In defense of endogenous, spontaneously ordered development: institutional functionalism and Chinese property rights

Abstract

Neo-liberal observers have frequently raised the red alert over insecure property rights in developing and emerging economies. Development would be at a crossroads: either institutional structure needs changing or it risks a full-fledged collapse. Yet, instead of focusing on the enigma between economic growth versus ‘perverse’ institutions, this contribution posits a functionalist argument that the persistence of institutions points to their credibility. In other words, once institutions persist they fulfill a function for actors. Chinese institutions have been frequently criticized for lack of security, formality and transparency, yet paradoxically, these apparently ‘perverse’, inefficient institutions have sustained since the late 1970s throughout the entire economic boom. Key to understanding this might be the realization that institutional constellation stems from an endogenous, spontaneously ordered development in which the state is merely one of many actors that ultimately shape institutions into a highly complicated and intertwined whole. The argument is substantiated by reviewing the case of China's rural-urban land rights structure with particular reference to its markets, history and rights of ownership and use.

Keywords:

• economic history
• distributional conflict
• eviction
• tenure insecurity
• credibility
• real estate
• housing

The writing of this contribution has been made possible through the RECOLAND (Rethinking China's Collapse over Land: Development and Institutional Credibility) Project generously funded by the European Research Council (ERC). The author would like to express his sincere gratitude for the detailed and constructive comments by Rafael Wittek and Herman Hoen that helped shape this paper. Special thanks also to go the anonymous reviewers of this journal.

Notes

¹The precise reference on Ferguson's page 1 is Part III, Section 2.

²The rapid land development is also closely related to the highly inflated real estate sector, which in the past few years has witnessed price rises of over 200 percent in major cities over 2000–2010 (Wu et al. 2012). For more info, see also Shen et al. (2005) and Hou (2009).

³For more information, see P. Ho, 2013.

⁴Having said this, one should recognize that the crucial element in neo-classical thought is competition and not property rights per se. Of course, because of the greater and greater control over firm performance, neo-classical thought has a certain preference for private, decentralized property rights, but this is subordinate to the necessity of competition. For this reason, neo-classical thought has often neglected the debate on property rights, and concentrated on the notion that, regardless the allocation of property rights, they should at least be well defined (so responsibilities are clear, and competition can be given full rein; Herman Hoen, personal communication, Groningen, 12 December 2012).

⁵Meaning: it is not in our hands, regardless, whether we talk about actors from state, civil society and peasant organizations, business, social movements, academia, media and the like.

⁶Vandenberg also thought that this conceptual tension might be inherent to North and Thomas' economic historical analysis, as they left behind hard-core, econometric methodology. He cautiously quotes: ‘Clark suggests that North's increasing deviation from the hard and fast parameters of neoclassical analysis has led him to assemble “a noisy rabble of all the pet concepts and theories of a variety of disciplines and sub-disciplines”’ (Clark quoted in Vandenberg 2002, 232).

⁷As, for example, Inglehart (1997, 206) wrote: ‘institutions do help shape their society's culture – along with many other factors. But the plausibility of the interpretation that institutional determinism is the major explanation is severely undermined by the finds ( … ) that economic development leads to democracy, but democracy does not bring economic development’. (Emphasis in original document).

⁸One could imagine, for instance, a study on the causal effect of institutions on economic growth through qualitative historical analysis, while the opposite effect of economic growth on institutions could be assessed through quantitative regression or factor analysis.

⁹ The typical example of this is the so-called ‘Washington Consensus’, a set of policy prescriptions which included privatization of state-owned enterprises and the provision of legal security for property rights (Williamson 1989). The ‘Washington Consensus’ became the guiding principle for many social engineering programs financed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the former Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries.

¹⁰Or, as Aoki (2007, 2) rightfully asked: ‘[I]f institutions are nothing more than codified laws, fiats, organizations, and other such deliberate human devices, why can't badly performing economies design (emulate) “good” institutions and implement them?’

¹¹The term ‘endogeneity’ in a statistical sense refers to circular causality between the independent and dependent variables; in other words, variable X affects Y, which in turn affects X again. Conceptualized in terms of a supply and demand model it would imply that when predicting the demand level at equilibrium, the price would be endogenous because producers change their price in response to demand and consumers change their demand in response to price. Contrarily, a change in consumer tastes or preferences would be an exogenous change on the demand curve.

