geddes would hail with approval, due to both the novelty of the questions and their ambition to shift the paradigm of current debate on China’s political make up by smashing through a decades-old binary fallacy that markets are either freed or planned. Geddes would likely also find virtue in Kennedy’s actual analysis. Kennedy seems to let his interviews define the economic variables of focus for each industry case study, independent of the framework guideposts. From there, he proceeds to assign a value of roughly equal proportion to that identified by his interviewees to each variable in his own analysis. Kennedy’s decision to treat each case study independently of the other two and to allow for research-subject-guided flexibility in his design study, allows him to probe deeper and produce subtler insights that would have been possible to obtain using an approach aimed to unify the three cases through a common set of core, predetermined economic variables.
In this last respect, Kennedy’s research design approaches what Maria Heimer refers to in “Doing Fieldwork in China” as a one-case multi-field-site set up. Applying Heimer’s definition, Kennedy’s “cases” are more aptly called field sites. Like the duo of O’Brien and Li referenced in Heimer’s work, Kennedy uses these field-site cases to explore one phenomenon, state lobbying by businesses. This phenomenon, in turn, is his true “case”.
In line, again, with Heimer’s analysis, the virtues of the one-case multi-field site approach are evident in Kennedy’s work. Kennedy paints a dynamic picture of Chinese state power and the various Chinese industries’ ability or lack there of to influence the administrators and policy makers who manage that power. In fact, Kennedy demonstrates quite convincingly that existing models of policy making in China are due for an update that integrates the growing direct role that societal actors, both industries and the lobbyists who represent them, play in the policy process. What this will do is shift the focus of the conversation away from market/planned economy and political climate dichotomy, towards a more nuanced and ultimately varied view of that landscape.
Kennedy himself identifies that the weakness of his approach may be that in seeking to minimize the role of civil society struggle in his work, he may have run afoul of trying to prove too much. It is fair to say that by prizing the eccentricities of each field-study-case to the point where his research becomes, in effect, a study of differences between field sites, Kennedy’s research is not very apt at measuring the effect of the above-mentioned set of economic variables upon business-government relations. Due to the lack of ability to convincingly evaluate the influence of even these basic controlling variables, there is uncertainty about whether he is right to more or less ignore the social struggle in his analysis. Observing the way that open access to the political system has been undermined by direct lobbying and political capture of the US Supreme Court by corporate interests, and the civil reaction at this development, it seems to me an open question whether government-business relations can be analyzed separate from the development of civil society.
About the Author
