Asia and Pacific
Sovereign Funds: How the Communist Party of China Finances Its Global Ambitions
BY ZONGYUAN ZOE LIU. Belknap Press, 2023, 288 pp.
Sovereign Funds: How the Communist Party of China Finances Its Global Ambitions
BY ZONGYUAN ZOE LIU. Belknap Press, 2023, 288 pp.
“Follow the money,” Liu advises, and in doing so, she shows that Chinese sovereign funds are so different from better-known sovereign wealth funds, such as those of the governments of Abu Dhabi and Norway, that she prefers to call them “sovereign leveraged funds.” That is because most of their vast foreign exchange holdings (over $2 trillion as of 2019) are in effect borrowed in numerous complicated ways from China’s immense foreign exchange reserves. These various exotic workarounds, which Liu skillfully traces, produce “shadow reserves.” China uses them to make investments that are riskier, less liquid, and potentially more profitable than the safe investments favored by most sovereign wealth funds. But their mandate has more to do with policy than with profit. At home, the Chinese government uses the funds to stabilize the stock market, bail out failing banks, and invest in priority industries; overseas, it uses them to buy stakes in natural resources and influential Western firms and to finance the Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative. In these ways, the sovereign funds have created a market tool to supplement the Chinese government’s administrative and political techniques for exerting influence at home and abroad.
Banking on Beijing: The Aims and Impacts of China’s Overseas Development Program
BY AXEL DREHER, ANDREAS FUCHS, BRADLEY PARKS, AUSTIN STRANGE, AND MICHAEL J. TIERNEY. Cambridge University Press, 2022, 312 pp.
The AidData website at the College of William and Mary has become the go-to source for information on China’s overseas development grants and loans, data that China wants to keep secret. Dreher and his colleagues go behind the scenes of this multiyear, cross-national effort to collect and standardize these data from a wide variety of sources. The book then summarizes and extends the project’s findings. As Chinese overseas funding has increased, it has shifted from grants to mostly loans. Grants and low-interest loans reward the political cooperation of partner governments, which aid from Western governments also tends to do. But most Chinese loans are made at commercial rates. Chinese financing is faster and less technocratic than funding from Western governments and international development banks, and China lends more often to autocratic and corrupt governments, but
it is still wrong to call China a rogue donor. The large-scale infrastructure projects that China likes to fund have helped spur economic growth in most recipient countries. When this is not the case, the responsibility lies more often with the receiving country than with China.
The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline BY YASHENG HUANG. Yale University Press, 2023, 440 pp.
The EAST in Huang’s title stands not only for China but for the four keys to its history listed in the subtitle. The imperial examination system dating back to the sixth century forced aspiring elites to unite around the single goal of service to the state. Autocracy grew from the elimination of balancing forces within the state and of societal power centers outside the state. The stability of the authoritarian system was what the Chinese Communist Party achieved—despite self-inflicted episodes of chaos— by adopting its own forms of these ancient traditions. But technological stagnation was the price the Chinese dynasties paid for their supreme stability. Reformist leaders after the death of Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic of China, opened up the system enough to allow for innovation, entrepreneurialism, and economic growth. Now, however, Huang predicts that the crackdown on freedom under the Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s modernized version of imperial rule may bring an end to the country’s brief spurt of dynamism. Huang’s wide-ranging and consistently shrewd analysis suggests that Xi’s “China dream” of national greatness may be just that: a dream.
Japan’s Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance
BY FLORENTINE KOPPENBORG. Cornell University Press, 2023, 234 pp.
Japan’s traditionally weak system for regulating nuclear safety, created by the long-dominant Liberal Democratic Party and its allies, allowed what came to be known as the 3.11 disaster (after the March 11 earthquake in 2011), when a tsunami spurred the meltdown of one of the nuclear power plants at Fukushima. The disaster happened to occur when the opposition Democratic Party of Japan was in power for the first and only time. (The party has since dissolved.) The Democratic Party government was not able to phase out nuclear power as some of its leaders had wanted. But it pushed through the creation of the independent Nuclear Regulation Authority, which boasted a fulltime board, its own technical staff, sanctioning powers against electric utilities, and even the right to draft nuclear safety bills for submission to the Japanese Diet. Later Liberal Democratic cabinets tried to weaken the NRA’s powers so they could more quickly restart closed reactors and extend the lives of existing ones. But the NRA defended its independence, with the support of public opinion and the International Atomic Energy
Agency. Koppenborg skillfully traces the politics of the NRA’s creation and survival. It remains one of only two authentically independent regulatory agencies in Japan’s otherwise politicized regulatory system.
Contemporary Japanese Politics and Anxiety Over Governance
BY KEN’ICHI IKEDA. Routledge, 2022, 244 pp.
The Japanese public’s assessments of its government’s performance have been anemic for years, but Ikeda finds that the COVID-19 crisis crystallized an even more pessimistic attitude: the fear that the government is not capable of solving potential future problems, such as job insecurity, terrorism, and war. Analyzing numerous cross-national surveys, he shows that the public’s anxiety is more intense in Japan than in other countries when measured against actual COVID-19 infection rates, unemployment rates, levels of political violence, and similar objective criteria.The disproportionate anxiety over governance seems to derive partly from a weakening of the social networks traditionally used to mobilize voters and partly from the inability of the Democratic Party of Japan, during its brief stint in power from 2009 to 2012, to deal effectively with the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, followed by what voters perceived as a flat-footed response to COVID-19 by the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Japanese voters remain committed to democracy in principle. Yet 83 percent of respondents in a recent survey agreed with the statement, “I’d rather spend my time enriching my own life rather than pursuing political goals.”
I Have No Enemies: The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo
By Perry Link and Wu Dazhi. Columbia University Press, 2023, 568 pp.
There are very few icons in the chronicles of the Chinese struggle against state repression. This meticulously researched and wonderfully crafted biography will help change that. Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel Prize winner who died while incarcerated, lived a life of extraordinary courage, sacrifice, and achievement. He played a critical role in negotiating a safe route for students to withdraw from Tiananmen Square during protests there in 1989, led the post-1989 Citizen Rights Defense movement, and endured frequent periods of detention and imprisonment. The authors trace the personal journey of a very public life that was replete with contradictions: Liu was an eloquent public speaker, but he also stuttered; he was fiercely independent but prone to constant “self-questioning and self-revising”; and a failed marriage paved the way for later happiness in romantic love. Readers will be most moved by Liu’s humility in his constant learning of the craft of social protest and his many moral self-examinations. He signed divorce papers in prison on account of his own past mistreatment of his wife; he passed up opportunities for exile from China several times and repeatedly chose to face the state’s
repressive machine instead. The book’s title aptly captures his quest for love, tolerance, and compassion. His moral example may prove to be his most enduring legacy.
YANG SU