Zouping Revisited

Adaptive Governance in a Chinese County

Jean C. Oi, Steven Goldstein, Jean C. Oi, Steven Goldstein

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781503604551
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economía
• Subtopic: Política económica

China has undergone dramatic change in its economic institutions in recent years, but surprisingly little change politically. Somehow, the political institutions seem capable of governing a vastly more complex market economy and a rapidly changing labor force. One possible explanation, examined in Zouping Revisited, is that within the old organizational molds there have been subtle but profound changes to the ways these governing bodies actually work. The authors take as a case study the local government of Zouping County and find that it has been able to evolve significantly through ad hoc bureaucratic adaptations and accommodations that drastically change the operation of government institutions.

Zouping has long served as a window into local-level Chinese politics, economy, and culture. In this volume, top scholars analyze the most important changes in the county over the last two decades. The picture that emerges is one of institutional agility and creativity as a new form of resilience within an authoritarian regime.

PART ONE

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Change within Continuity

Zouping County Government

Jean C. Oi and Steven M. Goldstein

Observers have often pointed out that China has undergone dramatic change in its economic institutions without corresponding changes in its political institutions. On the surface, this seems an obvious point. China remains a one-party state ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The institutional structure and the formal organization of the government and party bureaucracies have changed little since the onset of economic reform. Yet the political institutions have so far seemed capable of governing a vastly more complex market economy that has a much more heterogeneous and rapidly changing labor force. Is it possible that China’s political institutions have somehow managed to cope despite remaining basically unreformed, or have there been more subtle and profound changes in the way that the existing organizational structures actually operate? This is the core question pursued in this book.

The research collected in this volume suggests that the old organizational structures in fact have come to operate in surprising new ways. Drawing on fieldwork at the lowest levels of the administrative bureaucracy in one Chinese county, this volume offers new insights into the adaptability of this communist one-party system. Such findings also may shed new light on the concept of “authoritarian resilience,” which has gained currency in the political science literature (with the case of China front and center) as many attempt to explain how economic change progresses seemingly without political reform.¹ Andrew Nathan’s seminal piece argues that it works through institutionalization, the creation of new mechanisms that address critical issues such as succession, promotion, functional specialization, and increased political participation.² Kellee Tsai builds on the institutional perspective by showing how new institutions come about, a process that she sees resulting in “adaptive informal institutions,” whereby the rules eventually change regarding actions or groups that were originally outside of the system.³ Ben Hillman takes a different direction to argue that it is in fact informal institutions, specifically patronage networks, that contributes to resilience.⁴ Others, such as Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth Perry, reject the focus on institutions, formal or informal, as too narrow and instead argue that one needs to look at unique policy mechanisms, especially at those that may precede the reform period, back to the Chinese Communist Party’s past.⁵ They argue that methods inherited from the “guerrilla and revolutionary style of governance” explain China’s success.

The search for answers is far from over. Our understanding of authoritarian systems remains incomplete, especially when it comes to China’s one-party state. While Nathan and Tsai shed light on how new institutions and agencies come into being, and Heilmann and Perry help explain how policy changes are more easily achieved in China than in other countries, both approaches pay far less attention to the adaptive capacities of the existing system. The first perspective is about subtracting or adding to existing institutions; the latter is about policy changes and their implementation. Some important new work is being done on how the state has managed to maintain a smaller core bureaucracy while reducing the size of the larger bureaucracy overall.⁶ Others worry that township governments have turned into “hollow shells” with fewer and fewer resources.⁷ Many unanswered questions remain about what has happened within China’s existing institutional structure, inside the agencies of local government, after reductions are made and resources are taken away.

This volume looks inside existing institutions of local governance to see if and how they have evolved over time in response to changing economic and political contexts. We examine how a local government has been able to govern within a radically changed economic and political environment while the preexisting Leninist structure remains. The fundamental finding that emerges is that China’s economic reforms and growth have not only affected incomes and quality of life but have significantly changed ways of governance, despite the fact that institutional forms of governance often appear unchanged.

