Decentralized Meritocracy

Abstract

The article explains the ongoing resilience of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime as a dynamic process of continual institutional adaptation of the CCP’s threat-management system, which simultaneously must address vertical (popular) and horizontal (internal) challenges. The author finds that the CCP central leadership’s current top-down intervention into subnational governments, featuring Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign, reform of local government financing platforms (LGFPs), and consolidation of personal power over the party-state, is the second of two major actions over the last thirty years designed to maintain the stability and survival of the single-party system. Notably, many of the contemporary challenges faced by the regime, such as a local government budgetary crisis and rampant official corruption within subnational governments, are in many respects the unforeseen consequences of an earlier intervention by the Center conducted in the mid-1990s under Jiang Zemin.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank the Institute of International Relations at National Chengchi University and the Center for Chinese Studies at National Central Library for their support during this research period. He would also like to thank Shengping Chang, I Yuan, Arthur Ding, and Pascal Abb for their helpful comments and feedback during the writing of this research project.

FUNDING

This research was funded through a Republic of China Ministry of Foreign Affairs Taiwan Fellowship.

Notes

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^88. Quoted in ibid.

^89. Quoted in Mamta Badkar, “China’s Crackdown On Corruption May Now Be Weighing on Growth,” Business Insider, June 27, 2014, http://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-corruption-crackdown-impacts-fai-2014-6 (accessed May 17, 2015). Similar concerns were expressed in an interview with an analyst in Taipei, Taiwan, on June 27, 2015.

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^92. Interview with academic in Taipei, Taiwan, June 8, 2015.

^93. Lu and Sun, “Local Government Financing Platforms in China,” 10.

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^95. Naughton, “Is There a ‘Xi Model’ of Economic Reform? ” 9.

^96. Interview with academic in Taipei, Taiwan on July 23, 2015.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded through a Republic of China Ministry of Foreign Affairs Taiwan Fellowship.