Hongying Wang

The expanding profile of Chinese international development aid has generated strong academic and policy interests. A growing literature has emerged on Chinese foreign aid’s motivations, modalities, and impact. However, a significant lacuna remains in the domestic politics relating to this phenomenon. This gap is especially glaring in public opinion concerning China’s growing foreign aid programs. By analyzing empirical data gathered from a variety of sources, including a well-established online forum, social media sites of two influential media organizations, and multi-year surveys of residents of Beijing, this paper presents a nuanced picture of what the Chinese public thinks of Chinese foreign aid and tests two popular explanations of public opposition to foreign aid—perceived budgetary trade-offs and more general dissatisfaction with government policies.

More and more Chinese high- and new-technology companies have entered the global market in the recent years. While their business success has attracted widespread attention, their engagement in governance innovation has been largely ignored by previous studies. This special issue explores the governance challenges and opportunities for Chinese high- and new-technology companies at multiple levels. The empirical case studies of prominent Chinese companies, such as Alibaba, Huawei, the China Railway Corporation, and the State Grid Corporation of China, show a variety of experiences and approaches regarding governance innovation. We hope these studies will encourage more scholars to explore wider patterns of business actor engagement in governance innovation, paying special attention to the new actors from the Global South.

This paper examines China’s involvement in the governance of international development finance (IDF), analyzes its approach to the IDF regime complex, and explains its strategic policy incoherence. It shows that in recent decades China has actively engaged with the elemental IDF regimes at multiple levels – global, regional, cross‐regional, subregional, and bilateral. It argues that the Chinese government has been strategically incoherent in its policy toward IDF governance, lending support to competing models and norms. China’s ‘forum linking’ strategy with regard to multilateral development banks has enhanced international cooperation while its unconventional bilateral development assistance programs have facilitated ‘forum shopping’ by the recipient countries, thus undermining the traditional IDF framework. There are multiple sources of China’s strategic policy incoherence. Besides the country’s multiple identities and complex interests, this paper highlights the impact of the fragmented nature of the regime complex and Chinese perception of this fragmentation.

The People’s Bank of China (PBC)has played an important role in China’s sustained economic growth. Despite its limited formal independence, PBC has developed considerable de facto authority and autonomy, referered to here as central bank discretion (CBD). This article offers a detailed historical account of how PBChas gained growing CBD in areas such as monetary policy, financial stability, foreign exchange and financial regulation. It also analyzes the main underlying forces that have contributed to PBC’s authority and autonomy.This study of CBD in China seeks to enrich the existing literature on the political economy of central banking, which has so far focused heavily on the concept of central bank independence (CBI).

In recent years many former heads of foreign governments have visited China, appearing at various forums, conferences, and other events. China’s engagement with these former leaders may appear to be a form of public diplomacy, but even more importantly it has been a strategy of political legitimation adopted by the Chinese Communist Party. Based on an original database of hundreds of cases, we provide a systematic analysis of the visits of former foreign leaders to China and of their role as external validators for the party-state and its policy initiatives, particularly the Belt and Road Initiative. By shedding light on the Party’s search for external consent and support, we seek to fill a significant gap in the literature, which tends to focus narrowly on the domestic sources of legitimacy and domestic strategies of legitimation.

Extant research about global value chains (GVCs) has focused on its economic effects, while the innovation effects of GVCs remain understudied, especially for developing countries. This study explores the effect of GVC involvement along two dimensions – GVC participation and GVC position – on innovation performance in China’s manufacturing industries. We also investigate the interaction effects of GVC involvement and industrial agglomeration on innovation performance. With a sample of 15 manufacturing industries in China from 2005–2015, we find that China’s manufacturing industries have substantial participation in GVCs, but they are located mainly at low positions in GVCs. In addition, the study shows strong evidence that GVC participation has an inverted U-shaped effect on innovation performance, whereas the effect of GVC position on innovation performance is positive. Finally, we find that the interaction effect of GVC position and industrial agglomeration positively influence innovation performance, while the interaction effect of GVC participation and industrial agglomeration is negative. These empirical findings have important theoretical and policy implications.