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Why do provincial governments change policy, even when those policies have proven successful? This paper explores a debate regarding the determinants of provincial policy choice and the degree of discretion provinces are permitted in this area. It does so by scrutinizing the shift in Guizhou's development policy from a poverty reduction orientation to a wholehearted pursuit of economic growth, urbanization and industrialization. In contrast to those who argue that central experience, prospects for promotion or local conditions are key factors explaining policy choice, the paper concludes that Guizhou's shift in policy had more to do with the backgrounds and experiences of top provincial leaders. The result has implications for our understanding of central–local relations and local government decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent literature on environmental governance in China frequently ascribes blame for China's environmental problems to sub-national governments' lax environmental enforcement. Such research implicitly assumes that more central control would lead to better results but, as yet, the role of the centre in environmental governance remains underresearched. In the context of the current phase of recentralization, this article studies central and local interests, capacities and interactions across policy issues and government agencies. By “bringing the centre back” into the study of central–local relations in China, we examine both where such recentralization has in fact occurred and whether such recentralization efforts have improved environmental outcomes. We argue that centralization does not improve outcomes in every case. Further, central and local levels of governance are not as different as they might seem. Indeed, there are significant areas of overlapping interests and similar patterns of behaviour, both positive (enforcement) and negative (shirking), between central and local administrations. The results draw an empirically and theoretically rich picture of central–local relations that highlights the innate complexity of China's environmental governance patterns during the current phase of recentralization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that manufacturing policies of Chinese local governments have provided an important corrective to some of the weaknesses inherent in the central government's indigenous innovation framework, most importantly its inattention to the importance of advanced manufacturing capabilities for innovation. Based on an original dataset of over one hundred executive interviews conducted with 43 Chinese wind and solar firms, I identify both central government R&D funding and continued local government support for manufacturing as critical factors in enabling innovation among China's renewable energy firms. In particular, this article shows that firms have utilized a combination of both central and local government policies to establish unique engineering capabilities required for innovation in commercialization and scale-up to mass production. The findings suggest that continued local government support for the manufacturing economy has not undermined central government innovation policies, but has (1) broadened the range of resources available to entrepreneurial firms and (2) enabled new options for industrial upgrading that are outside the conceptualization of innovation underlying the central government's indigenous innovation framework. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The scholarly work on China's environmental regulations in the context of “central–local” relations is dominated by the preference for a centralized approach. This article examines a centrally imposed and executed verification programme of locally reported pollution data, a rare and sustained central effort to enforce an environmental policy, namely the national pollution reduction target system. The programme was established in 2007 to curtail perceived widespread data falsification and to enhance the quality of emission data, the basis for assessing local compliance with targets. Based on an analysis of official documents and interviews with environmental officials and industry representatives, this article found that the verification programme appears to have reduced the overreporting problem with emission data, enhanced local monitoring and enforcement capacity, and to a certain degree deterred violations due to the increased frequency of national and local inspections. Nevertheless, significant challenges remain. Verification is highly resource intensive, it has involved little external oversight and public participation, the central authority has exerted significant yet unchecked discretionary powers, and poor data quality has remained an issue. Over time, the verification programme appears to have turned into essentially a “numbers game.” All those challenges indicate that a centralized enforcement approach is arguably ineffective in addressing China's long-standing problem of weak environmental policy implementation. This study also sheds lights on the classical “principal-agent” theory in the study of public bureaucracy. Not only does the principal distrust the agent, which is the main concern of the theory, but the agent also distrusts the principal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Based on findings from three years of site-intensive fieldwork at the local level, this article presents evidence to suggest that binary governance frameworks like centre–local relations are insufficient to understand certain local regulatory outcomes in contemporary China. I seek to specify a distinct type of local governance that has been emerging in recent years, which blurs existing binary concepts. It can be distinguished along two main dimensions: ostensible structure and modalities of governance. Two cases are analysed to illustrate the ways in which it impacts local regulatory outcomes. The analyses point to the need for expanding our portfolio of approaches to understanding local governance in contemporary China. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Decentralized environmental governance theory suggests that decentralization can produce better environmental performance mainly because lower-level governments are closer to the people and environmental issues and are considered more legitimate than the national government. However, China's decentralized system of environmental governance has been often regarded as a key factor in creating pollution problems rather than in solving them. To explain this puzzle, this article, using Blame Avoidance Behaviour in government theory as a theoretical framework, examines how blame avoidance behaviour shapes China's decentralized system of environmental governance from three perspectives: first, actors and the chain of blame shaped by the hierarchical power structure among environmental policymakers and implementers; second, the strategies of discursive domination and decentralization for blaming environmental problems on local officials; and lastly, the contextual factor of “hierarchical governmental trust.” Drawing on documentary discursive analysis and extensive fieldwork, this article suggests that the dysfunction of China's decentralized environmental governance structure may in fact be an outcome of a blame-shifting game between central and local governments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Unprecedented and highly visible degraded air quality in China's urban centres has prompted a step change in central government control efforts in recent years. This “War on Air Pollution” has included a mixture of administrative controls, regulatory clampdowns, economic incentives and public education campaigns. A critical constraint on how