The Chinese Economy in Crisis: State Capacity and Tax Reform: State Capacity and Tax Reform

This is one of the most influential and controversial Chinese studies of the Chinese economy published in recent years. The authors argue strongly that the decentralization that has taken place in China since the 1980s threatens to undermine the future of reform and perhaps even the state itself. They contend that reform has undermined state capacity in China, and that the state's fiscal revenues, as a percentage of GNP, have declined and will continue to decline into the foreseeable future, thereby putting China in the ranks of the least "statist" societies, and weakening the country's ability to mobilize resources for modernization.

Wang Shaogung is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Hu Angang is a Senior Fellow at the Chinese Academy of Science