The inner working of China’s politics has long been treated as a black-box where decisions are made in smoke-filled rooms. As further complication, China’s internal power structure has changed dramatically since the reform era and keeps evolving. This session aims to present some recent theories that can help to understand the complexities of the governance of China. The presentation will cover the following parts. (1) A brief introduction about political economy and China. (2) The political game in China: why was the Chinese state able to promote economic growth during the reform era, yet has been unable to do so during the Mao era? (3) The policy-making puzzle: logrolling among vertical bureaucratic systems in China.
 
The main references of the session include:

*Mario Gilli and Yuan Li (2014). Accountability in One-Party Government: Rethinking the Success of Chinese Economic Reform. – In: Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, 170(4), 616-645. (This paper is considered as the reference paper)  

Yuan Li (2014). Downward Accountability in Response to Collective Actions: The Political Economy of Public Goods Provision in China. – In: The Economics of Transition, 22(1), p. 69–103, 2014.

Mario Gilli and Yuan Li (2013). A Model of Chinese Central Government: The Role of Reciprocal Accountability. – In: The Economics of Transition, 21(3), p. 451–477.

Mario Gilli, Yuan Li and Jiwei Qian (2015). Logrolling under Fragmented Authoritarianism: Theory and Evidence from China. Working paper