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Post-Mao reforms ranging from de-collectivization to the abolition of agricultural taxes have eroded the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) control over the rural periphery. However, with an agenda to strengthen the CCP’s all-around control over the economy and society, the Xi Jinping era saw a reversal of the long-term trend. We argue that Xi’s high-profile anti-poverty campaign from 2015 to 2020 consisted of massive Party building attempts and served as an important strategy for the Party to repenetrate the rural periphery. Based on in-depth fieldwork, archival research, and secondary information sources, we show that by injecting human and financial resources into poverty regions, the CCP reinvigorated its previously underfunded and demoralized grassroots organs, expanded rural Party member recruitment, and enhanced the Party’s intervention in village affairs. Therefore, despite its seemingly economic nature, Xi’s anti-poverty campaign may lead to the long-lasting effect of Party power consolidation in the countryside. This finding suggests that authoritarian regimes can use campaigns with appealing policy goals to advance broader political agendas and enhance authoritarian resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's environmental crackdowns under Xi Jinping have led to a sweeping shutdown of private enterprises. To circumvent this, enterprises have developed different survival strategies including direct lobbying to government officials and indirect lobbying through business associations. Based on comparative case studies of environmental lobbying in Chinese cities, our research finds that larger enterprises, enjoying more economic leverage, tend to lobby directly using their own political connections to sway environmental enforcement. By contrast, smaller enterprises are excluded from these clientelist networks and have to lobby through business associations, the effectiveness of which hinges on the support of large enterprises. Therefore, we argue that although the Chinese government's increasingly stringent environmental policies have shrunk the lobbying (and living) space for private enterprises, the existence of environmental clientelism protects economically powerful and politically connected private enterprises but sacrifices the others in the implementation of environmental policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In autocracies facing widespread corruption, the allocation of the scant attention available for fighting corruption strongly affects corruption control. Although research has found that authoritarian regimes tend to fight corruption selectively, it is unknown whether and how autocracies allocate attention across different policy areas to combat corruption. We propose that single‐party authoritarian regimes can steer anticorruption attention to the policy domains prioritized by the central authority through the mechanism of cross‐organizational policy coordination. Using original datasets compiled from Chinese governmental and procuratorial policy papers from 1998 to 2016, we demonstrate that Chinese prosecutors direct anticorruption attention to the policy domains accentuated in the central government's major reforms. Our field interviews support this finding and reveal possible disruption of anticorruption efforts in policy domains falling off the central government's top list. Thus, we extend the research on political influence over anticorruption agencies and show that single‐party regimes can instrumentalize anticorruption to serve the government's policy agenda, driving the allocation of limited anticorruption attention across policy areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely assumed that authoritarian states tend to use repression to suffocate social conflicts that threaten regime stability. Focusing on the Chinese state's responses to resource conflict, a particular type of social conflict triggered by mineral resource extraction, this research argues that authoritarian regimes may prefer to use redistributive policies to defuse social unrest under certain circumstances. Through mixed methods combining qualitative research and statistical analysis, I find that local governments in resource-rich regions do not spend heavily on coercive state apparatus. Instead, they generously hand out social security benefits to appease aggrieved citizens. Furthermore, the Chinese state actively involves mining companies in the redistribution process and requires them to share the financial costs of relief policies. Therefore, when conflicts arise between specific social groups with conflicting interests, redistribution may be a more effective strategy to preserve regime stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mineral resource extraction has frequently caused social tensions in China. This research examines the reactive and pre-emptive strategies used by the Chinese state to cope with resource conflicts. Based on extensive fieldwork in multiple mining areas, we find that the Chinese local state actively mediates between the mining sector and local citizens, and skilfully suppresses collective protests. More importantly, it pre-emptively intervenes in dispute-prone processes and redistributes resource wealth to create vested interests and mitigate popular grievances. We argue that the active state intervention in resource conflicts in China is driven by the party-state's tight control of local officials, which prevents local capture by resource interests, and enabled by the party-state's deep reach into society, which allows grassroots governments to negotiate between conflicting interests and mobilize resources towards conflict resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Countries endowed with rich natural resources such as fuels and minerals often fall behind in human development. Does resource endowment hamper human capital development in China, a country that hosts rich resources in many of its regions? Through cross-regional and longitudinal statistical analysis and field research in selected mining areas, this study finds that resource dependence reduces government expenditure on human capital-enhancing public goods including education and health care. The local economic structure and reduced demand for labour, the shifting of government responsibilities onto mining enterprises, and the myopia of local residents and officials all discourage the local governments in resource-rich regions from investing in human capital. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article compares two neighbouring underdeveloped counties in south-west China. They share many similarities in economic, political and demographic structures, but experience divergent levels of social instability. The comparison suggests that, under China's political system and cadre incentive structure, the endowment of mineral resources in one county, and the lack thereof in the other, significantly influences the modes of economic development and local governance in these two counties, and thus contributes to their different levels of social instability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the late 1970s, China's fiscal system has facilitated the initiation and implementation of economic reforms and greatly contributed to China's remarkable economic achievements. However, weaknesses of the fiscal system have been exposed that have aroused concerns about the weakening of state capacity. While many have discussed the loss of central fiscal control over localities under decentralization and its negative consequences, not enough attention has been paid to another major problem: the diffusion of fiscal power to nonfiscal government departments. In this article, I argue that the existence of the extra-budgetary system has granted ad hoc taxation power to nonfiscal departments and led to the mismanagement of fiscal revenue. Compared with the vertical diffusion of fiscal power, i.e., the devolution of fiscal authority from central to lower-level governments, the horizontal diffusion of fiscal power is more difficult to control and more detrimental to the institutionalization of China's fiscal system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]