Chinese Local Governance:
Contemporary Innovation and Reform

 

**Conference participants ONLY have been granted access to the full papers to read ahead of time.**
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Abstracts

More abstracts coming soon!

Generating Popular Support in China: The Material, Moral and Institutional Biases for Regime Survival
Bruce Dickson and Mingming Shen
It is widely believed that the CCP’s legitimacy is based on a combination of prosperity, normative beliefs, and ties to the state. This paper evaluates these claims by measuring the level of popular support and identifying the determinants of that support. We show three key findings. First, as in previous studies, we find significant differences in levels of support and trust for central and local governments. Second, we find that the relationship between prosperity and support is complex. Although higher levels of income produce higher support, retrospective income gains do not. Aggregate prosperity (per capita GDP) reduces support for the central government, and has no effect on support for local governments. Third, belonging to the CCP creates more support for the central government, but not for local governments. Previous studies have looked at these factors in isolation. When taken together, a different and more nuanced picture emerges.

Coercive Capacity and the Durability of the Chinese Authoritarian State
Yuhua WANG
Why has the Chinese authoritarian state remained so singularly durable in an age of democratization? Contrary to existing theories that are focused on economic and social explanations, we argue that the strong state coercive capacity has survived the authoritarian rule in China in the face of a destabilizing domestic and international environment. We demonstrate that the Chinese Communist Party has taken deliberate actions to enhance the cohesion of its coercive organizations—the police, in particular—by distributing “spoils of public office” to police chiefs. In addition, the state has extended the scope of its coercion by increasing police funding in localities where the state sector loses control of the population. We rely on mixed methods to test the theory.

Show me the Money: Inter-Jurisdiction Political Competition and Fiscal Extraction in China
Pierre F. Landry and Xiaobo LU
In contrast to the “race-to-the-bottom” nature of tax competition in democracies, we argue that the logic of inter-jurisdiction competition in authoritarian regimes leads to greater fiscal extraction. Specifically, promotion-seeking local politicians are incentivized to signal their loyalty and competence to their principal(s) by providing them with tangible fiscal revenues. The greater number of agents appealing to same principal, the more intense is local political competition, thus leading to greater fiscal extraction. We test our proposition in the context of county-level political competition in China, by taking advantage of the vast variation in the number of county-level jurisdictions across 300+ prefecture-level governments. Our extensive panel dataset of local government finance in China between 1999 and 2006 provides evidence for a positive relationship between the number of county-level jurisdictions and fiscal extraction in most provinces, but not so in autonomous regions. We corroborate the main results with evidence from spatial analysis that takes into account the interdependence of county behaviors, as well as from case studies of two quasi-natural experiments.

Dormitory Management and Boarding Students in China's Rural Elementary Schools
Yaojiang Shi, Ai Yue, Huan Wang, Fang Chang, Chu Yang, James Chu, and Scott Rozelle
With the implementation of the school merger program in rural China, more and more students are boarding at schools. However, poor, rural boarding students experience poorer health, increased behavioral problems, and reduced academic performance compared to their non-boarding peers. One of the explanations for this difference might be poorly trained life teachers, who are supposed to manage and care for the day to day lives of boarding students
The overall goal of this paper is explore whether an in-service life teacher training program can improve boarding students’ health, behavior, and academic performance. Drawing on results from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of a life teacher training program conducted in 10 primary boarding schools in Northwest China, we find significant improvements in health and behavior. Specifically, compared to boarding students in control schools, 15% fewer students in treatment schools reported feeling cold while sleeping at night. The results also showed that student tardiness and misbehaviors after class declined significantly by 18 percent and 78 percent, respectively. However, the in-service life teacher training program had no measurable impact on boarding students’ BMI-for-age Z-score, number of misbehaviors in class, and academic performance. Our analysis suggests that improved communication between life teachers and students might be one mechanism behind these results.

