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Business Lobbying within the Party-State: Embedding Lobbying and Political Co-optation in China

Most existing scholarship regards private businesspeople in China as allies of the party-state, without considering how the private sector’s policy influence is possible in an authoritarian state where the political elites dominate the policy-making process. Based on the large number of successful proposals that the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce (ACFIC) has submitted to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, this study reveals the rising policy influence of private businesspeople in the past decade. It finds that their influence on government policy is not realized simply through collusion or informal ties with local governments at the stage of policy implementation. Instead, they now can voice their interests and exert influence as a group in national policy making at the central level through formal institutional channels. In recent years the influence of business associations affiliated with the ACFIC has been increasing, mainly due to institutional changes at the national level that encompass their input. This entails political co-optation that helps empower the private sector to exert influence on policy, rendering it unnecessary for the business community to challenge the political system from the bottom up.