Bottom Line
- Under the concept of “top-level design,” President Xi Jinping has repurposed institutions to eliminate problems caused by local discretion such as corruption and policy implementation gaps.
- Increasing centralization of policy and strict penalties for lack of compliance is resulting in local officials no longer experimenting with policy to solve local governance problems and instead focusing more on documenting procedures
- These strategic adaptations lead to erratic policy swings between paralysis and overcompliance at the local level, and an increasingly rigid and unresponsive policy process.
- Although these institutional changes are resulting in less corruption and more standardized governance (rule by law), they also reduce the local feedback and policy autonomy that constructed a more durable system than normally seen in authoritarian regimes (so-called “resilient authoritarianism”).
Introduction
According to its Constitution, China is a unitary state; however, as part of economic reform in the 1980s and early 1990s, the central government delegated administrative authority to the provinces. Administrative delegation authorized local governments’ autonomy in governing and resulted in a de facto functional division between the central and local state.
[1] In order to to align the interests of local state agents in this decentralized system with over thirty-three provincial-level regions, 334 prefecture-level divisions, 2,862 county-level divisions, 41,034 township-level administrations, and 704,382 village-level divisions, the central government relies on a personnel management system linking evaluation to promotion. The national cadre evaluation system that developed in the reform era uses performance targets to create incentives for local officials to govern according to common priorities, resulting in fairly stable patterns of behavior.
[2] Under this system, the central party Organization Department appoints and reviews officials at the provincial level (one-level down), and then this same “one-level down” process occurs annually at the subnational level to assess cadre performance and determine promotions and raises.
[3] This competitive process creates a “political tournament” of performance-based promotion whereby local cadres endeavor to implement the central policy agenda to demonstrate merit.
[4] As Yongnian Zheng famously pointed out, the CCP became an “organizational emperor” during the reform era, and the strong personnel management system is the most important mechanism explaining regime durability.
[5] In fact, to the extent that there is a consensus understanding of Chinese politics, most scholars would agree that the cadre evaluation system best explains local officials’ behavior, including disregarding central policies to implement local interests resulting in “policy implementation gaps.”
[6]
Thus, over the reform era (1979–2012), China’s public-administration system developed both a strong central Party-state and extensive system of grassroots governance linking the two via achieving policy targets outlined in the annual cadre evaluations. However, as this centralized personnel management system interacted with the decentralized governance model (sometimes called “Fragmented Authoritarianism”
[7] ) researchers observed challenges such as an inability to equally incentivize agents at lower levels of the system not being promoted out of home provinces, as well as the fact that performance goals are outcome-oriented, allowing varying tactics to achieve mandated goals. In addition to these challenges, scholars also identified problems applying negative incentives and in monitoring local agents, such that promotion decisions were often made without accurate information.
[8] Simply put, this system lacked enough “connective tissue” to seamlessly link policy ideas developed at the top with implementation and enforcement at the bottom. To achieve President Xi’s goal of “top-level design” and eliminate fragmentation and local discretion, he has been repurposing institutions to serve as this connective tissue linking central and local governments to eliminate policy implementation gaps and other problems caused by local discretion such as corruption. Local officials also recognized the structural problems in the Fragmented Authoritarianism system, especially policy competition and corruption, and many supported the institutional reforms championed by Xi.
President Xi has converted existing institutions and practices such as leading small groups (LSGs)
[9] and campaign-style policymaking to achieve new goals. The two main changes observed with top-level design are policy “conglomeration,” where policy authority is aggregated or consolidated via super-ministries, and merging Party-State responsibilities. This institutional reform unifies policy authority into one entity, from previously fragmented departments, with a high bureaucratic rank and also layers in Party leadership such that the Party is the policymaker and the State entity serves strictly as policy implementer. This reform removes policy discretion in implementation from both central state and local state to the Party. The other interconnected change is the creation of “coordinating institutions” where LSGs control the policy process directly through campaign-style policymaking tactics in many key policy areas, including national security and poverty alleviation. The enforcement mechanism is the ability to requisition local state agents and embed “key tasks” in annual evaluations,
[10] supported by new forms of digital monitoring of local officials.
[11] These reforms eliminate the vertical bargaining by local state agents and horizontal competition among central ministries normally observed in the Fragmented Authoritarianism model.
