China's Water Warriors: Citizen Action and Policy Change
Cornell University Press, February 2008

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SYNOPSIS/CORNELL PRESS COPY

Fifteen years ago, opponents of large-scale dam projects in China were greeted with indifference or repression. Today they are part of the hydropower policy-making process itself. What accounts for this dramatic change in this critical policy area surrounding China's insatiable quest for energy? In China's Water Warriors, Andrew Mertha argues that as China has become increasingly market driven, decentralized, and politically heterogeneous, the control and management of water has transformed from an unquestioned economic imperative to a lightning rod of bureaucratic infighting, societal opposition, and open protest. Although bargaining has always been present in Chinese politics, more recently the media, nongovernmental organizations, and other activists-actors hitherto denied a seat at the table-have emerged as serious players in the policy-making process. Drawing from extensive field research in some of the most remote parts of Southwest China, China's Water Warriors contains rich narratives of the widespread opposition to dams in Pubugou and Dujiangyan in Sichuan province and the Nu River Project in Yunnan province. Mertha concludes that the impact and occasional success of such grassroots movements and policy activism signal a marked change in China's domestic politics. He questions democratization as the only, or even the most illuminating, indicator of political liberalization in China, instead offering an informed and hopeful picture of a growing pluralization of the Chinese policy process as exemplified by hydropower politics.

REVIEWS

"China's Water Warriors offers an informed and illuminating view of the rapidly changing Chinese policy process. Andrew C. Mertha's fascinating study of the contemporary politics of hydropower reveals how new actors--journalists, NGO activists, scholars, and even the public at large--influence the Chinese policy process to a degree almost unimaginable a decade or two ago."--Elizabeth J. Perry, Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government, Harvard University

"Andrew C. Mertha proves that sometimes it's best to approach a topic from the side. To provide the freshest interpretation of Chinese bureaucratic politics in years, he investigates controversies surrounding dam-building. To cast light on state-society relations and the pluralization of Chinese society, he starts with the state. Nearly every page contains something new about issues as different as democratization, protest, and the policy process. Readers will be grappling with Mertha's findings on policy entrepreneurship and issue framing for as long as Chinese leaders are making policies."-Kevin J. O'Brien, Alann P. Bedford Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, coauthor of Rightful Resistance in Rural China

"China's Water Warriors should be read by anyone interested in hydropower politics and the future of government in China. Andrew Mertha's focus on how political pluralism works within a single-party, authoritarian state is highly original."- Bent Flyvbjerg, principal author of Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition

"While China has roared ahead with water control and hydropower megaprojects, Western scholarship has been slow to update its stubborn paradigms. This book takes a big step in bringing theory more in line with the complex realities of political pluralism and protest found in China today."--Tim Oakes, University of Colorado

"China's Water Warriors will force a major alteration in the way we understand China today. Andrew C. Mertha uses concepts and ideas from the field of American politics to good effect and ties his cases to critical themes in the field of domestic Chinese politics. He demonstrates the space that the liberalizing and internationalizing polity has been able to clear for the intrusion of new actors; his analyses of the changed role and influence of such players as the media and NGOs are pathbreaking and highly revealing. Mertha's deep knowledge of historical legacies brings nuance and reliability to his fascinating stories, and the vividly told narrative benefits greatly from Mertha's expert skill in asking-and teasing out answers to-subtle and sensitive questions of his informants."--Dorothy J. Solinger, University of California, Irvine

The Politics of Piracy: Intellectual Property in Contemporary China
Cornell University Press, September 2005, Hardcover, 258pp, ISBN: 0801443644; Paperback, 241pp, ISBN: 0801473853.

Cick to read the first five pages | Review by Neil Diamant in Comparative Political Studies | Review by Randy Peerenboom in the Journal of Asian Studies | Review by Debora Halbert in Law and Society Review | Review by Tian Dexin in Education Review | Review by Anne Stevenson-Yang in The Far Eastern Economic Review

SYNOPSIS/CORNELL PRESS COPY

China is by far the world's leading producer of pirated goods-from films and books to clothing, from consumer electronics to aircraft parts. As China becomes a full participant in the international economy, its inability to enforce intellectual property rights is coming under escalating international scrutiny.
What is the impact, Andrew C. Mertha asks, of external pressure on China's enforcement of intellectual property? The conventional wisdom sees a simple correlation between greater pressure and better domestic compliance with international norms and declared national policy. Mertha's research tells a different story: external pressure may lead to formal agreements in Beijing, resulting in new laws and official regulations, but it is China's complex network of bureaucracies that decides actual policy and enforcement. The structure of the administrative apparatus that is supposed to protect intellectual property rights makes it possible to track variation in the effects of external pressure for different kinds of intellectual property. Mertha shows that while the sustained pressure of state-to-state negotiations has shaped China's patent and copyright laws, it has had little direct impact on the enforcement of those laws. By contrast, sustained pressure from inside China, on the part of foreign trademark-owners and private investigation companies in their employ, provides a far greater rate of trademark enforcement and spurs action from anti-counterfeiting agencies.