policies are designed and implemented is the central government's capacity to access accurate cost information, and monitor, evaluate and enforce the policies at subordinate levels of government. We examine in detail the directives and arrangements that underpin China's “War on Air Pollution” at the provincial level, taking Hebei province as a case study. Located upwind of Beijing, Hebei's heavy industries have been a particular focus of the environmental policies. The current approach, which requires highly specific and costly local actions, yet allocates funds centrally, suffers from misaligned incentives and does not address longstanding weaknesses in local policy monitoring, evaluation and enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the world's two largest countries requires feasible governance pathways that integrate politics, policy and administration. Using examples of successful mitigation at the local level in China (Guangzhou) and India (Gujarat), this article identifies integrated governance solutions that work in both cases through different types of linkages. In China, it is mainly intra-governmental linkages, while in India it is mainly state–society linkages. In neither case do international negotiations concerning emissions targets have significant effects, while national frameworks have only marginal effects. Approaching the problem in this comparative manner helps to clarify how greenhouse gas governance operates in each country, the lessons for central–local environmental relations, and the implications for international assistance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the so-called “central State Owned Enterprise (SOE) problem” in China's environmental governance system, namely central SOEs' defiance of environmental regulation. We present evidence showing that, in the last decade, central SOEs have been the source of a large number of serious pollution incidents and have often failed to comply with environmental guidelines and regulations. Central SOEs in the electricity generation and oil and gas industries are particularly culpable, with six firms alone accounting for 62 per cent of all 2,370 reported violations (2004–2016). We argue that a combination of “central protectionism” of state-owned national champions and insufficient regulatory capacity in the environmental bureaucracy have provided state firms under central management with both incentives and opportunities to shirk on environmental regulations. Yet, while the institutions of central protectionism are deeply rooted, countervailing forces within the complex Chinese state are also gaining momentum. In spite of the considerable regulatory challenges, officials in the environment bureaucracy display increasing resolve and ingenuity in trying to strengthen their enforcement capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Inter-jurisdictional water resource issues constitute a growing political and economic challenge in China. This article examines three such cases of hydropolitics, namely large dam construction, water resource allocation, and downstream water pollution, through the lens of central–local relations. It argues that the hydropolitics in China are characterized by the pursuit of localized preferences within the constraints imposed by a centralized political system. In each case, the primary actors are sub-national administrative units, who adopt various competitive strategies to pursue their own localized interests at the expense of neighbouring jurisdictions. This article argues that although vertical control mechanisms in the Chinese system effectively limit central–local preference divergence, they do little to contain horizontal conflicts between sub-national administrative units. The paucity of formal inter-jurisdictional dispute resolution mechanisms is a major barrier to meeting water resource challenges, and inter-jurisdictional collective action problems are likely to pose growing difficulties for the Chinese political system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During field research on environmental governance in the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in 2012, the author studied the Chinese state's efforts to promote its agenda and “civilizing mission,” the resistance of local Yi people to both, and the resulting clash of discourses on environmental protection. To understand the nature and mechanisms involved in this conflict, the author focuses on the state's “civilizing mission” in light of Foucault's power concept. The article examines two issues: 1) the strategies by which the central state exerts power and asserts its policies in a minority area, i.e. how it attempts to steer the behaviour of local cadres in order to implement its modernization concept, and 2) whether and to what degree it makes a difference that the researched area is a “minority” (Yi) area. To answer these questions, one county in the prefecture was taken as a case study. Furthermore, this article continuously refers to the policy field of environmental governance to substantiate the thesis of a civilizing project conducted by the centre. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Reforms carried out by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have long followed a traditional model of “experimentation under hierarchy.” This article will attempt to develop this model further by building a framework to illustrate the influence of both the political dynamics of hierarchical central–local relations and local economic circumstances in the introduction of large-scale political reforms. The initiation and expansion of “experimental points” are only permitted in those select few provinces with both favourable political and economic local conditions, allowing the CCP to minimize risk and make informed decisions regarding possibilities for nationwide reform. This article proposes that the hierarchical interaction of central and local political elites, and in particular provincial secretaries, can explain the extent of reforms, whereas the type of reform is linked to distinct provincial economic conditions and the provincial secretary's interpretation of provincial priorities. Put succinctly, the CCP's model of political reform can be specifically characterized as “experimentation under hierarchy in local conditions.” This article presents a detailed discussion of both the political and economic considerations inherent in this concept, and provides examples of reform programmes in Guangdong and Sichuan to illustrate the model in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines how Chinese reformers have used a set of "fatality indicators" to deal with the serious work safety situation in the past two decades. It argues that the system of fatality indicators is a prudent strategy to tackle the responsibility deficiencies in the previous work safety regulatory system and strengthen the central government's supervision over local safety management. The primary purpose of implementing the fatality indicators is to shift local officials' focus from a GDP-centred growth mode to a new mindset of achieving a balance between economic development and social stability in local governance. The article also indicates that the decline in work-related fatalities in recent years is evidence of the effectiveness of the fatality indicators. These achievements aside, however, the introduction of fatality indicators is closely associated with an increase in local officials' dishonest reporting of real death tolls and the fluctuation in very serious accidents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews the studies based on central-local government relations in the People's Republic of China. Research done in the area; Discussion on relations between Beijing and provinces in the post-Mao era.