Victor C Shih
Biographic Data
| ID | 4375330 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Victor C Shih |
| GIVEN NAMES | Victor C |
| FAMILY NAME | Shih |
| SIGNATURE | SHIH V C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California San Diego |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2480-185X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 424 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Who Represses? Career Incentives and the Geography of Repression in China
Response to Lynette H. Ong’s Review of Coalitions of the Weak: Elite Politics in China from Mao’s Stratagem to the Rise of Xi
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Revolution, State Building, and the Great Famine in China
In a strong authoritarian state, what mechanisms hold political elites accountable and contain the state’s predatory tendencies? We examine China’s Great Famine of 1958–1961 to understand the variation of predatory behaviors across Chinese provinces. By exploring the Chinese Communist Revolution history and probing into over four hundred biographies of political elites in the newly founded communist state, we first document the revolutionary lega…
Elite Cleavage and the Rise of Capitalism under Authoritarianism: A Tale of Two Provinces in China
A great challenge for capitalist development under authoritarian regimes is to effectively constrain predatory behavior. Beyond existing frameworks of the dictator’s time horizon and institutionalized power sharing, we introduce an alternative perspective—elite cleavage. We argue that the systematic vulnerability of marginalized local cadres motivated them to ally with grassroots constituents and protect local economic interests in order to incre…
Locking in fair weather friends: Assessing the fate of Chinese communist elite when their patrons fall from power
A growing literature shows robust evidence that patronage by high-level politicians greatly enhanced officials’ chance of promotion in the largest one-party dictatorship in the world, China. There have been few works on whether patrons’ exits, even when they were retirements, had an impact on followers’ career prospects. This question concerns the core theoretical issue of whether factional ties are self-reinforcing mechanisms. That is, patron–cl…
China’s Credit Conundrum
Interviewed by Robert Brenner, Victor Shih discusses the one-off factors that enabled China’s rise as workshop of the world and its subsequent dependence on state credit as driver of growth. Contradictions between the conditions for political and financial stability, as the Xi regime superintends an unsteady slowdown
The Fall of the Old Guards: Explaining Decentralization in China
Contentious Elites in China: New Evidence and Approaches
The purges of former Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang, former Central Military Commission Vice Chairman Xu Caihou, and the former head of the Central Committee Office Ling Jihua in 2014 re-excited a long-standing debate in the field of elite Chinese politics: how contentious is politics at the elite level? On the face of it, these purges, as well as the arrests of ninety nine senior officials associated with these three individua…
Factions of Different Stripes: Gauging the Recruitment Logics of Factions in the Reform Period
The literature on faction suggests that patrons in the party may recruit faction members on the basis of a broad range of shared traits and experience. Some scholars argue reasonably that with increasing specialization of officials, factions are increasingly dominated by those with shared work experience in a set of bureaucracies. Although this trend may be true in general, senior leaders may still recruit those with whom they share birth place a…
Guerrilla Capitalism: Revolutionary Legacy, Political Cleavage, and the Preservation of the Private Economy in Zhejiang
In this article, we propose a causal relationship between a region's communist revolutionary legacy before 1949 and the variation in private sector development after 1949. In the case of Zhejiang, the pre-1949 revolutionary experience led to the power struggle between two elite groups, the guerrilla cadre group and the southbound cadre group, in the province after 1949. As the weak side, guerrilla cadres were willing to protect local economic int…
Interest Group Influence in Authoritarian States: The Political Determinants of Chinese Exchange Rate Policy
Why do countries keep their exchange rates weak and undervalued? This article argues that domestic politics is more important than systemic factors, but existing domestic political explanations do not fully explain how interest group preferences and political institutions influence exchange rate policy. The authors argue that tradable industries do not always demand an undervalued exchange rate, but do so only when they are unable to receive othe…
The Domestic Politics of the International Dollar Standard: A Statistical Analysis of Support for the Reserve Currency, 2000–2008
Why did most central banks continue to purchase dollar reserves during the 2000s even though they suffered mounting financial losses as a result of this policy? This paper argues that domestic political considerations determine whether policy makers accumulate or dump the reserve currency. We hypothesize that central bank independence decreases support for the dollar because independent central banks reduce the political clout of exporters and in…
