Professor @dukelaw interested in "order without law." Author of Chinese Small Property, Finance against Law, and The Authoritarian Commons.
Durham, North Carolina
Joined July 2013
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Shitong Qiao retweeted
We (Jonathan Elkobi, me) are happy that @chinaquarter has accepted our new piece “The End of Fiscal Autonomy. ” Yes, it’s provocatively titled but this is an important data point for analyzing China’s economy. A large literature suggests that local autonomy, including fiscal “federalism” has been a key ingredient to growth and local reform initiatives. If local governments literally have little to no autonomy, their incentives and ability to use local initiatives to generate growth also declines. Below, I summarize our findings with link of pre-pub version at the end.
Quick primer: Chinese budgeting is broken into 1. ordinary budget to finance public services, civil service salaries and 2. Extra budgetary fund (EBF) used to finance land acquisition/sale, infrastructure projects and other discretionary spend. The source of the problem is here—ordinary revenue at the local level has grown very modestly over a 6-year period (21%), while EBF revenue (land income) has not grown at all due to the property crackdown. Central transfers made up the bulk of the growth in non-debt sources of income for local governments. (1/N)
Shitong Qiao retweeted
We should rethink the role of human judgment in the review process. Human expert should have a role, but it's no longer about writing 1,500-word essays to summarize findings, check proofs, and so on.
On top of that, any journal that forbids AI usage in the review process should reconsider their position.
New paper: "AI Article Reviews Dominate Human Peer Reviews at Their Best: Evidence and Policy Choices" See: GaryKing.org/peerless. with Steven Worthington. Comments welcome!
Shitong Qiao retweeted
My first book, Authoritarian Markets: The Politics of China’s Banking Explosion (Cornell University Press), is officially out today!
It explores the political foundations of China’s banking market development—and how that development both drove the rapid growth of the Chinese economy in the past three decades and incubated its deeply intertwined challenges: shadow banking, the housing bubble, and local government debt.
The China story isn’t sui generis—not once you see how contract-intensive markets expand in other autocracies. Authoritarian states produce authoritarian markets: markets with three coherent properties, the three “Rs”—rationed entry, reflective competition, and rigged regulation. I won’t give away details but post the epigraph to each chapter below :)
I hope you find the book readable, rigorous, and refreshing—a different set of three Rs, but ones I hope characterize the book as much as its argument.
Finally—here’s a promo code (40% off!): 09EXP40.
cornellpress.cornell.edu/boo…
p.s. So many teachers and friends to thank---see my acknowledgement :)
Shitong Qiao retweeted
Highly relevant!
"A Network Approach to Geopolitics" by Ernest Liu, Stephen J. Redding, Bennett Smith-Worthington, and David Y. Yang.
"We develop a tractable framework for analyzing geopolitics as a network of coordination and strategic influence. Countries choose geopolitical actions that trade off domestic interests against incentives to align with connected countries. They can exert costly bilateral influence to affect one another's actions. We characterize equilibrium actions and bilateral influence in closed form. Cross-country differences in domestic interests decompose into latent geopolitical cleavages, each of which the network transmits into geopolitical actions independently of the others. The cross-country covariance matrices of domestic interests and of geopolitical actions identify the cleavages and their importance, from which we recover the network. We implement the framework using data on United Nations voting and democratic orientation. The inferred network is well approximated by a few dimensions, aligns with external measures of geopolitical ties, and recovers well-known historical cleavages. We undertake counterfactuals for domestic interests and network connections and quantify three notions of geopolitical power."
dropbox.com/scl/fi/fw5k6xvlq…
Housing remains unaffordable in China’s growth machines, as Wendell Pritchett and I wrote about a decade ago in Exclusionary Megacities. I understand the temptation to look to China as a model for growth and housing, but the reality is more complicated than it might seem.
Interesting to read this news ⤵️ of NYC playing venture capitalist alongside @bswud & @RobinRivaton's new @WorksInProgMag story about Chinese cities as de facto VC firms.
