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The anti-corruption campaign launched by General Secretary Xi Jinping has been one of the most far-reaching bureaucratic overhauls in modern Chinese history. How has Xi's crackdown on corruption shaped bureaucratic selection at the sub-provincial level? In this paper, we find that the purge has influenced how local ties are weighed in the appointment of prefecture city leaders. While it is common for provincial Party chiefs to appoint locally embedded officials to govern localities without high-profile corruption cases, they tend to appoint outside officials without local experience and connections to manage cities whose ex-leaders have recently been prosecuted for corruption. We argue that the provincial leaders' objective of installing non-local officials is to exert hierarchical control and oversight in localities affected by corruption. Using an original dataset of all Party secretaries from China's 287 prefecture-level cities between 2013 and 2020, we find a significant divergence in the local embeddedness of officials who are appointed to replace corrupt ex-leaders and the embeddedness of those who fill the vacancies of transferred or retired predecessors. Our study sheds light on how Xi's anti-corruption campaign has reshaped the central–local relations and the logic of political control in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rapid economic growth in China with considerable market intervention has led to renewed interest in the efficacy of industrial policy. Have industrial policies helped Chinese firms overcome market failures and boosted productivity, or have they distorted markets and undermined creative destruction? This paper explores these questions in the specific context of local implementation by studying the targeting of financial favors and the relationship of such targeting to local political incentives. Using unique and largely unexplored quasi-census firm-level data from annual tax surveys in China from 2007 to 2015, this paper demonstrates that financial favors disproportionately target loss-making, larger, older, and less productive firms. It then argues that short-term career incentives facing local officials explain this sub-optimal targeting, showing that promotion likelihood for city leaders increases with higher levels of 'excess' financial favors to firms, particularly when these favors are provided to loss-making firms. Finally, the paper estimates costs to the Chinese economy from misallocated financial support by showing that financial favors are associated with lower levels of firm entry and lower productivity growth. The paper contributes to the literature on industrial policy, political incentives, and misallocation, and has important implications for China's future growth and transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Three months into the Covid-19 crisis, lockdown has become a global response to the pandemic. Why have so many countries resorted to lockdown? How is it being implemented in different places? Why have some places had more success with lockdowns and others not? What does the effectiveness of lockdowns tell us about the local institutions entrusted with enforcing them? This paper compares how lockdown orders have been implemented in China, Italy, and the U.S. The analysis points to two major factors that have shaped the enforcement: tensions between national and local governments, and the strength of local territorial institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice in Leninist political systems of assigning local leaders concurrent seats on higher-level leadership bodies presents a puzzle. In China, for example, a subset of provincial leaders hold seats in the central Politburo, while some city-level leaders hold seats in provincial party standing committees (PPSCs). While some scholars view these concurrent appointments as a form of top-down control or co-optation, others see these arrangements as a reflection of local power and a channel for the assertion of local interests. In this paper, we attempt to adjudicate between these different views empirically by analyzing the patterns and consequences of concurrent appointments of city leaders to China's PPSCs. We introduce a new typology that distinguishes between the political and economic functions of concurrent appointments to differentiate four possible intergovernmental dynamics of control, co-optation, compromise, and concession. Through analysis of an original dataset on PPSC appointments and case studies of three Chinese cities, we show that concurrent appointments in China's provinces can function as a means of concession, compromise, or co-optation, but we find little evidence that concurrent appointments allow higher-level authorities to firmly control or economically exploit localities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the making of local climate governance in the Chinese setting where central-local inter-governmental relations continue to play critical part in almost every policy domain. Through analysing the climate responses of the three provincial-level governments at the Yangtze River Delta (YRD), the paper argues that the process of “experimentation under hierarchy” is relevant to understanding the evolving of the subnational climate regime in the YRD region. We find the preponderance of the central authorities in initiating national climate strategies and galvanising responses at the local level. Meanwhile, provincial governments have been able to leverage climate plans and actions to achieve their own gains. These findings suggest that any optimism about subnational climate activism in a Chinese setting has to be mixed with caution. In fact, the shadow of hierarchical authority structure lingers and plays important part in the initiation of subnational response and spurring climate responses and innovations from below. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses Chinese sub-national governments' implementation strategies to meet national energy efficiency targets in the 11th Five-Year Plan (2006-2010). Previous research has focused on the ways governance practices and decision-making structures shape implementation outcomes, yet very little attention has been given to what strategies local leaders actually employ to bridge national priorities with local interests. To illustrate how local leaders work politically, this paper highlights specific implementation methods officials use to strengthen formal incentives and create effective informal incentives to comply with energy efficiency mandates. The analysis is drawn from 53 interviews conducted in June and July of 2010 in Shanxi, a major coal-producing and energy-intensive province. Findings suggest that local government leaders conform to national directives by "bundling" the energy efficiency policy with policies of more pressing local importance or by "bundling" their energy efficiency objectives with the interests of groups with significant political influence. Ultimately, sub-national government officials frame policies in ways that give them legitimacy at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]