http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4145-5963
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Abstract
This paper compares a unique dataset tracking the content of all Central Committee and State Council documents with economic variables in China in the period 2003–2015. After motivating the dataset, two time-series measuring the relative importance of economic issues within the Party and the State are constructed. These two time-series are then compared with measures of China’s real economy using a Granger test. The results suggest that past measures of China’s economy can better help predict the State Council’s future prioritisation of economic issues, but not vice versa. A similar relation is not found for the Central Committee’s prioritisation of economic issues. This result is consistent with the view that it is the State that takes a more active role in managing the Chinese economy.
Notes
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Zheng, Party vs. State in Post-1949 China.
2 Lieberthal and Lampton, Bureaucracy, Politics, and Decision Making in Post-Mao China.
3 Batke et al., Chinese policy document database.
4 Zheng, “Is Communist Party Rule in China Sustainable,” 1–23.
5 Schurmann, Ideology and Organization in Communist China.
6 Zheng and Chen, “The Chinese Communist Party.”
7 See note 1 above.
8 Ibid.
9 See note 4 above.
10 See note 1 above.
11 Guo, “The Party-State Relationship in Post-Mao China,” 301–315.
12 Wright, Party and State in Post-Mao China; Guo, “The Party-State Relationship in Post-Mao China,” 301–315.
13 See note 4 above.
14 Hartig, “Die Kommunistische Partei Chinas,” 70–89.
15 Naughton, “Shifting Structures and Processes in Economic Policy-Making at the Centre,” 40–45.
16 Batke et al., “Open Government in China.”; ‘Li Keqiang - China’s underrated Premier’.
17 Bollen et al., “Twitter Mood Predicts the Stock Market,” 1–8.
18 See note 1 above.
19 The clearest example of this are the documents detailing the listings of State Leading Small Group members, which are issued as Guobanfa and not Guofa.
20 Technically, government documents cannot be about the Party, though Party documents can be about the government. Hence, though the category Party is included, the de facto categories for Guofa and Guobanfa are fourteen.
21 That they are unknown (as opposed to being simply non-existent) is recognised from the rigorous and straightforward numbering of all these documents. Zhongfa, Zhongbanfa, Guofa, and Guobanfa are all labelled in a tripartite way. The first part identifies what type of document (i.e. Zhongfa, Zhongbanfa, Guofa, or Guobanfa) the document actually is. The second part identifies the year in which it was issued. The third part identifies the number of the document. Numbers are unique and increasing throughout the year, with the first Zhongfa, Zhongbanfa, Guofa, or Guobanfa of every year being assigned a ‘1’. For example, the first Zhongfa of the year 2006 has the label Zhongfa[2006]#1 (中发 [2006]1 号). Equally, the 42nd Guobanfa of 2015 has the label Guobanfa[2015]#42 (国办发 [2015]42 号). Thus, there are instances where although the existence of a certain document is known, the document itself (including its content and its exact date of issue) is not. For example, by knowing that the Guofa with label Guofa[2004]#17 was issued on the 23nd of May 2004, and that the Guofa with label Guofa[2004]#19 was issued on the 7th of July 2004, it is clear that the Guofa with label Guofa[2004]#18 must have been issued between the 23th of May and the 7th of July 2004. However, due to the government not providing unrestricted access to all of the existing Guofa (and all other types of documents as well), what the Guofa with label Guofa[2004]#18 is about and when exactly it was issued cannot be unambiguously ascertained. See Batke et al. (Citation2016) for a more thorough discussion of how open government and transparency has developed in China, including the solution to the issue of how to ascertain whether a given Zhongfa, Zhongbanfa, Guofa, or Guobanfa is indeed the last one of a given year.
22 In testing the robustness of the results (i.e. evaluating the model under the assumption that no unknown (undisclosed) documents deal with economic issues and the assumption that they all do) there is the problem of how to temporally classify these unknown (undisclosed) documents. To see this, consider an unknown document that is known to have been issued between May (the date of issue of the preceding one) and July of that year (the date of issue of the following one). Given that the document is unknown, it cannot be unambiguously categorised as having been issued in either the first or the second semester. This issue is not very prominent in the Guofa (where such unknown and temporally not-classifiable documents make up roughly 1% of the entire Guofa), though it is relatively more prominent in Zhongfa (where such documents make up roughly 13% of the documents). To deal with this issue, it is assumed that the unknown documents have been produced at a constant ‘speed’. For instance, if three unknown (undisclosed) documents have been issued between the 17th of May and the 15th of July, the date of issue of the three unknown (undisclosed) documents will be imputed as 1st of June, 16th of June, 1st of July, respectively.
23 In holding with convention, the level, as opposed to the growth in, business confidence is used here.
24 If and when new dimensions of the data will have been obtained (e.g. through the harnessing of natural language processing to analyse the available documents for content more deeply), it could be interesting to combine this richer data with theoretical models on political decision making to derive specifications that allow a better identification of directions of causality.
25 It should be noted that a similar analysis between Party and State does not suggest any statistically significant relationship between the two. In other words, knowledge of whether the Party previously focused more on economic issues has no predictive power as to whether the State will do so in the future, and vice versa. This holds also for the cases considered in the Robustness Checks section below. The results are available on request.
26 Engle and Granger, “Co-Integration and Error-Correction,” 251–276.
27 Toda and Yamamoto, “Statistical Inference in Vector Autoregressions with Possibly Integrated Processes,” 225–250.
28 Ibid.
29 These are the Final Prediction Error (FPE), the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC), the Schwarz Criterion (SC), and the Hannan-Quinn Information Criterion (HQ).
30 To avoid cluttering the analysis, only the resulting m and n are reported here, while the tests statistics leading to them are not.
31 Unsurprisingly, the test statistics vary the most for the ‘Party’ analyses, since the problem of unknown (undisclosed) documents was relatively more pronounced in Party documents as opposed to State documents.
32 One exception is the State-unemployment relation. However, this is not surprising in light of Table , which shows that standard maximum lag-length selectors favour a model with a maximum lag-length of four.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Max-Sebastian Dovì
Max-Sebastian Dovì is an M.A. student with the Yenching Academy at Peking University. He holds a Bachelor’s in Economics and International Relations and Philosophy. In the future, he is interested in pursuing research in macroeconomics and political economy.