¹²The notion of interaction could also be termed ‘contracting’, ‘negotiation’, or ‘bargaining’. See for instance Libecap (1989, 7).

¹³This is different from the widely used definition by North, who assumed externality in his view of institutions as ‘the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, … the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction’ (North 1990, 3).

¹⁴Aoki, for instance, employed the term ‘self-sustaining’ to reject the principle of intentionality, and subsequently defined institutions as ‘self-sustaining, salient patterns of social interactions, as represented by meaningful rules that every agent knows and are incorporated as agents’ shared beliefs about how the game is played and to be played’ (2007, 7).

¹⁵Hayek's notion of spontaneous order was inspired by Adam Ferguson, who described social structures in his essay as ‘the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design’ (Ferguson 1782, 1, Part III, Section 2). Ferguson's most famous contemporary is, of course, Adam Smith (1776), whose notion of the ‘invisible hand’ has become the textbook example of this line of reasoning. Carl Menger (1871, 1883) can be seen as the nineteenth-century representative of the thought on spontaneous order.

¹⁶It is relevant, not in defense of free trade, privatization and deregulated markets, but, paradoxically, as opposed to the neo-liberal postulate that institutions can be designed by intention.

¹⁷A very useful overview of the application of evolutionary principles in economic theory is provided in Bergh and Stagl (2003).

¹⁸The ideas expounded here are no novelty and, in this regard, it might be helpful to recall that new theories often derive from the adage ‘originality is the product of a faulty memory’ (Louis Wirth quoted in Becker and Richards 1986, 136). Institutional theory clearly draws upon Herbert Spencer's principles of social darwinism. In his ‘System of Synthetic Philosophy’, Spencer (1897) describes societal evolution, in which societies best adapted to their environment will prevail through a process of the ‘survival of the fittest’. Shortly after Spencer's book was published, Veblen (1898) followed suit and coined the term ‘evolutionary economics’. The idea of institutional evolution through selection has since then played a crucial role in neo-liberal thought. For instance, Friedman (1953) proposed that markets as one type of institution act as major mechanisms of natural selection. As firms compete, unsuccessful rivals fail to capture an appropriate market share, go bankrupt and have to exit.

¹⁹Thus, contrary to what is popularly believed, Spencer's notion of ‘survival of the fittest’ does not refer to physical fitness, but implies that a society is most suited to its direct environment. It is the reason why evolutionary biologists prefer the more neutrally worded ‘natural selection’ over the popular, yet discriminatory, ‘survival of the fittest’. See also Mayr (1992) and Ruse (1998, 93–98).

²⁰One of the earliest proponents of the teleological development of humanity is, of course, the Enlightenment philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857), who in The law of human progress set forward his theory of three succeeding stages in the development of humanity and human knowledge. In his view, each stage was a necessary precondition for the next (Lenzer 1997, Pickering 2006).

²¹Rostow identified various fixed stages in economic development, moving from traditional, static society with limited technology to the age of high mass consumption. See Rostow (1960).

²²The works by Radice (2000) and Streeck and Thelen (2005) attempt to make sense of the conceptual confusion by providing substantive overviews of the different models of institutional change in relation to convergence.

²³Botcheva and Martin's (2001) article may have added to the confusion as it inadvertently reasons from the neo-liberal axiom, in which institutions externally affect human (or in their case: statal) behavior, yet without explicitly stating so.

²⁴As Furubotn rephrased Libecap's perspective, the question is ‘why seemingly “irrational” or “perverse” structures of property rights are adopted, and are able to persist in society’ (Furubotn 1989, 25). An example of such inefficient institutions is described in Kuran, who identified Islamic law in the failure of producing sustained and credible limitations on government takings (2012, 1088).

²⁵In this regard, Vandenberg noted that ‘North is cognisant of the importance of power and how power affects the design and operation of institutions’ (Vandenberg 2002, 227).

²⁶This relates to the argumentation around the notion of ‘institutional isomorphism’. In this view, it is maintained that, different from institutional convergence, isopmorphism does not occur as a result of efficiency gains but due to external factors, such as bureaucratization, professionalization and standardization (or myths and ceremonies). As Meyer and Rowan wrote: ‘[O]rganizational success depends on factors other than efficient coordination and control of productive activities’ (1977, 352), while DiMaggio and Powell (1983, 147) noted: ‘[B]ureaucratization and other forms of organizational change occur as the result of processes that make organizations more similar without necessarily making them more efficient’.

