Published Papers

The reform era began with the removal of Mao era elites from leadership positions on a scale theretofore unseen in the People's Republic of China.  Rather than depending on incentives to mobilize Mao-era cadres to support Reform and Opening, the new reform leadership brought in younger, better educated pro-reform elites.  This paper thus proposes a Personnel Model, in which the Communist Party brings in sympathetic cadres to implement major shifts in the Party line.  Furthermore, personnel changes were first imposed on the military, then on the civilian apparatus.  We show the large scale and rapid implementation of these reforms in 1982-1984 using an original database of over 60,000 cadres drawn from Organizational Histories.

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China’s rapid urbanization has generated a substantial population of “landless peasants,” villagers whose farmland has been fully expropriated. The fate of these “landless peasants” has varied greatly from locale to locale. In many cities, they have become wealthy urban landlords; in others, they have been pushed aside in the urbanization process. When they have become urban landlords, they have often done so through the formation of village collective shareholding corporations and villages-in-the-city (chengzhongcun 城中村, also known as “urban villages”), which have in turn provided housing for many migrant workers. Through a comparison of Guangzhou, with its many villages-in-the-city and powerful village collectives, and Shanghai, with far fewer villages-in-the-city or village collectives, this article argues that these starkly divergent physical, institutional, and distributive outcomes have been the result of divergent municipal policies that seek to urbanize peasants in very different ways. In both Guangzhou and Shanghai, although these urbanization policies were rooted in path dependency and local culture, they were subject to abrupt change by municipal leaders with new ideas.

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While similar to American zoning in many technical aspects, Chinese detailed control plans play a substantially different role in the distribution of property rights. Whereas American zoning was invented long after privately held property was widespread, and hence represented a diminution of extant property rights, Chinese detailed control plans clarify what property rights the state will sell to developers. As a result, the American zoning regime is more tolerant of developers seeking changes to zoning, while the Chinese system generally sees such behavior as an effort to get discounted access to state resources. Nonetheless, developers in both countries seek to influence planning restrictions: American developers do so through open negotiations with local governments, while Chinese developers are forced into more surreptitious lobbying. In the long run, inflexible planning restrictions make it very hard for anyone but the government to legally undertake even the smallest urban redevelopment projects in China; on the other hand, the state is able to get a higher share of land use value. Hence, while Chinese detailed control plans may formally resemble American zoning, they perform different functions with sharply different implications for urban development and redevelopment.

尽管在诸多技术层面与美国区划法相近，中国的控制性详细规划在产权分配方面扮演着完全不同的角色。鉴于美国区划出现在私有产权盛行良久之后，因此象征着对现行产权的一种削减；中国的控制性详细规划则明确了政府会将何种产权授予开发商。因此，当开发商寻求规划变更时，美国对此更为宽容，而中国的制度却把这种行为视作试图变相谋取国家资源。无论如何，这两个国家的开发商都会设法对规划条件施加影响：美国开发商的做法是与当地政府公开谈判，而中国开发商不得不通过更加潜移默化的方式进行游说。长期而言，中国的规划条件调整使得政府以外的机构主导城市再开发项目的难度增大——无论其规模多小；但另一方面，国家也得以分享更多的土地使用价值。由此，虽然中国的控制性详细规划与美国区划法在形式上相似，但二者的作用并不相同，其对城市开发和再开发的影响也大相径庭。

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As the Chinese land development system became marketized in the 1980s and 1990s, local governments and their urban planning agencies came under increasingly untenable pressure as they both imposed and modified detailed planning restrictions. As a result, many cities restricted the broad discretionary authority granted under national law through reforms to both technical guidelines and decision-making institutions. The Chinese planning literature tends to focus inordinately on technical guidelines, but in practice even the best technical guidelines leave significant room for discretion. Hence this paper focuses on the reforms to decision-making institutions adopted in Shanghai and Shenzhen, especially the appointment of expert members to city planning commissions. Although their reforms varied in logic and depth, both cities chose to borrow the authority of planning experts to deflect responsibility for planning decisions away from the planning bureau. In doing so, they reinforced control over planning decisions by the planning bureau, but did nonetheless expand participation in planning. Most importantly, by creating clear procedures for plan adoption and modification and incorporating voices outside the planning agency, these reforms substantially increased the barriers to corruption or technically flawed plan modifications.

改革开放以来伴随着土地市场 化进程不断深入，地方政府与城市规划 职能管理部门在详细规划决策上面临着 越来越大的外界压力。通过技术规范与 制度约束，中国规划体系自计划经济传 统时期延续下来的较大的自由裁量权不 断受到挤压。以往的研究较为关注通过 规划的技术规范增强规划的刚性，然而 各地在诠释国家技术标准和强制性内容 上仍然拥有较大的灵活变通能力。尝试 通过追溯 1980 年代以来上海和深圳两地 规划决策制度的变迁，尤其是如何通过 规委会制度创新引入专家决策，从而总 结规划自由裁量权在地方分配与再分配 的逻辑与发展历程。尽管深沪两地规划 制度决策制度创新的程度和逻辑各不相 同，但在借助规划专家巩固规划专业权 威、促进审批程序规范透明上具有共通 性，并且两种制度设计都有效提高了控 规变更的技术和政治门槛。

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Using examples from village reconstruction programs in rural China, we show that local cadres often prioritize project visibility over publicized policy goals.  Rather than emphasizing land reclamation (or rural welfare) as central policies and the academic literature do, cadres and the projects they designed tended to focus on projecting an image of urban, wealthy villagers.  Where such image-driven behavior is most deleterious to villagers, it can evince opposition.  We observe that some areas avoid conflict by making these projects voluntary or adjusting projects to local conditions.  However, we provide a case study of a village with strong village leadership, showing that contrary to recent claims that village cadres are increasingly impotent, some maintain the authority to override widespread objections from villagers.

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