The Politics of a Shadow Economy "with Chinese Characteristics"

• Main Authors: Brandon Alexander Millan, 林博仁
• Other Authors: Lee, Ming
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/60001647558888182898

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 亞太研究英語碩士學位學程(IMAS) === 101 === According to Robert Neuwirth (2011a), the “shadow economy” — the activities of those who pay neither tax nor social insurance — “looks a lot like the future of the global economy.” And while some scholars (Elgin and Oztunali 2012) have attempted to estimate the size of this underground activity and determine its main drivers, few studies have considered the political attitudes and patterns of mobilization of this growing demographic and its potential implications. This thesis examines the politics of those employed in the shadow economy in China. The analysis is based on two primary data sets that investigated the political attitudes of Chinese working in the informal sector: the 1993 Survey on Social Mobility and Social Change (SSMSC) and the AsiaBarometer Survey (ABS) 2006. According to Friedrich Schneider (2007), conventional wisdom suggests participants in the shadow economy are less likely to engage in forms of protest and other demonstrations and therefore, among other factors, governments have little motivation to reduce its size. However, other empirical studies find that these individuals are more likely to mobilize. In the Chinese context, regression analysis finds that workers in the 1993 Chinese shadow economy were indeed more likely to demonstrate, strike, and petition, whereas this same variable had no effect on the former two forms of mobilization in 2006. Rather than examining the politics of the shadow economy “in China,” these findings suggest that future analyses on the subject would be better served by framing the study with an exceptionalist clause – a shadow economy “with Chinese characteristics.”