Abstract
This chapter helps readers quickly understand the main argument of this book. It first lays bare what motivates this book, and then defines the key questions the entire book is centered around. The chapter also provides a synopsis of my argument, the literatures the book engages, the research design, and the plan of the book.
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Notes
- 1.
They were abolished in 1975.
- 2.
By “post-reform” I mean the period after Deng Xiaoping kicked off economic reform in the late 1970s. This was also the time when Deng began to institutionalize Chinese politics and various institutional arrangements, formal or informal, started taking shape. Temporally, “post-reform China” can therefore be periodized into (1) the genesis of China’s authoritarian institutions (the second generation of leadership led by Deng Xiaoping), (2) the era of institutionalized authoritarian rule (the third and the fourth generations of leadership represented by Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao), and (3) the era of institutional flux (the fifth generation of leadership headed by Xi Jinping).
- 3.
There is, however, no denying their potential effects. See Chap. 9 for a complete discussion.
- 4.
Svolik (2009) endogenizes the balance of power between the dictator and his allies through the lens of the dictator’s moral hazard problem, and therefore offers certain dynamic interpretations of the modus vivendi between the former and the latter. The paper, however, only models the authoritarian politics when it hasn’t been institutionalized. In other words, there is no way for it to provide any insights into how authoritarian institutions might change.
- 5.
The source of data is the World Bank’s World Development Indicators.
- 6.
Bear in mind that Nigeria had only a few years of practicing democratic rules before the coups happened in 1966.
- 7.
David Barboza. “Former Party Boss in China Gets 18 Years.” New York Times, April 12, 2008. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/12/world/asia/12shanghai.html (Accessed April 19, 2018).
- 8.
While this is by no means relevant to my main argument in this book, what still needs to be noted here is that I use the masculine third-person pronoun for the dictator throughout the book since almost all dictators in modern times are male, and I use the feminine third-person pronoun for all the other actors.
- 9.
While it is beyond the scope of this book to explain in detail what these incentives were, interested readers are advised to consult Xu (2011) for a very informative overview. Xu (2011) argues that China’s local economic engine switched from industrialization to urbanization after the 1994 fiscal reform. As far as this study is concerned, the shift in the local growth model does not affect our conclusion since it did not make the curse disappear.
- 10.
In other contexts, the political–sociological backgrounds can surely allow for other interpretations, too—for example, ethnicities, religions, and races.
- 11.
The two types of authoritarian institutions also differ profoundly in the kind of population they engage, the type of regime risks they help manage, and the set of mechanisms through which they take effect. A more detailed explanation of their conceptual differences is available in Chap. 8.
- 12.
They will become complements when the opposite is true. The full derivation is available in Chap. 8.
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Tung, H.H. (2019). Introduction. In: Economic Growth and Endogenous Authoritarian Institutions in Post-Reform China. Politics and Development of Contemporary China. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04828-0_1
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