CeMEAS Lecture Series:
Behind the headlines:  reforming governance from rebuilding China’s fiscal foundations

Christine Wong, University of Melbourne
Monday, 19.06.2017, 18:00 – 19:30, KWZ 0.602

In the lead up to the 19th Party Congress in November 2017, the dominant narrative on Xi Jinping’s first term is that his ambitious reform program has stalled, and that the anti-corruption campaign is just a ruse for power-grab and repression. This lecture argues instead that behind the headlines, significant progress has been made towards building the foundations for a rule-based system of governance.
The analysis starts from reviewing the progress in fiscal reform, a sector seen as the lynchpin of the ambitious, comprehensive program announced at the Third Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party’s 18th Party Congress in November 2013. From the outside, it looks like the early passage of the Budget Law and other legislative changes have brought few concrete results, and progress is far behind schedule. In fact, the Budget Law and associated documents have set in motion some fundamental changes that will redraw the boundary between the state and market, as well as the state and society. These changes are just starting to be implemented, though, and progress will unlikely be linear.

Profile
Christine Wong is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Centre for Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Melbourne. Prior to joining Melbourne, she was Professor and Director of Chinese Studies at the University of Oxford, where she was a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall. She has also held the Henry M. Jackson Professorship in International Studies at the University of Washington, and taught economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz; University of California, Berkeley; and Mount Holyoke College.
Professor Wong has also held senior staff positions in the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, and worked extensively with other international agencies including the IMF, OECD, UNDP, UNICEF, and the UK Department for International Development. She is a member of the OECD Advisory Panel on Budgeting and Public Expenditures.
Professor Wong is a leading authority on China’s public finance. She has published widely on China’s public finance, intergovernmental fiscal relations and their implications for governance, economic development and welfare. Her recent research is focused on economic reform under Xi Jinping and the institutional constraints to modernising governance in China.

Picture: Lyn Gateley, DSC01599, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0, https://flic.kr/p/8iF7Ey