Getting Ahead in the Communist Party: Explaining the Advancement of Central Committee Members in China
Spectacular economic growth in China suggests the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has somehow gotten it right. A key hypothesis in both economics and political science is that the CCP's cadre evaluation system, combined with China's geography-based governing logic, has motivated local administrators to compete with one another to generate high growth. We raise a number of theoretical and empirical challenges to this claim. Using a new biogra…
Goldilocks” Liberalization: The Uneven Path Toward Interest Rate Reform in China
Nearly two decades after central bankers began to call for interest rate liberalization, the central bank continues to impose stringent rules on the fluctuation of deposit interest rates. This seems an unlikely outcome given widespread endorsement of liberalization by technocrats and experts both in and out of the government, China's accession to the World Trade Organization, and the technocrats' insulation from popular pressure. To be sure, loca…
Tools of Survival: Sovereign Wealth Funds in Singapore and China
The rise of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) as major investors in the global economy has raised worries that they serve the geopolitical ends of owner countries. However, given the paramount importance of surviving domestic political competitions, SWFs are likely also tools of domestic political survival. In examining the corporate governance and underlying political environment in which SWFs in Singapore and in China operate, this paper further ex…
Nauseating” Displays of Loyalty: Monitoring the Factional Bargain through Ideological Campaigns in China
Autocrats, as factional patrons, only find out the true loyalty of clients during a serious political challenge, when they are least able to enforce the factional bargain. In autocracies with norms against cults of personalities, public, exaggerated praises may constitute an alternative way for clients to signal loyalty credibly. By suffering the social cost of being despised by others, sycophants credibly signal their affinity to a particular le…
Partial Reform Equilibrium, Chinese Style: Political Incentives and Reform Stagnation in Chinese Financial Policies
Incomplete financial reform in China is puzzling because Premier Zhu Rongji, a seemingly promarket technocrat, was largely insulated from explicitly rent-seeking pressure and leftist ideology when he carried out a massive restructuring of Chinese banks in 1997. Yet at the end of his tenure as premier, the financial sector continued to channel the bulk of savings toward the state. Given the complexity of Zhu's policies, we cannot begin analyzing t…
The Business of Lobbying in China
The Business of Lobbying in China. By Scott Kennedy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 278p. $49.95. In this fascinating monograph, Scott Kennedy explores the nature of state–society relations through the lens of business lobbying. He begins his work by criticizing existing approaches in comparative politics, which often try to fit various countries into a few standard models of state–society relations: pluralism, corporatism, client…
Development, the Second Time Around: The Political Logic of Developing Western China
The Great Development of the West is no more than grand conferences held in the west (Xibu Dakaifa zhishi xibu dakaihui). — State Council officials in charge of developing the west On the surface, the Great Development of the West (GDW, Xibu Dakaifa) campaign seems like a classic maneuver by a developmental state to bolster the growth of an underdeveloped region. Even in 2002, GDP per capita in western China, which includes the provinces of Xinji…
Factions matter: Personal networks and the distribution of bank loans in China
This article begins by focusing on the distributive implications of factions, as conceptualized by past theorists. This article then operationalizes faction as a quantitative variable using some well-established assumptions about factions. A cross-section, time-series model is then used to test the impact of factions and the intensity of factional ties on the distribution of bank loans in reform era China. Two pairs of case studies are further us…
Getting Ahead in the Communist Party: Explaining the Advancement of Central Committee Members in China
Spectacular economic growth in China suggests the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has somehow gotten it right. A key hypothesis in both economics and political science is that the CCP's cadre evaluation system, combined with China's geography-based governing logic, has motivated local administrators to compete with one another to generate high growth. We raise a number of theoretical and empirical challenges to this claim. Using a new biogra…
Nauseating” Displays of Loyalty: Monitoring the Factional Bargain through Ideological Campaigns in China
Autocrats, as factional patrons, only find out the true loyalty of clients during a serious political challenge, when they are least able to enforce the factional bargain. In autocracies with norms against cults of personalities, public, exaggerated praises may constitute an alternative way for clients to signal loyalty credibly. By suffering the social cost of being despised by others, sycophants credibly signal their affinity to a particular le…