REVIEWS

"You should buy-not steal or copy-The Politics of Piracy. It is an impressive and timely book that will help anyone trying to understand today's (or tomorrow's) battles between the United States and China regarding intellectual property. In it, Andrew C. Mertha draws on years of experience in China and a rich academic background to produce a study that I know scholars, businesspeople, and policymakers will find valuable with regard to both intellectual property and China's engagement of global norms in general." - William P. Alford, Harvard University, author of To Steal a Book is an Elegant Offense: Intellectual Property in Chinese Civilization

"The Politics of Piracy is a great read and should prove to be the definitive, durable account of the politics of intellectual property in China. Andrew C. Mertha's research regarding patent, copyright, and trademark policymaking, implementation, and enforcement is the work of a highly skilled and motivated specialist in the structure and process of Chinese politics. We learn that Deng's science and technology policymakers debated patent policy from the earliest days of the reform movement, that cultural and propaganda issues trump copyright policy, and that U.S. trademark owners have figured out how to get the locals to take action against counterfeiters. Mertha's anecdotes illuminate even as they entertain." - Michael P. Ryan, Georgetown University, author of Knowledge Diplomacy: Global Competition and the Politics of Intellectual Property

"This very well-written book sets out a clear argument and follows it through the maze of China's bureaucracy, arriving finally at persuasive conclusions. I have never read such a vivid description of how Chinese bureaucracies connect to each other, from the center to the local level. Andrew C. Mertha provides an extremely lucid explanation of why some types of intellectual property rights are relatively well enforced and others are not." - Joseph Fewsmith III, Professor and Director of the East Asia Interdisciplinary Studies Program, Boston University

Patently Misleading: Partial Implementation and Bargaining Leverage in Sino-American Negotiations on Intellectual Property Rights (co-authored with Robert Pahre), International Organization 59 (3) Summer 2005: 695-730: We develop a model of international negotiation in which states anticipate that the agreements they sign will only be partly implemented. The results differ significantly from theories of domestic ratification, which have previously been applied to this problem. Negotiators do not try to satisfy the implementer, and may even choose agreements that the implementer would explicitly reject in a ratification model. Partial implementation also makes it possible for two negotiators to reach agreements outside their usual win-set. This may allow one country to make extraordinary concessions, knowing that some provisions will never be fully implemented. We apply these claims to Sino-American negotiations over IPR, where implementation has been a recurrent issue. The theory enriches the theory of two-level games, which has focused much too narrowly on formal ratification without amendment as the canonical case of domestic influence over international bargaining.

“Policy Enforcement Markets”: How Bureaucratic Redundancy Contributes to Effective IPR Policy Implementation in China, Comparative Politics 38 (3) April 2006: 295-316: In this article, I argue that the widespread assumption in which redundancy necessarily leads to inefficiency is incorrect, that there are different types of redundancies. In some cases, redundancy does produce inefficient results. But in others, parallel bureaucracies can contribute to efficient and effective policy outcomes, while their absence can lead to wasteful and ineffective policy implementation. Examining the issue area of intellectual property in China, I show how institutional arrangements and inter-bureaucratic competition over overlapping jurisdictions explain why copyright enforcement is so poor while trademark enforcement has met with far greater success. Efforts to make the copyright bureaucracy more efficient by merging it with other bureaucracies often result in organizational inertia that stifles effective copyright enforcement. By contrast, organizational competition between two discrete, parallel bureaucracies over the anti-counterfeiting portfolio (the "policy enforcement market") contributes to more effective and less costly enforcement. In addition to challenging the assumption equating redundancy with inefficiency, the article identifies conditions under which bureaucratic redundancy can lead to effective policy outcomes. These findings also provide an alternative framework through which to study Chinese policy implementation and enforcement, they suggest future Chinese compliance patterns with World Trade Organization rules, and they have implications for the evolution of China's legal regime.

Unbuilt Dams: Seminal Events and Policy Change in China, Australia, and the United States (co-authored with William Lowry), Comparative Politics 39 (1) October 2006: 1-20: Seminal politico-historical events, in which not only policy but the actual political processes through which policy evolves undergo dramatic and fundamental change, are as important as they are uncommon. Why do such seminal politico-historical events occur, and how comparable are seminal events across continents and political systems? We answer these questions by analyzing instances where government attempts to build large-scale dam projects have been reversed after arousing opposition, and, in the process, given birth to the modern environmental movements. We look at two such cases in the United States and Australia, respectively, as an heuristic through which to analyze the case of Dujiangyan, China. We find that the Chinese case eerily parallels these other instances and fits squarely within Schattschneider's notion of "expanding the sphere," suggesting that this framework is not limited by regime type. Substantively, we may be witnessing a fundamental change in the ways in which the Chinese state governs itself.

