Suchergebnisse

Conducting research in authoritarian regimes, especially ones with politicized courts, bureaucracy, and academia, entails many risks not encountered in research in advanced democracies. These risks affect numerous aspects of research, both qualita-tive and quantitative, with important implications for research transparency. In this brief essay, I focus on the key risk of con-ducting research in established authoritarian regimes: namely, physical risks to one's local informants and collaborators. Mini-mizing these risks will entail trading off ideal practices of trans-parency and replicability. However, scholars of authoritarian regimes can and should provide information on how they have tailored their research due to constraints imposed by the re-gime and their inability to provide complete information about interviewees and informants. Such transparency at least would allow readers to make better judgments about the quality of the data, if not to replicate the research. Also, scholars of au-thoritarian regimes can increasingly make use of nonhuman data sources that allow for a higher degree of transparency. Thus, a multi-method approach, employing data from multiple sources, is especially advisable for researching authoritarian regimes.

Nearly two decades after central bankers began to call for interest rate liberalization, the central bank continues to impose stringent rules on the fluctuation of deposit interest rates. This seems an unlikely outcome given widespread endorsement of liberalization by technocrats and experts both in and out of the government, China's accession to the World Trade Organization, and the technocrats' insulation from popular pressure. To be sure, local interests and central bank lobbying have driven gradual liberalization of interest rates. However, senior Chinese technocrats held on to control over interest rates because of their need to maintain state banks' dominance and to mobilize bank funds in times of economic downturns. As such, progress toward interest rate liberalization only took place during "Goldilocks" phases when the economy enjoyed healthy growth without high inflation.

Incomplete financial reform in China is puzzling because Premier Zhu Rongji, a seemingly promarket technocrat, was largely insulated from explicitly rent-seeking pressure and leftist ideology when he carried out a massive restructuring of Chinese banks in 1997. Yet at the end of his tenure as premier, the financial sector continued to channel the bulk of savings toward the state. Given the complexity of Zhu's policies, we cannot begin analyzing them if we conceive reform as a neat, coherent policy shift. In this article, competing hypotheses of policy change are tested on Zhu's financial "reform," which is conceptualized as a bundle of discrete policies, each having different and at times contradictory impact on the economy. With this conceptualization, banking centralization, the Herculean efforts to digest nonperforming loans, and stagnation in interest rate and private banking reform can best be understood as a coherent political survival strategy.