At the Crossroads of Post-Communist Modernisation

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1 At the Crossroads of Post-Communist Modernisation

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3 At the Crossroads of Post-Communist Modernisation Russia and China in Comparative Perspective Edited by Christer Pursiainen

4 Editorial matter, selection and chapters 1, 2, 4 and 6 Christer Pursiainen 2012 All remaining chapters respective authors 2012 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act First published 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number , of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

5 Contents List of Tables List of Figures Preface and Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors vi vii viii xi 1 Introduction 1 Christer Pursiainen 2 A Short History of Catching Up Christer Pursiainen 3 The Free-Market State or the Welfare State? Markku Kivinen and Li Chunling 4 Authoritarianism or Democracy? Christer Pursiainen and Minxin Pei 5 Sovereignty or Interdependency? Sergei Medvedev and Linda Jakobson 6 Conclusions Christer Pursiainen Index 231 v

6 Tables 3.1 Selected indicators from UNDP s 2010 Human Development Report Class structure by autonomy criterion, autonomy index = Income in roubles by class Income in roubles by class and area Job changes in five years: the opportunity to use skills Three stages of welfare state structuring in the Russian Federation Alternative models of class relations The class structure of China Class structure and the middle class in urban areas, Number of participants in the social insurance system in China State Duma elections, : number of parties China s key socioeconomic indicators in the 1970s Military expenditure of Russia 193 vi

7 Figures 3.1 The development of real incomes in Russia and rural and urban China The development of Gini-index in Russia and China, Strikes in Russia Russia s foreign debt and stability fund Government expenditure on social care, Growth of GDP and income, The growth of the urban population Educational expansion of China, Growth in number of persons with white-collar occupation and higher education Gini coefficients of China, Income level and ratio of urban and rural households, Number of peasant workers in cities, Numbers of trade unions and their membership, Percentages of social expenditure in GDP in China The increase in social expenditure on education, health care and public housing 100 vii

8 Preface and Acknowledgements This book is the result of a three-year project by a team of six researchers from China, Finland, Russia and the United States, all of whom have extensive careers in the social sciences, specialising in the study of either Russian or Chinese societies, or both. The idea to bring these researchers together took shape in 2006, during a visit to Beijing by a delegation of the Aleksanteri Institute the Finnish Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Helsinki. Naturally, in discussions during this visit, comparative perspectives on developments in Russia and China were often raised. Indeed, it was concluded that a structured comparison of the developments in these two major post-communist countries would be a most interesting project, particularly because at that time there seemed to be no other such books in English on the market. The idea received a favourable response from the Academy of Finland and with its kind financial support the project was started with a kick-off seminar in March 2008 under the auspices of the Aleksanteri Institute, which became the administrative host of the project. From the very beginning, the plan was to proceed through specifically tailored small-scale workshops with external and critical discussants in order to develop the research team s own draft papers and ideas on how to compare these two countries, as well as to facilitate a wider debate on the theme at large. The first workshop was organised in Moscow in November 2008 at the Higher School of Economics, Faculty of Political Science. The next workshop took place in Beijing in September 2009 at Tsinghua University, Institute of Strategic Studies, School of Public Policy and Management. This was followed by the final workshop in San Francisco in April 2010 at Stanford University, Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Institute of International Studies. Our sincere thanks go to the above-mentioned distinguished institutions. The three workshops helped structure the work of the research team; in addition, we very much benefited from the often challenging comments from our Russian, Chinese and US colleagues, who represent the highest level of scholarship: Kevin O Brien, Chu Shulong, Dong Xiaoyang, Tom Fingar, Steven Fish, Li Bo, Alexander Lomanov, Fedor viii