²⁷Grabel (2000, 11) is probably one of the first scholars to use the principle of endogeneity in a reconceptualization of credibility.

²⁸Similarly, H.-J. Chang (2007, 20) noted that ‘institutional forms may not matter that much, as the same function can be performed by different institutional forms’.

²⁹In other words, an institution that exists on paper alone, and that has no significant effect on social actors' behavior, or might even be socially contested. See also the discussion of the ‘empty institution’ in P. Ho (2005a, p. 73.).

³⁰Aron (2000, 128), for instance, argues that in relation between institutions and economic development, we should describe institutions by certain ‘performance or quality measures’ (i.e. function variables), rather than variables that ‘merely describe the characteristics or attributes’ of institutions (i.e. form variables). Also, in Rodrik's later work, the notion of ‘functional equivalents’ is used. The principles of functionalism go back to the theory of evolution developed by Lamarck, and published in seven volumes as Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres from 1815 to 1822, as well as the ideas of functionalism represented by Émile Durkheim (1858–1917).

³¹See also the discussion in Ho (2013).

³²Thus, the second question – what levels of credibility does a certain institution command? – will not be taken up in this writing.

³³By which ‘local’ refers to the province, prefecture, municipality, city or county. For more information on this, also see P. Ho (2000).

³⁴For more info on the various taxes that existed in the past, see X. Li (2004). Also see Kennedy (2013) as well as Day (2013).

³⁵Allowed under the 1986 Land Administration Law, article 2, which states: ‘the right to the land owned ( … ) by the collectives may be lawfully transferred’.

³⁶For a detailed review of the internal debates by the Legal Committee of the National People's Congress on the exact formulation of the Land Administration Law in relation to the balance between state and market forces at the countryside, see also P. Ho (2005a pp. 38–41).

³⁷See Huang, 2001.

³⁸For example, in Jianli County (Hubei Province), the farmers working outside agriculture numbered 220,000 in 2001, which is 49 percent of the total rural labour force. They left behind 520,000 mu (35,000 ha of arable land – one third of the county's total area of arable land – which was subsequently sub-leased. In most cases the original lessee has to pay the new tenant a fee to work his land, as agriculture is less profitable. This fee could amount to 300 Renminbi (Rmb) per mu (G. Huang 2001, 1).

³⁹This is common in situations where farmers have migrated to the city permanently and have returned their contract land to the collective.

⁴⁰As stipulated in the 2002 Rural Contracting Law, Chapter 5, Article 33.

⁴¹The National People's Congress justifies this measure by stating that: ‘The past years “real estate is hot” ( … ) as a result of which much land has been left idle. If collective land is allowed to enter the market, large quantities of collective land will be converted into construction land, and even more land will be left idle. This will frustrate the reform of the state-owned land use system’. 1998 Land Administration Law, Article 43 (the Chinese term ‘ben’ or ‘own’ is crucial regarding the first restriction). The prohibition on rent or transfer of rural construction land is further explained in the official legal interpretation of this law (National People's Congress Legal Work Committee 1998, 176).

⁴²During the revision of the Land Administration Law, Shanghai and Henan provinces requested to include the following stipulation: ‘Under the condition that the ownership and land use will not be altered, the use right to collective land can be legally transferred, rented out, or mortgaged’. But this suggestion was not adopted by the National People's Congress (National People's Congress Legal Work Committee 1998, 381). In July 2010, China started with the first pilot for the mortgage of rural land. Provinces such as Guizhou followed soon after. At the national level, the first change was signaled by Article 20 of the Communiqué of the Communist Party Congress of 12 November 2013. This stipulated: ‘[F]armers should be given the rights to occupy, use, benefit, and transfer their contract land, as well as the rights to mortgage and hypothec the contract management right’ (CCP, 2013). How this Party stipulation will work out legally and in actual practice is unknown at the time of writing.” (Editorial 2010, Y. Huang 2011).

⁴³As is stipulated in the 1998 Land Administration Law, Article 62. The illegal sale is also made possible due to the unclear responsibility over land and housing in the countryside. Instead of being issued by the relevant government housing and land administration departments, the township government or village committee issues the house and land permits.

