• DOI:10.2307/2950087
• Corpus ID: 151206422

China, Corporatism, and the East Asian Model

@article{Unger1995ChinaCA,
  title={China, Corporatism, and the East Asian Model},
  author={Jonathan Unger and Anita Kit‐wa Chan},
  journal={The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs},
  year={1995},
  pages={29 - 53}
}

• J. Unger, A. Chan
• Published 1 January 1995
• Political Science
• The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs

The social-science paradigms that China scholars employed in former decades do not adequately fit China as of the 1990s. Western scholars today find themselves struggling to reconceptualize the workings of a Party-state that no longer directly dominates society and of an economy that no longer can be classified as 'Leninist command'. Observers of China find themselves faced with a system in free-fall transition to some system as yet unknown, to the point that it often becomes difficult to analytically frame what is occurring at present, let alone attempt analyses of China's probable future. A concept that is of considerable assistance in making sense of the ongoing shifts is 'corporatism'. It does not provide an all-encompassing framework for everything occurring in China today, but it does seem to hold strong explanatory value for some of the more important trends. The concept has already been aired (almost entirely in the pages of this journal) in relation to a few specific types of organization in China,' but the multifaceted nature of corporatism's spread in the PRC has not yet been analysed. Nor has the emergence of corporatist associations in China been viewed in comparative