Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: The Political Economy of China's Trade Policy

2008年9月，中国向世界贸易组织争端解决机构提出申诉，要求就美国已对其征收明确反倾销和反补贴税的六种产品中的四种进行磋商。为什么北京抱怨其出口的钢管、轮胎和塑料编织袋受到的待遇，而不是磁铁和硝酸钠？同样，在加入世贸组织期间与美国的双边谈判中，中国为一些产品争取到了比其他产品更优惠的关税时间表，有时甚至在同一行业内也是如此。为什么中国对某些行业和部门提供了更多的保护，而对其他行业却没有呢？这个项目通过关注改革时代中国对外经济政策的国内政治来解决这些问题。首要问题是：鉴于中国等威权国家正规制度的薄弱和选举问责的缺乏，社会利益和偏好如何影响贸易政策结果？建立了一个利益集团政治的一般框架，在这个框架中，威权领导人的政治生存取决于维持一个来自“选择者”(一组在选择领导人方面有发言权并有可能属于领导人获胜联盟的人)的获胜联盟，该联盟由利益分歧的成员组成，由于贸易政策的分配效应而相互竞争。因此，社会利益能够在多大程度上成功地影响政策结果，取决于他们接触到这些选择者成员并与之互动。本文采用案例研究和定量分析相结合的多种方法来检验这一理论。该项目考察了企业和行业对进口关税、非关税壁垒和中国反倾销案件结果的影响。在之前的实地调查中，研究人员发现了中国国内团体为其首选政策游说的各种渠道和机制，并确定了与其游说努力有效性相关的一些因素。特别是，国家所有权和与当地经济的联系等因素增加了社会对保护的需求，从而增加了政府给予贸易政策让步的可能性和程度。目前的项目包括收集和使用1999年至2009年中国450多个行业的原始数据，以及1997年至2008年中国提起的反倾销案件的原始数据。该项目对科学理解做出了几项贡献。除了少数例外，对中国对外经济政策的现有研究普遍脱离了来自开放和民主社会的更广泛的经济政策理论。这一差距反映出，人们对威权政权普遍缺乏了解。这项研究通过提出一个理论框架来帮助填补这一空白，该框架将威权贸易政策制定的研究与国际政治经济学和比较政治学学术工作中更一般的理论联系起来。其次，现有的关于中国对外经济政策的研究没有采用本文所使用的混合方法。该项目还填补了这一空白，同时它创建了一个具有改进的度量和数据的数据集，分解级别要低得多。丰富的数据将使其他学者能够对中国的政治经济学和国家与社会关系进行新颖的研究，这一项目也具有更广泛的影响。一方面，随着美国和中国的其他主要贸易伙伴发现，在它们与北京的经济关系中，面对国内参与者的阻力和支持越来越普遍，理解这些不同的中国参与者影响政策制定的过程变得越来越重要。另一方面，中国外交政策的多元化很可能超越贸易问题。因此，这个项目可以为中国如何在安全、能源和环境问题上参与双边和多边关系提供参考。

In September 2008, China filed a claim to the Dispute Settlement Body of the World Trade Organization (WTO), requesting consultations on four of the six products on which the United States had imposed definitive anti-dumping and countervailing duties. Why did Beijing complain about the treatment of its exports in steel pipes, tires and plastic woven sacks, but not magnets and sodium nitrate? Similarly, in bilateral negotiations with the US during its entry into the WTO, China secured far more favorable tariff schedules for some products than others, sometimes even within the same industry. Why did China offer more protection for certain industries and sectors but not others?This project addresses these questions by focusing on the domestic politics of China's foreign economic policies in the reform era. The overarching question is: given the weakness of formal institutions and the lack of electoral accountability in authoritarian states such as China, how do societal interests and preferences affect trade policy outcomes? A general framework of interest group politics is developed in which the political survival of authoritarian leaders depends on maintaining a winning coalition from a "selectorate" (a set of people with a say in the selection of leaders and a prospect of belonging to leaders' winning coalition) that is composed of members whose interests diverge and compete against each other due to the distributional effects of trade policies. The extent to which societal interests can successfully influence policy outcomes thus depends on their access to and interaction with these members of the selectorate.This theory is examined using a multi-method approach combining case studies and quantitative analysis. The project examines firm and industry influence on import tariff, nontariff barriers and outcome of antidumping cases in China. In prior field work, the researcher uncovered various channels and mechanisms through which Chinese domestic groups lobby for their preferred policy and identified a number of factors associated with the effectiveness of their lobbying efforts. In particular, such factors as state ownership and ties to the local economy increased the strength of societal demands for protection and hence the likelihood and degree of trade policy concessions granted by the government. The current project involves collecting and using original data on over 450 Chinese industries from 1999 to 2009 and on antidumping cases initiated by China from 1997-2008.This project makes several contributions to scientific understanding. With few exceptions, extant studies of China's foreign economic policies are generally divorced from broader theories of economic policies derived from open and democratic societies. That gap reflects a relative lack of understanding of authoritarian regimes more generally. This research helps fill the gap by proposing a theoretical framework that links the study of authoritarian trade policy- making to more general theories in scholarly work in international political economy and comparative politics. Second, extant scholarship on China's foreign economic policies does not employ the mixed methods approach used here. This project also fills that gap at the same time that it creates a dataset with improved measures and data at a much lower level of disaggregation. The richness of the data will allow other scholars to engage in novel studies of China's political economy and state-society relations.This project also has broader implications. On the one hand, as the US and other major trading partners of China find it increasingly common to face both resistance and support from domestic-level actors in their economic relations with Beijing, it becomes ever more important to comprehend the processes by which these different Chinese actors influence policy making. On the other hand, the pluralization of China's foreign policy making may well extend beyond trade issues. Thus this project can shed light on how China might engage in bilateral and multilateral relations on issues in security, energy and environment.