The official banking institutions for rural China are Rural Credit Cooperatives (RCCs). Although these co-ops are mandated to support agricultural development among farm households, since 1980 half of RCC loans have gone to small and medium-sized industrial enterprises located in, and managed...

Ample empirical evidence suggests that Rural Credit Cooperatives (RCCs), which are the core credit institutions in rural China, are not accountable to their member households. This article argues that this conundrum can be explained by an institutional analysis of the credit cooperatives using...

Despite the fact that the Rural Credit Cooperatives are the only formal credit providers to millions of households in rural China, empirical evidence suggests that they hardly serve the interests of member households. This study examines the extent to which the recent institutional reform have...

Both China and India have witnessed extensive land expropriation by the states from farmers for use in industrialization and urbanization projects. Land conflicts have ensued from these developments. This paper poses two questions: 1) Why do we see a similar escalation of land dispossession in...

What drives people to protest in an authoritarian country? Drawing from a rich set of individual-level data from the China General Social Survey 2010, we address the question of protest participation by focusing on the factors of resources, and rewards vs. risks, that might be unique to...

China has been held up as a modern-day exemplar of “market-preserving federalism”. This study challenges this popular belief by showing that its local governments face soft budget constraints. Fiscal indiscipline among subnational governments, which risks national indebtedness and...

Rural credit cooperatives have become increasingly commercialized over the last decade. However, this does not spell the end of cooperative finance in rural China. Various new cooperative credit organizations have sprung up in recent years with endorsement from the central and local governments....