Why Local Officials in China Work So Hard : The Penetration of Ideas, Interests, and Institutions

Abstract

In the 2000s and 2010s, local officials in Zhejiang Province, Guangdong Province, and Tianjin City worked hard on both government efficiency (super-department reform and administrative licensing reform) and voice and accountability (social governance and village-level self-governance) governance areas. Such diligence can be attributed to a conjuncture of the central leaderships ideas such as the Scientific Outlook on Developmet, Harmonious Society, ideas of public service-driven fiscal system and the Acurate View on Performance and interests of the fiscal system and the cadre management system such as Award instead of Subsidy, the special grant mechanism and the strengthened material incentives in the performance evaluation, leading all to the consolidation of the states power.

This strengthened state power reached the county through the province and the municipality and in the process, the Party School Network played a crucial role in the socialization of the central ideas. And, in order for the state power to penetrate through state-building at the grassroots level, a conjuncture of reform ideas and the political economic interests of the county leadership such as promotion and prize money played a determinant role. But the factor that weakened the states power was the interests of the local bureaucracies or departmentalism. If the conjuncture of the ideas/interests of county leaderships did not overcome the interests of local bureaus, reforms or institutional building were weakened. On the other hand, if the local departments were persuaded by the conjuncture of the ideas/interests of county leaderships to agree to the reforms of the leaderships, the reform continued and expanded.

There were variations in the ways local officials worked hard on the institutional innovations in these three areas. Zhejiang Province was a social participation-driven model, Guangdong Province was a social pressure-driven model, and Tianjin was a county competition model. The reason for this variation in institutional innovations is that Zhejiangs counties had the highest financial self-sufficiency rate and the low dependency rate on central grants, resulting in the most active response to societal demands. Guangdong Province was between Zhejiang and Tianjin in terms of the financial self-sufficiency rate and only responded to social pressure passively. Tianjin had the lowest rate of financial self-sufficiency. Its dependency rate was relatively high, which was more sensitive to accountability from the top and to a promotion incentive, thus becoming the county government competition model. Finally, when the states power penetrated into the villages of the lowest unit through the ideas of county leaderships, the way that the states power penetrated through the new agents, such as village cadres with moral motives, rather than directly into the village allowed the states power to penetrate into society without being weakened.

The areas in which three regions county local officials worked hard are presented in detail in case studies in Chapter 4. To explain why local bureaucrats were working hard, Chapter 2 explains the changes in the intergovernmental fiscal system through case studies, and Chapter 3 analyzes the changes in the vertical mobility of municipal and county-level leaders and cadre management system in Zhejiang and Guangdong provinces through multi-level statistics analysis and case studies. In Chapter 4, the areas where bureaucrats worked hard are both government efficiency and voice and accountability governace areas that were set by the central government in advance through financial and performance management in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3. In Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, the changes in the fiscal system and the performance evaluation institution led to the strengthening of the states power and a change of the local state role. In order to explain the institutional changes in Chapters 2 and 3, this study emphasized the combination of ideas and interests of central and local leaderships in each chapter. Chapter 4 attempted to show the dynamics of how the ideas-interests of county leaderships interacted with the interests of the local departments in the penetration process of the states power. Chapters 2 and 3 mainly explore the consolidation of the states power by scrutinizing the national formal institutions, which affected fiscal and power relations among the provice, municipality and county. Chapter 4 describes the strengthened national official system that had impacts on relations among the county, township (sub-district) and village (urban community), and explained how village leaders with moral motives were connected with such formal institutions. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine how the states power travelled down to the local state and penetrated in order from the center all the way down to the village society in China.