⁴⁴Personal communication, Wang Weiguo, Beijing, 16 November 2005.

⁴⁵As Gao and Liu (2007, 31) argue: ‘the current system overemphasizes the role of administrative approval. As the land use right for farmers’ housing has the nature of a usufruct right, the rules of the original acquirement should be restructured according to the principles of the property law. The role of rural land owners must be stipulated’.

⁴⁶For instance, official figures mention a decrease of four percent in the total arable area over 1978–1996: an annual loss of 218,000 ha. See Ash and Edmonds (1998). More information is also available in S.P.S. Ho and Lin (2003) and J. Wang et al. (2012).

⁴⁷In 1993, China experienced only 8709 incidents related to peasants' and workers' unrest. By 1999, these conflicts had quadrupled to over 32,000. Six years later, they had again tripled to an excess of 87,000 (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences 2005).

⁴⁸A well-known example of this is the conflict over the redevelopment of the Dongbakuai District in Shanghai (Chinaview 2006).

⁴⁹The other ways of rent-seeking are through: (1) government purchase of materials (zhengfu caigou), when for instance a corrupt official would buy a government car at a higher price than the market price, with the difference divided between him and the car dealer; (2) infrastructure development (named: jiben jianshe), by which similar arrangements exist as with government purchase, or by which the construction company sends gifts to senior state officials to win a tender, and (3) appointments (dang guan) when gifts are generally given to the decision-makers in order to obtain a wanted position [personal communication, section head of municipal auditing agency (shi shenjiju), 5 June 2008]. For privacy reasons, the official's name and the city to which the auditing agency belongs have not been mentioned.

⁵⁰For instance, in an attempt to halt indiscriminate expropriations and urban sprawl, the governor of Guangdong province decreed that ‘collective construction land which rights are disputed is forbidden to enter the market’ (literally: ‘to be transferred’) (Guangdong Provincial Government 2005, 1).

⁵¹An example of this is provided in Appendix J in P. Ho (2005a).

⁵²In the latter case, a new contract and (possible) new conditions are stipulated. In the former case, the original contract is transferred under the same conditions.

⁵³Before this, the average real estate price rose by 14.4 percent over 2003–2004, and by 12.5 percent in the first quarter of 2005 (Lan and Shun 2005).

⁵⁴Per unit (m²) asking price for Beijing had increased with 19.4 percent from 25166 to 30054 RMB over January to December 2012; Shanghai 3.1 percent from 22665 to 23356 RMB; Shenzhen 10.4 percent from 17428 to 19247 RMB; and Guangzhou with 11. 6 percent from 14762 to 16476 RMB over the same period.

⁵⁵In other words, as opposed to the popular adage ‘l'histoire se repète’.

⁵⁶However, historical research has proven that the rate of tenancy was different from what the Chinese communist regime tried to make people believe. In fact, tenancy showed huge regional differences, with owners generally distributed in North China and tenant farms more abundant in South China. From the famous 1930 study by Buck of a large number of farms, ‘owners average 63 per cent for all of the 2866 farms studied’ (Buck 1930, 145). Another problem of the land reform movement was the classification of farmers into poor, middle, rich farmers and landlords. Madsen rightly notes that ‘the official criteria for determining who was a landlord or a rich peasant, and so forth, were themselves imprecise’ (Madsen 1991, 626).

⁵⁷For a detailed description of the history of urban China under Mao, see MacFarquhar and Fairbank (1991).

⁵⁸The main exceptions being: forest, grassland, wasteland, infrastructural, mining and military land in the countryside.

⁵⁹Collectivization was executed in phases with a gradual pooling of the means of production – labor, capital and land. Before the People's Communes were set up in 1958, they were preceded by the Mutual Aid Teams, the Lower Agricultural Production and the Higher Agricultural Production Cooperatives. The official end to private land ownership in China came in the year 1956, when the ownership of agricultural land was vested in the Higher Agricultural Production Cooperatives. See Madsen (1991).

