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As China has transformed itself from a centrally planned economy to a market economy, economists have tried to understand and interpret the success of Chinese reform. As the Chinese economist Yingyi Qian explains, there are two schools of thought on Chinese reform: the “School of Universal Principles,” which ascribes China’s successful reform to the workings of the free market, and the “School of Chinese Characteristics,” which holds that China’s reform is successful precisely because it did not follow the economics of the market but instead relied on the government. In this book, Qian offers a third perspective, taking certain elements from each school of thought but emphasizing not why reform worked but how it did. Economics is a science, but economic reform is applied science and engineering. To a practitioner, it is more useful to find a feasible reform path than the theoretically best way. The key to understanding how reform has worked in China, Qian argues, is to consider the way reform designs respond to initial historical conditions and contemporary constraints. Qian examines the role of “transitional institutions”—not “best practice institutions” but “incentive-compatible institutions”—in Chinese reform; the dual-track approach to market liberalization; the ownership of firms, viewed both theoretically and empirically; government decentralization, offering and testing hypotheses about its link to local economic development; and the specific historical conditions of China’s regional-based central planning.

The practice of urban preservation has become increasingly controversial in modern cities. In some places, historic monuments dismantled decades ago are rebuilt in exactly the same fashion, whereas centuries-old urban dwellings are demolished and replaced by new structures with historic appearances. In other places, heritage status becomes the equivalent of tax benefits, which encourages the renovation of historic houses but leads to the displacement of longtime residents. Based on extensive fieldwork and archival data, this book explores how the joint force of policy discourse and political institution shapes the policy process and creates distinct patterns of urban preservation in Beijing, Paris, and Chicago. It argues that the policy concept of urban preservation has become a strategic device for political and social actors to frame their propositions and promote their favored course of action. At the same time, the fragmented urban power structure serves as a filter that constrains the implementation of the preservation initiatives. In particular, the book developed a typology of political fragmentation (i.e., functional, intergovernmental, and territorial) to compare how different types of political fragmentation have shaped the policy process of urban preservation in predictable ways. By wedding political science theory and method to the study of urban preservation, this book is one of the first efforts to reveal the political underpinnings of the topic. The cross-national comparative approach is not only critical to test the theoretical framework presented, but also depicts a richer picture of the modes of spatial and social governance in the urban world.