9 Preface and Acknowledgements ix Lukyanov, Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, Nancy Tuma, Mark Urnov, Andrew Walder, Wu Yongping, Igor Zevelev and Zhao Huasheng. We are also most thankful to Linda Cook and Chris Lanzit for their very useful comments on the final draft of the manuscript, as well as to the three anonymous reviewers who, at different stages of the manuscript, provided us with their constructive but critical evaluations. There are many other people to thank. We owe much to our excellent assistants at different phases of the project: Ira Jänis-Isokangas, Markus Kainu, Ming Tang and Igor Tomashov. We are also especially grateful to the Aleksanteri Institute staff: Marja Riikonen, who so professionally and patiently took care of the financial administration; Essi Lindroos and Anna Salonsalmi, who were most helpful in all practical matters; and Timo Hellenberg, for what could be called the overall inspiration in initiating this project during our trip to western China in September Thanks also to Toby Archer, who did the final checking of the language and made useful comments on the text. Jingchao Peng from the Swedish Peace Research Institute s Beijing office provided very important logistical support during our workshop in Tshingua University, as did Desirée Gibson from the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at Claremont McKenna College during our Stanford University visit. Finally, we express our great appreciation to Ambassador Matti Anttonen, who found time to host a most inspiring evening at the Embassy of Finland during our workshop in Moscow. You are now holding the result of our adventure of more than three years. It goes without saying that one book cannot be comprehensive enough to cover the most important aspects of socio-political change over the last twenty or thirty years in countries such as Russia and China. Yet we believe that while each of the aspects discussed in this work deserves a book of its own and in fact, a lot of such books do exist the novelty of our approach is that we draw a concise but holistic picture that focuses on, to our mind, the essence of the transformations in Russia and China. Unlike many books dealing with Russia and China simultaneously, we are not focusing on their bilateral relations. These two countries appear in many ways to be on the same side of an emerging new ideological and global competition, representing an alternative modernisation model to that of the West. Yet there are also naturally crucial differences between these countries strategies and conditions. We are confident that our approach enables a structured comparison of these two countries in spite of the multiple sub-themes and different empirical conditions. While the overall approach represents a minimum

10 x Preface and Acknowledgements consensus by the authors, the breadth of theoretical and empirical themes involved in this kind of a study makes it impossible to agree on each and every issue and interpretation. We have therefore chosen to follow the traditional form of an edited compilation, showing clearly under each chapter, and sometimes in the footnotes, who is responsible for which chapter and section. Still, this book can be regarded as a whole, and it is much more coherent than many edited volumes. While the book draws a long-term and general picture of its theme, some of the issues deal with contemporary daily politics. It should therefore be mentioned that the individual chapters were mostly completed in the summer of 2011 and the whole manuscript assembled in September However, some figures and developments relate to the December 2011 State Duma elections in Russia and were updated after that event in the respective chapter. An offshoot of the project was the XI Aleksanteri Conference, which was held in Helsinki in November 2011 on the very same theme as this book. The high-level keynote speakers, over one hundred papers, and the overall enthusiasm of the participants proved that our comparative Russia China theme is perhaps more than a question for a specific moment, but rather part of an emerging research programme dealing with the results of post-communism and other societal and political transformation processes. Questions such as is the transition over?, are the hybrid regimes here to stay? and what is this so-called new authoritarianism? seem to be challenging enough to justify further investigation and new theoretical openings.

11 Contributors Li Chunling is Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). She received her Master s in History from Beijing University (1987) and her PhD in Sociology from CASS (1998). Linda Jakobson is Program Director of East Asian studies at the Lowy Institute for International Policy, Sydney. She was the Programme Director and Senior Researcher for the China and Global Security Programme at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) whilst based in Beijing, as well as Programme Director on China at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. Markku Kivinen is Director of the Aleksanteri Institute, Finnish Centre for Russian and Eastern European Studies, University of Helsinki. He was Professor of Sociology at the University of Lapland, Finland ( ) and a visiting professor at the University of Michigan (2001). He received his MA, Licentiate s degree, and PhD in Sociology from the University of Helsinki. Sergei Medvedev is Professor and Associate Dean at the State University Higher School of Economics in Moscow. He studied at the universities of Moscow, Prague and New York City, and holds a PhD in History. Over the past 15 years, he has held research positions and professorships in Russia, Germany, Italy and Finland. Minxin Pei is the Tom and Margot Pritzker 72 Professor of Government and the Director of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at Claremont McKenna College. From 1999 to 2009 he was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and directed its China Program from 2004 to He was on the faculty of the Politics Department at Princeton University from 1992 to He received his MA and PhD in Political Science from Harvard University. Christer Pursiainen is Senior Advisor at the Secretariat of the Council of the Baltic Sea States, Stockholm. He has worked in institutions such as Nordregio, Nordic Centre for Spatial Development in Stockholm; Russian-European Centre for Economic Policy, Moscow; Aleksanteri xi

12 xii Notes on Contributors Institute, Finnish Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Helsinki; and the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, Helsinki. He is Doctor of Political Science and Docent in International Relations at the University of Helsinki. It should be noted that all the arguments he proposes in this book are his responsibility alone and do not reflect the opinions of his current employer.