⁶⁰Article 17 of the earlier 1961 draft of the Sixty Articles stipulated that ‘all land … within the limits of the production brigade is owned by the production brigade’. However, by the time the revised draft of the Sixty Articles was issued by the CCP Central Party Committee on 27 September 1962, the team had been given land ownership (CCP Central Party Commmittee 1961, 454). As the final version of the Sixty Articles decreed: ‘All land within the limits of the production team is owned by the production team’ (CCP Central Party Committee 1962, 141–2).

⁶¹The Plenum of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party in December 1978 marked the beginning of the economic reforms and the official end of collectivism.

⁶²The Land Administration Law states that ‘the ownership right of state-owned land is exercised by the State Council as representative of the state’. In practice, state ownership is exercised by the Ministry of Land Resources: ‘The responsible department for land administration of the State Council [the Ministry of Land Resources] is uniformly charged with the management and supervision of the nation's land’. See Articles 2 and 5, Revised Land Administration Law (Fang 1998, 207). Moreover, the National People's Congress Legal Affairs Work Committee formally issued the legal interpretation that ‘the various levels of local government are not the representative for the ownership of state-owned land. They have no right to deal with state-owned land without authorization … ’ It also added that ‘the right to profit from state-owned land belongs to the central people's government’ (Renda Fazhi Gonguo Weiyuanhui 1998, 37).

⁶³A principle also enshrined in the successive revisions of the Chinese Constitution.

⁶⁴One only needs to think of the descendents of Jewish families expropriated during the Holocaust, or the heirs of the former German gentry driven away from their estates when the Russian Red Army defeated the Nazi regime. Ex-ownership issues are notoriously complex: claimants often lack titles as these were destroyed during wars and political upheaval, while new owners can not simply be evicted as they have invested in the land for many decades. This is shown, for example, in a case at the European Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg. In the final days of the German Democratic Republic, Prime Minister Hans Modrow ordained that full ownership be granted to the farmers of the former collectives (LPG) and their heirs. The German government of Helmut Kohl, however, reversed this measure in 1992. In response, around 70,000 former LPG members and their descendants filed a case at the European Court for Human Rights, which in January 2004 ruled that the decision made by the Kohl administration was unlawful. In addition, the German government has been ordered to provide suitable financial redress to the victims of expropriation (Kerres 2004, 5).

⁶⁵As Simpson described: ‘Freehold originally meant that the land was held by services of a free nature and not that it was free from all rent and conditions, as its name seems to imply. This indeed is what it has come to mean, for it can now be regarded as synonymous with absolute ownership’ (Simpson 1976, 28). In the North of The Netherlands, there is a similar right called ‘Beklemrecht’, a right originating from the seventeenth century under which the tenant (‘Beklemde Meier’) had full rights over the land against a fixed, yet relatively low, rent.

⁶⁶There are many claimants to collective land, ranging from individual farmers to schools and temples. For instance, in an administrative village in Inner Mongolia, land ownership title was granted to a primary school. See P. Ho (2005a. Appendices C and Appendix D, 212–25). Many farmers also believe that they, rather than the collective, own the land on which their houses are built (Sargeson 2002).

⁶⁷The villagers' group accounted for only 32.3 percent, the township for 1.1 percent, and other categories for 3 percent (Wang 1998, 56).

⁶⁸See also the introduction in P. Ho and Edmonds (2008). The government has organized elections for the cadres of the administrative village since the mid 1980s. Although these have changed the role of the village collective, they have not significantly strengthened it either – certainly not regarding farmers' interests over land. See Z. Wang (1998).

⁶⁹The strengthening of tenure security was done through large-scale titling programs. A detailed overview of the efforts of the Chinese state in this direction is given in P. Ho (2012).

⁷⁰Cheng and Tsang, (1996, p.44) The term of lease is different for other types of land – forest, grassland and wasteland. The 2002 Rural Land Contracting Law defined that ‘the lease term for grassland can be 30 to 50 years, for forest land 30 to 70 years, and for forest land with special trees and shrubs the lease term can be extended after approval by the forest administrative departments of the State Council’. Hu 2002 p.174). The term for urban land according to the Land Administration Law is 70 years.

⁷¹The 1986 Land Administration Law was revised in 1998 to provide the legal basis for the ‘second round of lease’ (di'erlun chengbao). See article 20 which stipulates that the lease term for agricultural land (not forest, wasteland, and grassland) is 30 years.

