Routledge Contemporary China Series, 122. London; New York: Routledge, 2015. xvi, 181 pp. (Illustrations, maps.) US$145.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-415-74785-1.
This edited volume makes a significant contribution to a burgeoning literature on sub-national policy experimentation and diffusion in China. Bringing together nine rich and varied case studies, the volume sets out to more systematically theorize the pathways and processes of local policy innovation and diffusion, important for their potential to effect large-scale change. Four distinct patterns of policy diffusion are identified: top-down, bottom-up, inter-regional and intra-provincial. Each of these is found to have a different relationship to factors that commonly explain policy innovation and diffusion: persistent local governance challenges linked to cadre promotion criteria are found to drive most cases of local innovation, but only cause subnational diffusion. Central support can rapidly spread local initiatives nationally, but absent local need, centrally driven policies can encounter local resistance and innovative reinterpretation, behaviour which can spread regionally. Bureaucratic competition between government branches can also affect the speed of diffusion.
The case studies reveal how widespread local policy innovation and diffusion are across different policy areas. Highlighting the flexibility sub-national authorities can have, Ciqi Mei and Margaret Pearson’s chapter explains a case of defiance of Beijing`s attempts to curb local steel production. The authors show how a dynamic process of action, learning, and reaction shapes local behaviour. Observing how Beijing punished one offending steel producer to deter others, local governments and other producers calculated that the rewards of continued growth outweighed the probability and costs of punishment. Defiance thus spread, and steel production grew. Anna Lora-Wainwright also highlights how iterated, strategic interaction influences innovation and diffusion. As national urbanization policy extended to a Sichuan village, it was met not with resistance but with innovative individual responses to capitalize on the process. In response to a proposed development plan requiring village relocation, many villagers increased their house sizes in hopes of winning additional compensation. This strategy spread to such an extent that it ended up risking implementation of the plan due to higher compensation costs.
Kun-Chin Lin and Shaofeng Chen analyze another instance of strategic central-local interaction, this time in the area of state-owned enterprise (SOE) restructuring. The authors present two cases where centre and locality block each other’s initiatives and try to impose their own. When centrally mandated enterprise restructuring cut local governments off from enterprise-generated revenues, local governments developed countermeasures to preserve access to these revenues. One municipality leveraged its regulatory authority to extract side payments from a restructured firm. Another managed to implant its loyalists into a privatized firm’s new management to protect the locality’s claim on revenues, foiling part—but not all—of the intent of the central policies. William Hurst outlines a similar outcome in his chapter on privatization of a county-level SOE. He describes how local elites, faced with the centrally mandated privatization program, bent the policy to their advantage in order to retain access to the firm’s resources. Through a complex set of political and economic maneuvers, local officials orchestrated what Hurst calls a partial reform equilibrium under which local elites extracted benefits at the expense of both workers’ and central policy makers’ interests. While the objective of privatization was formally achieved, other central objectives of ending local political interference and access to firm resources were not. These cases demonstrate the dynamic, interactive nature of local innovation and policy diffusion, underpinning a key argument of the volume: that policy outcomes are a product of political compromise which may not yield socially optimal policies. Many cases highlight the formal institutions and structures shaping these interactive processes, and how informal institutions are developed to mediate between central dictates and local realities. Meina Cai describes how Zhejiang and Chongqing officials facing conflicting mandates (economic development and centrally imposed land-use restrictions) created land-use quota exchanges. Less developed counties traded their land development quotas for payments and investment from more developed counties, allowing the latter to build on more land than normally permitted. While central land-use quotas were violated at the county level, at the provincial level they balanced out to remain compliant with central rules. Similarly, Marie-Eve Rény outlines how some localities developed a more flexible policy of containment for unregistered Protestant house churches than Beijing’s harder-line policy of cooptation or repression. Containment is an informal agreement where house churches provide information to local police in exchange for a permissive approach to their activities, so long as they don’t threaten social stability. Rény argues the practice makes governance more effective and less costly, although the stricter central policy is an obstacle to wider diffusion.
May Farid’s chapter underlines another key argument of the volume, that the fragmented structure of the political system opens spaces for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to support “system innovation.” Farid argues that NGOs can affect discourse on issues or pursue direct advocacy, but cannot mobilize opposition. An incremental process of micro-influence is described, whereby NGOs support local officials with expertise and capacity, offering advice, feedback, training and service delivery, and even policy solutions and demonstration sites—bearing some of the risks of local experimentation.
Finally, John James Kennedy and Dan Chen’s chapter details how local innovation has become an end in itself for many local cadres, as it may be rewarded—and influenced—by superiors. Looking at electoral process innovations, the authors note that innovations challenging Communist Party authority (such as direct elections for township head) are quickly halted. On the other hand, they observe an explosion of less significant “innovative” adjustments of electoral procedures, particularly those which strengthen grassroots Party control—in line with current central preferences.
This volume firmly establishes the frequency, diversity, and importance of local innovation and diffusion in China’s broader policy process, noting China’s capacity to effectively address its myriad governance challenges is at stake. It begins to lay theoretical groundwork to explain this diversity with its typology of diffusion patterns, and their relationship to several key structural, agent-centred, and contextual variables. Given its specialization, it is most suitable for those with some prior understanding of China’s political system. Having advanced our understanding of the intertwining structures and processes involved in local initiative, the volume rightly calls for more research which emphasizes disaggregating the state, the interaction between its different levels, and the role of non-state actors.
Stephen Trott
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
pp. 628-630