1/5
Shitong Qiao retweeted
I review the big new @nikobowie @DaphnaRenan book in @thenation today, with praise and doubts in equal measure.
thenation.com/article/societ…
Shitong Qiao retweeted
From our FirstView: "When Can Clientelism Serve Democratic Ends? A Democratic Theory of Distributive Politics" by @samuel_e_bagg and @bhatia_ud.
buff.ly/DvRH4v8
ALT APSR abstract for “When Can Clientelism Serve Democratic Ends? A Democratic Theory of Distributive Politics,” by Samuel Ely Bagg and Udit Bhatia, Drawing on realist democratic theory, the authors argue clientelist practices that build countervailing power among disempowered groups can be democratically justified, but only under five specific constraints. Full abstract is available in linked article.
Shitong Qiao retweeted
“China is not the world’s largest command economy. It is a continent-sized Silicon Valley.”
Awesome piece by @RobinRivaton on China’s local governments and industrial clusters: worksinprogress.co/issue/chi…
Shitong Qiao retweeted
Yes due to folks like me trying to classify them
Caixin: “Across China, LGFVs have been undergoing a massive wave of renamings, dropping monikers tied to “urban construction” in favor of “industrial investment” to bypass strict borrowing limits.”
caixinglobal.com/2026-10-08/…
Shitong Qiao retweeted
Over the last few weeks I've been running a few workshops on Practical AI for academics. I thought I would share the slides and reflect a bit on what I have learned. You can find the slides and some material here: claesbackman.com/ai_workshop…
Shitong Qiao retweeted
My book, "The Fog of Accountability: How Institutions Keep Voters from Holding Their Local Governments Accountable," is here! I hope you'll grab a copy if you're interested in cities 🏙️, elections 🗳️, and how we can make them better
📚📦 amazon.com/Fog-Accountabilit…
Shitong Qiao retweeted
Reposting a WSJ op-ed with Jim Heckman on the “China Shock” study published in May 2025. Academic economists used to be more carefully qualifying their research findings. wsj.com/opinion/the-real-sto…
Shitong Qiao retweeted
Apparently, after nearly 10 years of research and writing about private cities, there will actually be a book. Out March 2027 — and available for pre-order now!
🗓️ OUT IN MARCH 2027
🏙️ 'City Makers' by @kichanova weaves together ground-level reporting with stories of rebel mayors, visionary architects and tech bros—the first comprehensive exposé of a new urban phenomenon: private cities.
Pre-order ➡️ tinyurl.com/23t4tkzz
ALT Book cover of City Makers: Inside the Rise of Private Cities by Vera Kichanova on a mustard yellow background. The white cover shows a yellow crane hook lifting a small city skyline. Beside it is a photo of a young woman with long brown hair, looking at the camera over her shoulder, wearing a dark floral top with a blurred street behind her.
Shitong Qiao retweeted
Excellent background brief on recent developments in China’s banking system. ICYMI it is undergoing a massive consolidation right now. From my colleague Jason Bedford at the @nuseai
Shitong Qiao retweeted
Some perspectives on how Chinese scholars assess and interpret the so-called "China Shock" @EHWpolisci
The Autor–Dorn–Hanson "China shock" papers are arguably the most politically influential economics papers of the past two decades. They created a narrative with far-reaching economic and geopolitical consequences. But the results have been contested.
A recent paper by @joefrancis505 finds that the Autor–Dorn–Hanson results on living standards vanish once the Borusyak–Hull–Jaravel corrections are applied. Many Chinese economists have studied the same question for twenty years, and their findings run in the same direction.
Using Know China AI (know-china.org), which answers from Chinese sources, we offer a perspective the US debate rarely sees. The Chinese literature's broad conclusion: Chinese imports did cost US manufacturing jobs, but the effect is modest and inflated by how trade is counted.
Shitong Qiao retweeted
Back in the classroom this Wednesday after a fairly long break from teaching. I’ve been updating EH207 with a bunch of fascinating new work on Chinese economic history, from Mao-era industrialization to social mobility and the environment.
Readings: dropbox.com/scl/fi/q9equ3nf7…
Shitong Qiao retweeted
New paper with @jenjpan and @xuyiqing in @BJPolS! “Selection, Stability, and Shock: Political Attitudes of Chinese Students at Home and Abroad” Does studying in the US make Chinese students more liberal, or does it trigger a nationalist backlash? doi.org/10.1017/S00071234261…
Shitong Qiao retweeted
Happy to share slides for six lectures on "causal panel analysis" based on my recent short course at Waseda.
github.com/xuyiqing/panel-le…
Written for applied researchers.
Shitong Qiao retweeted
Can’t wait to read it