⁷²Local custom also affected the state's effort to title collective land ownership. As a government notice warned: ‘Land permits must be issued to the hands of the rights holder; it is strictly prohibited to withhold these under the pretext of a uniform administration’ (Ministry of Land and Resources et al. 2011).

⁷³In this regard, Kung (2000, 702) made the important observation that: ‘reallocations are partial in nature, involving only households that have experienced a change in membership. Villages well endowed with land resources or with abundant off-farm income opportunities have tended to reallocate land less frequently, and involved fewer households and less land’.

⁷⁴As Guhan (1994, 40, 41) notes: ‘In the agricultural economy, land is the primary asset from a subsistence point of view: it provides food security, enables utilization of family labour, and reduces vulnerability to labour and food markets. ( … ) The example of China shows how access to land can provide the fundamental basis for social security in an agrarian economy’.

⁷⁵The average area of cultivable land is less than 0.10 ha per capita (National Bureau of Statistics 2003, 6, 97).

⁷⁶See Chapter 1 in P. Ho (2005a), and P. Ho and Spoor (2006). Note that this is different from the neo-classical explanation of credibility as described in e.g. Diermeyer et al. (1997, 20).

⁷⁷As Pei (2006, 166) asserts: ‘Doubtless … China's state capacity will continue to erode and sustainable development will be put at risk’.

⁷⁸Perhaps the earliest influential report in that direction is the study by S. Wang and Hu (1999).

⁷⁹As a commentator stated about the Property Law: ‘What will happen to the house after 70 years? It is an issue that is now closely watched by society’ (Lu 2005, 3).

⁸⁰Note that long before the housing boom and the bubble in real estate even materialized (Shen et al. 2005, Hou 2009), a poll carried out in 2003 amongst 23,000 urban citizens of several major Chinese cities (Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Wuhan, Xi'an and Shenyang) found that close to a quarter of the respondents (24.6 percent) had already bought new housing (at the secondary urban market), while another 73.8 percent expected to buy a house in the next year (Institute for Marketing Information 2003, 135).

⁸¹There are basically two possible situations: (1) the house is owned by a farming household, which illegally sold its ownership right to a third party; (2) the house has been newly built on rural land that has not been officially expropriated, and is thus not formally designated as urban construction land. For more information, see also J. Cai (2011) and Ministry of Land and Resources (2012).

⁸²In this regard, the ‘credibility thesis’ concurs with Libecap's view that distributional conflicts are ‘inherent in any property rights arrangement, even those with important efficiency implications’ (Libecap 1989, 2).

⁸³For all analytical clarity, in fact, they are also shaped and limited in the interaction with itself – the different factions and vested interests from within the state, as well as between the different levels of the state (central versus local).

⁸⁴The average profit is 15 percent per transaction of real estate (approximately three times the world average). However, even higher profits can be made, as the following example illustrates: when land from a village near the southern section of Beijing's Fourth Ring Road was expropriated, the farmers received only 177 RMB per square meter. The same land was sold two years later for almost 38 times the original price (China Times 2006, 4). It is therefore no surprise that among the 100 wealthiest Chinese business leaders, more than 40 were in real estate. Even after some of these tycoons were arrested for economic crimes, 35 real estate developers still remained on Forbes' 2003 list (Hoogerwerf 2002, Flannery 2003).

⁸⁵From 2001–2004, real estate ended in first place, and in 2005, real estate ended in third place (China Economic Net 2006).

⁸⁶By the end of 2012, there were pilots with property taxation in only two Chinese cities: Shanghai and Chongqing. In the US, property tax accounted for 73.9 percent of all revenues for the local government in 2009, a figure based on the 2009 Comprehensive Annual Fiscal Report (CAFR) and presented by Prof. John L. Mikesell, [email protected], International Symposium on China's Urban Development and Land Policy, Peking University, Shouren International Conference Center, 14–15 July 2012.

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Peter Ho is Professor at Minzu University, China and Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. He published extensively in leading SSCI/SCI-rated journals of development, environment and planning. His books include Institutions in Transition (2005, Oxford University Press), China's Limits to Growth (2006, Blackwell Publishers), Developmental Dilemmas (2005, 2009, Routledge) and China's Embedded Activism (2008, 2011, Routledge). In recognition of his scientific achievements, he was awarded the Independent Research Grant for Consolidators by the European Research Council (ERC).