Economic Planning in Republican and Early PRC-China: Path-Dependency and Institutions
TRANSITION ECONOMICS SPEAKER SERIES 2001
Rice faculty Steve Lewis (political science and Baker Institute) and Carl Caldwell (history) in conjunction with the new Goethe Center for Central European Studies and the Transnational China Project continue discussions on the economics and institutional politics of transitional societies in 2000-01. In 1998 a one-day symposium was held on planning initiatives in China and Western Europe, 1935-50, involving five scholars from outside Rice. In 1999-2000, three more speakers who dealt with wide-ranging topics related to the problem of path dependency, (i.e., the institutional constraints often ignored by transition economists as they conceptualize the development of market societies) were invited to Rice. In 2000-01, Caldwell and Lewis will organize a one-day conference to address the issues of Chinese transition and create a speaker series focusing on the nature of East Germany's incorporation into West Germany over the past ten years, bringing together scholars from history, political science, and economics.
Proposed for Saturday, February 24, 2001, "Economic Planning in Republican and Early PRC-China: Path-Dependency and Institutions, " this one-day conference will investigate the Republican Chinese and early PRC context of the institutional origins of socialist economic planning. Recent research on the path of privatization in the 1990s in the former centralist planned economies of China, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has emphasized the role of "path-dependency," or the historical constraints on the selection of privatization strategies. Both the privatization and democratization reforms in these societies seem to follow a path constrained by a reverse logic of the way in which the institutions of the planned economies were set up in the 1950s. Such transitional property forms as cooperatives and collectives, which played a key role in the "socialist transformation of capital" in these societies in the 1950s, re-emerged in the late 1980s, before formal privatization plans were adopted in the 1990s. But recent, intriguing research by historians of Republican China suggests that even the great transformation of the 1950s was not such a radical departure: many of the institutions of the PRC's planned economy existed before the revolution. The presenters on this panel will address the theoretical and empirical issues of understanding such "path-dependency".
China historian William Kirby (Director of Asia Center, Harvard) will discuss changes in the macro-level state organizations of China's planned economy, both in the Republican period and the beginning of the Socialist period. His paper, "The Natural Resource Commission in Republican China and the State Planning Commission in the PRC: Path-Dependency and Continuity" discusses how these changes were constrained by norms of state organs and the attitudes of planners that have existed across regimes.
Historian Linsun Cheng (U. Massachusetts at Amherst) will discuss the macro-level, institutional origins of China's planned economy. His paper, "Economic Planning and China's Planned Economy, 1937-1942," will focus on the central-level, state organizations for controlling China's economy. He makes the counter-intuitive claim that the State Planning Commission and State Economic Commission of PRC China had their origins in the Republican government's National Resources Commission.
A paper on the micro-level institutional origins of political campaigns of the early PRC entitled "Capitalists and Comrades: Institutional Isomorphic Change and the Dilemmas of Partial Reform in China," is Patricia Thornton's (political science, Trinity College) paper. It will discuss how anti-corruption and anti-capitalist campaigns in the early 1950s have created organizational norms and values in the Chinese state that shape marketization reforms in 1990s China.
Rice's Steven Lewis plan's to discuss how the micro-level, organizational constraints that central planners of the PRC inherited from planners in the Republican government shaped privatization experiments in 1980s and 1990s China. "Long-Term Institutional Constraints on Privatization Experimentation: Evaluation Path-Dependency in China and Other Formerly Central-Planned Economies," is a paper that traces the organizational norms and conventions of state economic organs that have shaped both the socialist transformation of capital in the 1950s and the privatization of state enterprises in the 1990s.
Caldwell and Lewis plan to invite three speakers at different times in the year to discuss aspects of German transition over the last ten years. The first will be Irwin Collier (economics, Free University Berlin), a noted expert on the economics and politics of German unification. His talks will pull together the complex of factors that have reshaped Germany since 1989. These include the collapse of markets to the East with the introduction of the D-Mark, the failed privatization in the eastern provinces of Germany, the effect of European integration, and the reorganization of the German welfare state.
Along with Collier, a graduate student of economics from the innovative Polish-German University of Frankfurt-an-der-Oder will compare transitional processes in East Germany and Russia. Another scholar from the field of political science will be invited to address East Germany's institutional changes over the past ten years.
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