Transparency with Chinese Characteristics: The Role of State, Enterprise, and Society in China's Environmental Governance
Yeling Tan
This paper examines the impact of transparency regulations enacted under authoritarian conditions, through a study of China’s environmental transparency measures. Given China’s decentralized administrative structure, transparency ends up being weakest in the most polluted cities, demonstrating the challenge of policy implementation. That said, the transparency measures have allowed civil society to establish initiatives that affect environmental governance through unusual pathways. Change has taken place with MNCs using online pollution databases to monitor Chinese suppliers, while local governments have responded to a pollution transparency index by engaging with NGOs. However, these initiatives have had limited impact in changing the behavior of key stakeholders. For the environment ministry, enforcement costs remain high. For local governments, change in behavior depends on type and state-enterprise relations. For enterprises, change depends on relations with government and MNCs. Given China’s authoritarian structure, improvements in governance do not map directly onto stronger accountability, challenging common assumptions about the relationship between transparency and accountability.

Population and Politics: Local Variation in China's Migration Policies
Jeremy Wallace
China’s rapid economic growth has been accompanied by urbanization that is unique both in its scale as well as its shape—most rural migrants to China’s largest cities are temporary workers. The regime maintains policies that limit and constrain migration to manage this population shift through its household registration (hukou) system. Scholarship has focused on the broad outlines of the hukou system at the national-level and the second-class status it imparts to individual migrants. This paper documents experimental local variation in China’s hukou system to improve our expectations of the political, economic, and demographic consequences of its reform. Describing a new dataset on relaxation of the policy for small and medium cities in select counties in 10 provinces, the paper finds that reform induces differing demographic changes in different localities. In outlying regions, reform boosts total population growth. Yet in regions directly under provincial capitals, hukou reform slowed the growth of these regions. Results are confirmed using patterns captured in satellite imagery of nighttime lights. This discrepancy points to the importance of key cities for local elites and the political tradeoffs that they face over issues and space.

Perverse Complementarity: Political Connections & Use of Courts Among Chinese Firms
Yuen Yuen Ang and Nan Jia
This article examines if – and how – political connections influence the use of courts in transitional economies. Using survey data of over 3,800 private firms in China, we find that politically connected firms are more likely than other firms to use courts over informal means of dispute resolution. Our finding motivates a more challenging question: Are politically connected firms more inclined to use courts because of their advantages in “know-how” (knowledge of the legal system) or “know-who” (capacity to influence adjudication)? By manipulating variance in regional legal environment and corporate donations as moderators, we find evidence that political “know-who” dominates informational “know-how” in inducing connected firms to litigate. Our findings imply a relationship of perverse complementarity between political connections and use of courts. In transitional economies like China, expansion of formal legal institutions may not diminish the advantages of informal networks; rather, it is the latter that privileges access to the former.

Out of the Shadows: Identifying "Missing Girls" in Shaanxi Province Where Local Incentives have National Consequences
John Kennedy and Shi Yaojiang
In 2010, according to the sixth Chinese census, the sex ratio at birth was 118 males to 100 females for the country up from 117 for the 2000 census, and it is 123 in Shaanxi province. This is incredibly high compared to the global average at the time that ranges from 103 to 107. The numbers have prompted many international scholars and journalists to ask; where are the “missing girls” in China? Demographers and China scholars have presented three main explanations for the skewed sex ratio. One is sex selective abortion and the use of ultra sound to detect the sex of the fetus. The second is infanticide and the practice of allowing female infants to die. These two explanations do not bode well for the future social stability and equal gender balance. However, a third explanation raises the possibility of unregistered girls and unreported births particularly in the countryside. This paper explores the third explanation and uses village, county and provincial population data to identify the “missing girls” in one province. The descriptive statistical and in-depth interview data suggest that many of these unregistered girls exist in Chinese society, but without formal identification cards.

 

This conference is made possible by the contributions of the University Center for International Studies, the Asian Studies Center, and the China Council of the University of Pittsburgh.

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