The Logic of Governance in China

An Organizational Approach

Bibliographic Data

ID3635548
AuthorsJulia Chuang (University of Maryland, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume83
Issue1
Pages179-181
Publication date2024-02-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Journal of Asian Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-9118 • E-ISSN: 1752-0401
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00219118-10872630
OpenAlexW4389233159
LanguageEN
Citations received9

In The Logic of Governance in China, Zhou Xueguang revisits a central question that he broached at the start of his career in his 1993 American Sociological Review article “Unorganized Interests and Collective Action in Communist China” (which is also reprinted as the final empirical chapter of the book). In that article, he had suggested that local bureaucrats in the Chinese state formed a unique class of their own: they act as state agents, and yet they have interests of their own, which led them to act in ways ungoverned by central officials.Thirty years later, Zhou has amassed a trove of qualitative data on the inner workings of the Chinese state. He has formulated a larger, theoretically rich puzzle around this same subject: the problematic character of the Chinese bureaucrat. In a state with a highly institutionalized government bureaucracy, he asks, why do bureaucrats routinely fabricate statistics, shirk the spirit of central orders, collude to cover up corruption, bargain with central state authorities over policy regulations, and rely on patronage ties and other informal mechanisms to carry out their tasks?Zhou offers the following assessment. China has a highly bureaucratized state apparatus, but it is not a legal-rational bureaucracy in the Weberian sense. Instead, since the beginning of the Chinese state in 221 BC, a charismatic ruler has always led the bureaucracy. Today, charismatic authority has been embedded in the bureaucracy in a fractal fashion: each bureaucratic unit of the state is led by a charismatic authority figure at the top. Tensions between charismatic authority and bureaucratic structures have made way for a highly unstable political context. Central orders are issued from above, and local bureaucrats are expected to carry these orders out by fiat. On the other hand, bureaucrats have access to more accurate on-the-ground information than charismatic leaders and can use this information asymmetry to bargain over central orders. This asymmetry is particularly salient in situations where central orders are draconian and local implementation is costly, yet central authorities do not have the resources to incentivize compliance at the local level.One example of this tension lies in environmental regulation. Zhou observes a locality where provincial leaders have set top-down policy goals for the reduction of chemical oxygen demand and sulfur dioxide. These goals for pollution reduction are quite draconian, and while municipal authorities are tasked with ensuring that county governments comply, they do not have sufficient resources to control or incentivize compliance among county governments. What Zhou finds is a puzzle. Municipal environmental bureaus fabricate pollution statistics for each of their counties. But they do not do so by lowering the reported pollution for their jurisdictions overall. Instead, they report somewhat accurate overall municipal totals but “redistribute” reported pollution so that all counties within their jurisdiction appear to make approximately similar progress in pollution reduction over time. If one county falls behind on pollution mitigation, the municipal authorities request a reallocation of pollution statistics, revising statistics from cleaner counties so that they appear to be more polluting and revising statistics from the polluting county so that they appear cleaner.Zhou interprets this as an effort among municipal authorities to ensure that no county falls so behind that they lose motivation to comply with provincial environmental protection goals. Although central authorities are passively aware that such revisions of reported statistics occur, they tolerate them as long as revisions are not wild alterations of actual data. Zhou identifies this phenomenon as a solution to an agent-principal problem and suggests that we understand the Chinese state structure as an agent-supervisor-principal framework. The principal, here central or provincial state authorities, establishes policy goals and central orders, but subcontracts the task of implementing goals to supervisors, here municipal governments. Municipal governments then collude with agents, here county-level governments, or they bargain with the principal over goals, in order to find wiggle room so they may claim compliance.Local bureaucrats may act with relative flexibility in implementing central orders; but Zhou also depicts the dark side of this “loose coupling” between principal and agent. Zhou also describes the helplessness of local bureaucrats, who are forced to “muddle through” to meet central orders, even when they have no resources to carry them out. For example, he depicts villages that are expected to build cement-paved roads linking village centers to main roads under a provincial “Paved Road to Every Village” project, part of a larger nationwide campaign for rural modernization. Village heads grudgingly comply with this policy goal, although they lack the funds to carry out construction. After borrowing from informal sources such as friends, relatives, and other private citizens and sourcing materials from nearby contractors on an informal credit basis, they carry out these onerous projects, though they have no idea how they will pay back their creditors. Eventually, when creditors demand repayment, village leaders cannibalize village public goods to secure funds.This is the norm for state policy implementation in China, Zhou suggests. However, central state authorities, faced with the threat of local authorities spinning out of control and exercising excessive autonomy in reporting data, may periodically tighten up enforcement. Zhou notes that the Chinese state since Mao has periodically tightened up policy enforcement by inaugurating mass “campaigns,” from the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s to the National Socialist Countryside Campaign of the first decade of the twenty-first century. During these periods of mass mobilization, the central state dedicates more resources to policy implementation and enforcement, and local bureaucrats are suddenly held to different standards.This dynamic is a result of tensions between the state bureaucracy and the charismatic authority of state leadership. The bureaucracy supports the party, carrying out policy orders and deriving its own authority from the delegation of power from the party. But local bureaucrats act with such autonomy that the charismatic central authority must periodically enact mobilization campaigns to regain full control over society.This highly ambitious work sheds light on Xi Jinping's recent introduction of various mass campaigns to recentralize state power. It provides a more nuanced view of how we should make sense of phenomena such as China's vast underreporting of COVID-19 infections and deaths. And it provides a speculative roadmap of where China is heading

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