Interest Group Influence in Authoritarian States: The Political Determinants of Chinese Exchange Rate Policy
Why do countries keep their exchange rates weak and undervalued? This article argues that domestic politics is more important than systemic factors, but existing domestic political explanations do not fully explain how interest group preferences and political institutions influence exchange rate policy. The authors argue that tradable industries do not always demand an undervalued exchange rate, but do so only when they are unable to receive othe…
Factions matter: Personal networks and the distribution of bank loans in China
This article begins by focusing on the distributive implications of factions, as conceptualized by past theorists. This article then operationalizes faction as a quantitative variable using some well-established assumptions about factions. A cross-section, time-series model is then used to test the impact of factions and the intensity of factional ties on the distribution of bank loans in reform era China. Two pairs of case studies are further us…
Factions of Different Stripes: Gauging the Recruitment Logics of Factions in the Reform Period
The literature on faction suggests that patrons in the party may recruit faction members on the basis of a broad range of shared traits and experience. Some scholars argue reasonably that with increasing specialization of officials, factions are increasingly dominated by those with shared work experience in a set of bureaucracies. Although this trend may be true in general, senior leaders may still recruit those with whom they share birth place a…
Partial Reform Equilibrium, Chinese Style: Political Incentives and Reform Stagnation in Chinese Financial Policies
Incomplete financial reform in China is puzzling because Premier Zhu Rongji, a seemingly promarket technocrat, was largely insulated from explicitly rent-seeking pressure and leftist ideology when he carried out a massive restructuring of Chinese banks in 1997. Yet at the end of his tenure as premier, the financial sector continued to channel the bulk of savings toward the state. Given the complexity of Zhu's policies, we cannot begin analyzing t…
Tools of Survival: Sovereign Wealth Funds in Singapore and China
The rise of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) as major investors in the global economy has raised worries that they serve the geopolitical ends of owner countries. However, given the paramount importance of surviving domestic political competitions, SWFs are likely also tools of domestic political survival. In examining the corporate governance and underlying political environment in which SWFs in Singapore and in China operate, this paper further ex…
Development, the Second Time Around: The Political Logic of Developing Western China
The Great Development of the West is no more than grand conferences held in the west (Xibu Dakaifa zhishi xibu dakaihui). — State Council officials in charge of developing the west On the surface, the Great Development of the West (GDW, Xibu Dakaifa) campaign seems like a classic maneuver by a developmental state to bolster the growth of an underdeveloped region. Even in 2002, GDP per capita in western China, which includes the provinces of Xinji…
Locking in fair weather friends: Assessing the fate of Chinese communist elite when their patrons fall from power
A growing literature shows robust evidence that patronage by high-level politicians greatly enhanced officials’ chance of promotion in the largest one-party dictatorship in the world, China. There have been few works on whether patrons’ exits, even when they were retirements, had an impact on followers’ career prospects. This question concerns the core theoretical issue of whether factional ties are self-reinforcing mechanisms. That is, patron–cl…
Contentious Elites in China: New Evidence and Approaches
The purges of former Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang, former Central Military Commission Vice Chairman Xu Caihou, and the former head of the Central Committee Office Ling Jihua in 2014 re-excited a long-standing debate in the field of elite Chinese politics: how contentious is politics at the elite level? On the face of it, these purges, as well as the arrests of ninety nine senior officials associated with these three individua…
Elite Cleavage and the Rise of Capitalism under Authoritarianism: A Tale of Two Provinces in China
A great challenge for capitalist development under authoritarian regimes is to effectively constrain predatory behavior. Beyond existing frameworks of the dictator’s time horizon and institutionalized power sharing, we introduce an alternative perspective—elite cleavage. We argue that the systematic vulnerability of marginalized local cadres motivated them to ally with grassroots constituents and protect local economic interests in order to incre…
The Fall of the Old Guards: Explaining Decentralization in China
The Domestic Politics of the International Dollar Standard: A Statistical Analysis of Support for the Reserve Currency, 2000–2008
Why did most central banks continue to purchase dollar reserves during the 2000s even though they suffered mounting financial losses as a result of this policy? This paper argues that domestic political considerations determine whether policy makers accumulate or dump the reserve currency. We hypothesize that central bank independence decreases support for the dollar because independent central banks reduce the political clout of exporters and in…
