Title: U.S..China Cooperative Research: Local Political Reform in China Abstract Narrative: This is a two and one half.year collaborative research project between John E. Jackson and M. Kent Jennings of the University of Michigan and researchers from the Political Science Department of Beijing University. The three objectives of the project are (1) to study the political and economic reforms taking place at the local level in China, (2) to examine the structure and behavior of local government in China, comparing these structures and behaviors with those in other countries, and (3) to bring researchers from Beijing University into the international research community through their participation in the design of the study, the data collection, and the writing and publishing of papers based on this work. This project is expected to provide important new findings about political and economic reform in China, about how global trends affecting all countries are being dealt with in China, and about how local government and politics in China compare to those in other countries. It will provide some baseline analyses and a data set that will encompass a broad range of political and economic phenomena, and as such, will constitute a fundamental advance in the knowledge of and ability to study political dynamics in China. This collaborative project is jointly sponsored by the NSF and the Chinese State Education Commission.
