CWP Alum Fellow Yeling Tan Wins The Peter Katzenstein Book Prize For Outstanding First Book In International Relations, Comparative Politics, Or Political Economy
Awardees 2022: Awarded to Yeling Tan for her book Disaggregating China, Inc. State Strategies in the Liberal Economic Order, Cornell University Press (2021).
Yeling Tan’s Disaggregating China, Inc. makes a major contribution to the fields of international political economy, comparative political economy, and Chinese politics. The book investigates China’s responses to pressures for reform arising from its entry into the World Trade Organization at the end of 2001. Tan convincingly shows that such pressures did not simply call for China to make policy adjustments in the areas of trade and industry policy, but to undertake far- reaching institutional reforms as well. WTO compliance calls not only for policy liberalization, but also institutional reform to create the institutions of the regulatory state, one that is capable of implementing the market-enhancing policies set as a requirement for WTO entry. Tan further demonstrates that China’s ability and willingness to implement such reforms cannot be reduced to either foot-dragging or acceptance. Instead, different parts of the Chinese state pursued one of three strategies: directive (market-substituting), developmental (market-shaping), or regulatory (market-enhancing), with the choice structured by the career incentives associated with each strategy in the specific bureaucratic, political and market contexts facing officials at different levels of government and in different agencies. Disaggregating China, Inc. brings an extraordinary and compelling range of empirical evidence to bear out this argument. Tan’s work is one of a very few studies of China to undertake systematic empirical analysis of micro-level processes, informed by rich contextual understanding. In the process, Tan demonstrates the importance of seeing China as a complex and multifaceted actor, not an authoritarian monolith. The book is nothing short of remarkable!
About the Prize: The Katzenstein Prize, in honor of Peter J. Katzenstein, the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies at Cornell University, recognizes an outstanding first book in International Relations, Comparative Politics, or Political Economy. The prize was established on the occasion of Professor Katzenstein’s 40th Year at Cornell University and has been made possible by the generous support of his colleagues, collaborators, and former students.
https://government.cornell.edu/peter-katzenstein-book-prize -
My research interests lie at the intersection of international and comparative political economy, with an emphasis on China and the developing world. Two broad questions define my research agenda. First: how do the rules of globalization affect politics within authoritarian regimes such as China, given that these rules require increasingly far-reaching modifications to domestic institutions? Second, how do authoritarian regimes affect rule-making at the international level?
I am also a non-resident scholar at the UC San Diego 21st Century China Center and a Public Intellectual Fellow with the National Committee on US-China Relations. From 2017-20, I was a fellow of the World Economic Forum's Council on the Future of International Trade and Investment. From 2017-18, I was a post-doctoral fellow at the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program at Princeton University
My work has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Governance, the China Journal and Global Policy. I am co-author of China Experiments: From Local Innovation to National Reform (Brookings Institution Press) and co-editor of Asia’s Role in Governing Global Health (Routledge). My latest book is Disaggregating China, Inc: State Strategies in the Liberal Economic Order (Cornell University Press Studies in Political Economy Series).
Photo Credit: https://pixabay.com/users/clker-free-vector-images-3736/ & https://government.cornell.edu/peter-katzenstein-book-prize