Guerrilla Capitalism: Revolutionary Legacy, Political Cleavage, and the Preservation of the Private Economy in Zhejiang
In this article, we propose a causal relationship between a region's communist revolutionary legacy before 1949 and the variation in private sector development after 1949. In the case of Zhejiang, the pre-1949 revolutionary experience led to the power struggle between two elite groups, the guerrilla cadre group and the southbound cadre group, in the province after 1949. As the weak side, guerrilla cadres were willing to protect local economic int…
The Business of Lobbying in China
The Business of Lobbying in China. By Scott Kennedy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 278p. $49.95. In this fascinating monograph, Scott Kennedy explores the nature of state–society relations through the lens of business lobbying. He begins his work by criticizing existing approaches in comparative politics, which often try to fit various countries into a few standard models of state–society relations: pluralism, corporatism, client…
Development, the Second Time Around: The Political Logic of Developing Western China
The Great Development of the West is no more than grand conferences held in the west (Xibu Dakaifa zhishi xibu dakaihui). — State Council officials in charge of developing the west On the surface, the Great Development of the West (GDW, Xibu Dakaifa) campaign seems like a classic maneuver by a developmental state to bolster the growth of an underdeveloped region. Even in 2002, GDP per capita in western China, which includes the provinces of Xinji…
Factions matter: Personal networks and the distribution of bank loans in China
This article begins by focusing on the distributive implications of factions, as conceptualized by past theorists. This article then operationalizes faction as a quantitative variable using some well-established assumptions about factions. A cross-section, time-series model is then used to test the impact of factions and the intensity of factional ties on the distribution of bank loans in reform era China. Two pairs of case studies are further us…
The Business of Lobbying in China
The Business of Lobbying in China. By Scott Kennedy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 278p. $49.95. In this fascinating monograph, Scott Kennedy explores the nature of state–society relations through the lens of business lobbying. He begins his work by criticizing existing approaches in comparative politics, which often try to fit various countries into a few standard models of state–society relations: pluralism, corporatism, client…
Partial Reform Equilibrium, Chinese Style: Political Incentives and Reform Stagnation in Chinese Financial Policies
Incomplete financial reform in China is puzzling because Premier Zhu Rongji, a seemingly promarket technocrat, was largely insulated from explicitly rent-seeking pressure and leftist ideology when he carried out a massive restructuring of Chinese banks in 1997. Yet at the end of his tenure as premier, the financial sector continued to channel the bulk of savings toward the state. Given the complexity of Zhu's policies, we cannot begin analyzing t…
Nauseating” Displays of Loyalty: Monitoring the Factional Bargain through Ideological Campaigns in China
Autocrats, as factional patrons, only find out the true loyalty of clients during a serious political challenge, when they are least able to enforce the factional bargain. In autocracies with norms against cults of personalities, public, exaggerated praises may constitute an alternative way for clients to signal loyalty credibly. By suffering the social cost of being despised by others, sycophants credibly signal their affinity to a particular le…
Tools of Survival: Sovereign Wealth Funds in Singapore and China
The rise of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) as major investors in the global economy has raised worries that they serve the geopolitical ends of owner countries. However, given the paramount importance of surviving domestic political competitions, SWFs are likely also tools of domestic political survival. In examining the corporate governance and underlying political environment in which SWFs in Singapore and in China operate, this paper further ex…
Goldilocks” Liberalization: The Uneven Path Toward Interest Rate Reform in China
Nearly two decades after central bankers began to call for interest rate liberalization, the central bank continues to impose stringent rules on the fluctuation of deposit interest rates. This seems an unlikely outcome given widespread endorsement of liberalization by technocrats and experts both in and out of the government, China's accession to the World Trade Organization, and the technocrats' insulation from popular pressure. To be sure, loca…
Interest Group Influence in Authoritarian States: The Political Determinants of Chinese Exchange Rate Policy
Why do countries keep their exchange rates weak and undervalued? This article argues that domestic politics is more important than systemic factors, but existing domestic political explanations do not fully explain how interest group preferences and political institutions influence exchange rate policy. The authors argue that tradable industries do not always demand an undervalued exchange rate, but do so only when they are unable to receive othe…