China’s “Soft” Centralization: Shifting Tiao/Kuai Authority Relations, The China Quarterly 184 (December 2005): 791-810: This article analyses China’s recent attempts to counter “local protectionism” and “implementation bias” since the mid-to-late 1990s by centralizing a growing number of its regulatory bureaucracies (“vertical management” or chuizhi guanli). The analysis is guided by the following questions: why has China undertaken these significant institutional changes? What are the actual institutional mechanisms accompanying vertical management? Finally, what are some of the implications of vertical management on the evolution of the Chinese state? The shift from decentralized authority relations to centralized authority relations requires substantial institutional changes with regard to bianzhi allocations, nomenklatura, and extrabudgetary financing, creating very real political winners and losers. I find that although officially these changes have largely been accomplished, many problems remain with regard to sorting out authority relations, implementing policy, and enforcing the law. These may have profound effects on the future evolution of institutional change in China.

Political Institutions, Local Resistance, and China's Harmonization with International Law (co-authored with Karen Zeng), The China Quarterly 182 (June 2005): 319-337: In countries with non-credible ratification mechanisms, where do the political battles over implementation and enforcement of trade agreements take place? In examining this question, our paper looks at the confluence of two dimensions gaining empirical and theoretical significance in China: harmonization with international laws and Center-local relations. Although China is currently attempting to standardize its legal and regulatory regime, many localities are reluctant to change local laws and regulations which provide preferential benefits to investors, maintain trade barriers to protect the local economy, and perpetuate the informal power of local officials and quasi-official associations. In this paper, we look at institutions that are being developed in China to ensure domestic harmonization of Chinese laws with WTO principles and the enforcement mechanisms in place to rein in those localities which continue to resist efforts at harmonization.

"From 'Rustless Screws' to 'Nail Houses': The Evolution of Property Rights in China"

"'Fragmented Authoritarianism 2.0': Political Pluralization of the Chinese Policy Process" (revise and resubmit at The China Quarterly)

"Institutions, Incentives, and Innovation: The Environment for Intellectual Property in China" (book chapter for yet-untitled volume edited by Denis Simon to be published by Routedge)

From Stanley Lubman, Kevin O'Brien, and Neil Diamant, eds., Engaging the Law in China: State, Society and Possibilities for Justice, Stanford University Press, February 18, 2005, Hardcover, ISBN: 0804750483
Shifting Legal and Administrative Goalposts: Chinese Bureaucracies, Foreign Actors and the Evolution of China's Anti-Counterfeiting Enforcement Regime: The growth in the number of foreign commercial actors in China has made them active participants in Chinese society and an active constituency in China's law enforcement regime and even within its lawmaking process. Foreign commercial actors arrived in China with the expectation that trademark protection would be guaranteed by the courts under the civil Trademark Law. When it became clear that the courts were unwilling and/or unable to ensure trademark protection, many of these firms utilized China's administrative enforcement apparatus with greater success. However, administrative enforcement could not establish a credible deterrent to would-be counterfeiters, and in recent years, foreign trademark-intensive companies have established a close association with national and local Chinese government agencies to press for the prosecution of trademark violations under existing statutes in China's Criminal Law. pdf version

In Ka Zeng, ed., China's Foreign Trade Policy: The New Constituencies, London: Routledge, 2007 (NB: typos abound; I am cleaning them up for final page proofs).China’s rise as a major trading power has prompted debate about the nature of that country’s involvement in the liberal international economic order. China’s Foreign Trade Policy sheds light on this complex question by examining the changing domestic forces shaping China’s foreign trade relations. Specifically, this book explores the evolving trade policymaking process in China by looking at: China’s WTO accession negotiation China’s bilateral trade disputes The development of China’s antidumping regime China’s emerging trade disputes in the WTO. In addition, Ka Zeng examines how lobbying patterns in China are becoming more open and pluralistic, with bureaucratic agencies, sectoral interests, regional interests, and even transnational actors increasingly able to influence the process and outcome of China’s trade negotiations. Using case studies of China’s trade disputes with its major trading partners, as well as China’s participation in the dispute settlement process of the World Trade Organization, to present an in-depth analysis of China’s trade relations, this book will appeal to students and scholars of international political economy, Chinese politics and foreign policy, and more generally Asian studies.

