Wire-Walking: Risk Management and Policy Experiments in China from a Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Policy scientists have long examined how policy innovation has emerged and diffused by focusing on the interaction between agents and policy programs. In contrast, this article focuses on how uncertainty in policy environments has affected the fate of policy innovation in an authoritarian state. Using original data from China’s official newspaper, the People’s Daily,it is found that the central government’s decision to promote sensitive policy experiments is a function of the perceived risks in the policy environment. The U-shaped relationship between the promotion of sensitive policy innovation and inflation reflects the wire-walking behavior of China’s central government. The central authority in China tends to promote fewer sensitive political experiments when inflation increases and resumes promoting experiments when the inflation rate passes a certain tipping point. It is also found that the central authority intentionally regulates the promotion of political experiments during important political events.

Keywords:

• policy innovation
• policy experiment
• China
• political reform
• inflation

Acknowledgments

We’d like to thank Xufeng Zhu, Jie Lv, Lei Guo, Leslie Pal, Yi Peng, Tao Feng and others for their comments and suggestions on previous versions of the paper in various conferences and workshops. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful review comments. Ciqi Mei would like to thank the financial support of China National Science Foundation (No. 71403143), Tsinghua Research Fund (No. 20141081210).

Notes

1. In 1998, the local government of a remote town called Buyun in Sichuan Province experimented with the first direct election of a township government chief. However, the experiment did not last and was eventually stopped in 2001 by the provincial government.

2. In 2017, Zhejiang province piloted an upgraded version of a one-stop service center by integrating several key departments both physically under one roof and digitally through big data and Internet technology. The name “visit once” or “at most one visit” emerged after the government promised that local residents and local business could receive most administrative licenses in one visit.

3. Yishan Township of Zouping City established the program of “Party Family Tag”, People’s Daily, August 12, 2003, p. 13.

4. Yang (2011, p. 88) classified innovation into three categories, namely institutional innovation (zhidu chuangxin), mechanism innovation (jizhi chaungxin) and technical innovation (jishu chaungxin). According to Yang, institutional innovation is often more sensitive than the other two: “Institution innovation involves building up a set of new institutions or fundamentally transforming current institutions; mechanism innovations are those creating new process, procedures or steps, improving the efficiency of resource mobilization, allocation and utilization; technical innovations are those adopting new technical means or tools”.

5. An exception is that the Second Plenary Session of every Party’s Central Committee is convened in the spring in the year immediately after the year the Party’s Central Committee is elected by the Party Congress.

6. More details on the database can be found at http://www.egreenapple.com/contents/56/110.html.

7. Two research assistants read the articles and coded them into different categories. The Cohen’s kappa coefficient was 0.797. The subsequent coding of the type of political reform was performed by the two authors.

8. King (1975) was the first to raise the idea of the “administrative absorption of politics” to explain why rapid urbanization has not caused a democratic movement in Hong Kong.

9. The State Bureau of Statistics started to publish CPI in the year 2001.

10. Figure A1 in the Appendix plots the partial autocorrelation function for administrative renovation and liberalization and adds the two (total reports on political reform). Standardized residuals are obtained from a negative binomial regression. The PACF plot suggests that the report on administrative renovation and liberalization utilizes the AR(1) process, while the sum of the two utilizes the AR(2) process.

11. We would like to thank one of our anonymous reviewers for this point.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ciqi Mei

Ciqi Mei is an associate professor in the School of Public Policy & Management, Tsinghua University.

Xiaonan Wang

Xiaonan Wang is a PhD student in the Department of Government and Politics in University of Maryland, College Park.