The Domestic Politics of the International Dollar Standard: A Statistical Analysis of Support for the Reserve Currency, 2000–2008
Why did most central banks continue to purchase dollar reserves during the 2000s even though they suffered mounting financial losses as a result of this policy? This paper argues that domestic political considerations determine whether policy makers accumulate or dump the reserve currency. We hypothesize that central bank independence decreases support for the dollar because independent central banks reduce the political clout of exporters and in…
Getting Ahead in the Communist Party: Explaining the Advancement of Central Committee Members in China
Spectacular economic growth in China suggests the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has somehow gotten it right. A key hypothesis in both economics and political science is that the CCP's cadre evaluation system, combined with China's geography-based governing logic, has motivated local administrators to compete with one another to generate high growth. We raise a number of theoretical and empirical challenges to this claim. Using a new biogra…
Guerrilla Capitalism: Revolutionary Legacy, Political Cleavage, and the Preservation of the Private Economy in Zhejiang
In this article, we propose a causal relationship between a region's communist revolutionary legacy before 1949 and the variation in private sector development after 1949. In the case of Zhejiang, the pre-1949 revolutionary experience led to the power struggle between two elite groups, the guerrilla cadre group and the southbound cadre group, in the province after 1949. As the weak side, guerrilla cadres were willing to protect local economic int…
Contentious Elites in China: New Evidence and Approaches
The purges of former Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang, former Central Military Commission Vice Chairman Xu Caihou, and the former head of the Central Committee Office Ling Jihua in 2014 re-excited a long-standing debate in the field of elite Chinese politics: how contentious is politics at the elite level? On the face of it, these purges, as well as the arrests of ninety nine senior officials associated with these three individua…
Factions of Different Stripes: Gauging the Recruitment Logics of Factions in the Reform Period
The literature on faction suggests that patrons in the party may recruit faction members on the basis of a broad range of shared traits and experience. Some scholars argue reasonably that with increasing specialization of officials, factions are increasingly dominated by those with shared work experience in a set of bureaucracies. Although this trend may be true in general, senior leaders may still recruit those with whom they share birth place a…
The Fall of the Old Guards: Explaining Decentralization in China
China’s Credit Conundrum
Interviewed by Robert Brenner, Victor Shih discusses the one-off factors that enabled China’s rise as workshop of the world and its subsequent dependence on state credit as driver of growth. Contradictions between the conditions for political and financial stability, as the Xi regime superintends an unsteady slowdown
Locking in fair weather friends: Assessing the fate of Chinese communist elite when their patrons fall from power
A growing literature shows robust evidence that patronage by high-level politicians greatly enhanced officials’ chance of promotion in the largest one-party dictatorship in the world, China. There have been few works on whether patrons’ exits, even when they were retirements, had an impact on followers’ career prospects. This question concerns the core theoretical issue of whether factional ties are self-reinforcing mechanisms. That is, patron–cl…
Elite Cleavage and the Rise of Capitalism under Authoritarianism: A Tale of Two Provinces in China
A great challenge for capitalist development under authoritarian regimes is to effectively constrain predatory behavior. Beyond existing frameworks of the dictator’s time horizon and institutionalized power sharing, we introduce an alternative perspective—elite cleavage. We argue that the systematic vulnerability of marginalized local cadres motivated them to ally with grassroots constituents and protect local economic interests in order to incre…
Revolution, State Building, and the Great Famine in China
In a strong authoritarian state, what mechanisms hold political elites accountable and contain the state’s predatory tendencies? We examine China’s Great Famine of 1958–1961 to understand the variation of predatory behaviors across Chinese provinces. By exploring the Chinese Communist Revolution history and probing into over four hundred biographies of political elites in the newly founded communist state, we first document the revolutionary lega…
Response to Lynette H. Ong’s Review of Coalitions of the Weak: Elite Politics in China from Mao’s Stratagem to the Rise of Xi
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Who Represses? Career Incentives and the Geography of Repression in China
Politics (19 works) · Political science (18 works) · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance (17 works) · China (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Law (14 works) · Economics (13 works) · Political economy (12 works) · Democracy (8 works) · Sociology (8 works)