Chapter 1 "Introduction" (with Ka Zeng)

Chapter 5 "Putting Your Mouth Where Your Money Is: How US Companies' Fear of Chinese Retaliation Influences US Trade Policy,"

From Carsten Fink and Keith Maskus, eds., Intellectual Property and Development: Lessons from Recent Economic Research, Co-publication of World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2005
Intellectual Property Rights and Economic Development in China (co-authored with Keith Maskus and Sean Dougherty): In this paper we describe and analyze the situation concerning intellectual property rights (IPRs) in China. We first discuss the basic economic theory of the need for IPRs, distinguishing among patents, trademarks, trade secrets, and copyrights. Economic theory suggests that IPRs are an important stimulus to innovation and economic growth if structured correctly and introduced in an environment of active competition. Empirical evidence suggests that IPRs do contribute positively to growth and also can be important in attracting high-quality technology and foreign direct investment. We present a report on the current IPRs situation in China, based on interviews of enterprise managers, public officials, and scholars in several cities. Respondents recognize that China has implemented a strong set of laws but there remain problems with enforcement. Trademark infringement in particular seems to be limiting domestic business development in China. A final section looks at indicators of science and technical innovation in China and relates these indicators to IPRs protection. Applications for protection are rising sharply but China continues to lag behind other countries in R&D performance, both due to weak protection and structural difficulties in commercializing innovation. The use of IPRs differs greatly across regions, largely because of significant income disparities. This poses a structural problem for strengthening IPRs enforcement. pdf version

"Manufaketure," Ted Fishman, The New York Times Magazine, January 9, 2005

"Flip Side to Fame in China," Mark Magnier, The Los Angeles Times, March 14, 2005

"On Piracy, An Advocate for China's Progress," Chris Buckley, The International Herald Tribune, October 4, 2005

"Emerging China: Can the US Successfully Compete?" CQ Researcher, November 11, 2005

"A Christmas Less Bright," Marck Perkiss, The Times of Trenton, December 18, 2005

"Piracy Eludes Solution," David Lazarus, The San Francisco Chronicle, April 16, 2006

Marketplace, Interview with Kai Ryssdal, National Public Radio, April 20, 2006

"A 'Waking Giant' In Food Safety? Experts Discuss China's Future Of Reform" The Tan Sheet, June 4, 2007

"Dissent Slows China's Drive For Massive Dam Projects," Andrew Batson, The Wall Street Journal, December 19, 2007

"China: Quake Toll Could Reach 50,000," The Associated Press, May 15, 2008

"After the Earthquake," Peter Hessler, The New Yorker Online, May 19, 2008

"China Quake Batters Energy Industry," Dexter Roberts, BusinessWeek Online, May 19, 2008

Living on Earth (NPR): China's Plans for Dams on Shaky Ground, May 23, 2008 (link to site or listen to the mp3)

and...

"Volunteers Aiding Seaport Museum," The New York TImes, September 12, 1971 (significant insofar as this was occurring at exactly the same time as the Lin Biao Incident was reaching its conclusion in China)

Ph.D. Thesis, Deposited on February 27, 2001
Pirates, Politics, and Trade Policy: Structuring the Negotiations and Enforcing the Outcomes of the Sino-US Intellectual Property Dialogue, 1991-1999: This thesis extends Robert Putnam's two-level games framework analyzing the intersection of domestic and international politics in the development and execution of international trade policy. Instead of focusing on the negotiations themselves, I examine what structures the two sides' bargaining positions and what drives subsequent patterns of implementation. My case is the US-China negotiations over intellectual property rights (IPR). Using mostly implicit threats, local Chinese officials deterred US companies operating in China from leveling grievances during the Special 301 trade policy making process, a dynamic labeled here as "transnational deterrence." Differences in this threat's effectiveness were largely due to variation across the organizational structures, proliferation of goals, and organizational "missions" of the IPR-based trade lobbies representing these US companies. These characteristics diminished the salience of the threat for the US copyright lobby, while magnifying it for its trademark-based counterpart. This deterred the trademark lobby from effectively harnessing the agenda setting and ratification process under Special 301, reducing the scope of US demands and corresponding Chinese concessions. This finding is significant for two reasons. First, it identifies a conflictual relationship between two sets of subnational actors that influences the outcome of trade negotiations, a dimension largely unexplored by the existing two-level games literature. Second, it demonstrates that China was able to benefit at the negotiating table, largely through the consequences of transnational deterrence. The second principal finding of this thesis has to do with another theme of two-level games, defection from international agreements. I argue that the specific characteristics of the bureaucracies charged with implementing these agreements can be a major factor in explaining compliance patterns. Variation along the three dimensions of organizational reach, administrative tasking, and bureaucratic "mind-set" explains these patterns of "bureaucratic defection."