Our approach recognizes the importance of informal relations, the existence of corruption, and the many problems facing local governments as China develops, but we argue that there is more to the story of governance, one that can easily be overlooked when one focuses only on the problems. That said, while none of the chapters focus on complaints that may lead to protests, a number of the chapters provide new insights into how local governments actually respond to problems and who in those governments are working to find solutions. Some might wonder whether our special relationship with the county limited our research and prevented us from probing informal relations and problems. On the contrary, because of good connections developed over the years, we sometimes gained privileged insights about problems in governance as we will discuss below. We seek to go beyond describing problems to analyze how the system has coped with challenges and adapted to the economic and political changes.

This volume describes ad hoc bureaucratic adaptations and accommodations that change the operation, if not the organizational form, of government institutions. In this process, existing agencies play new and unexpected roles. What emerges in this volume is a perspective close to what Martin Dimitrov calls “adaptive institutional change.”⁸ It is a story of how state agencies, faced with rapid and far-reaching economic changes that create new demands and challenges, are adapting, sometimes in a creative and entrepreneurial fashion, in the ways they carry out their functions and exercise their authority. The picture that emerges is one of institutional agility, with ongoing political change masked by outward continuity in formal organizations. Local government agencies have changed almost imperceptibly to meet new challenges.

A Window onto China: Zouping County, Shandong Province

Almost a decade after the policy of reform and opening was adopted, most places in China remained closed to foreign researchers. As Steven Goldstein’s preface details, through the efforts of Michel Oksenberg, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan who was serving on the staff of the White House National Security Council at the time of diplomatic normalization in 1979, an agreement was reached between the United States and China that provided an open field site for American researchers. That site was Zouping County in Shandong Province. Beginning in the mid-1980s, American researchers were allowed to conduct research in the county seat as well as in a number of “open villages” in Zouping County. Since then Zouping has provided a window on the changes that have been taking place at the local level. At least two hundred foreign scholars have been hosted by the county, and Zouping has been featured or used as a case in numerous studies.⁹ A representative collection of the first wave of research was published in Andrew Walder’s edited volume on Zouping, Zouping in Transition, almost two decades ago, which focused heavily on economic changes and their consequences during the earliest phase of market reform.¹⁰

In Walder’s 1998 volume, Zouping County was described as “unexceptional in either the pace and nature of change . . . or in its historical and geographical endowments.”¹¹ In the late 1980s, the county seat looked like so many others in rural China, with few automobiles, a limited road network, and little commercial development. The county government’s guest-house had limited modern facilities. A member of the service staff inquired every evening how many buckets of hot water would be needed for bathing the next morning. Each morning, a line of staff members would deliver the buckets of scalding hot water, which would be poured into the large bathtub, where the hot water could be mixed with the cold water from the faucet. International phone calls were possible but had to be placed and received at the front desk. The most imposing building in town was the three-story Russian-style concrete government and party headquarters, where the offices were poorly furnished and dimly lit, cooled in summer with fans. Officials, including bureau heads, lived in cramped government-owned apartments. A few lived in larger quarters, but the dwellings were rustic single-story structures, often with tamped-earth floors. The few passenger cars that existed belonged to the county or township governments. A few rich villages, like the one where foreign scholars lived when doing research in the countryside, also had cars. But that was the old Zouping soon after the beginning of the reforms.

Today, more than three decades later, Zouping is far from “unexceptional.” Its subsequent growth has made it nothing short of spectacular. By 2003 the county was officially ranked as one of the thirty richest within Shandong Province. In 2005 it ranked among the richest 100 counties nationally. In 2008 it became the second-richest county in Shandong and was ranked fifteenth nationally among small-and medium-size cities.

The new prosperity is reflected in the development of the county seat. It has become a bustling commercial entity with a wide array of shops, modern hotels, and restaurants. The restaurants, which serve a range of local and foreign cuisines, include a branch of a Taiwanese soy milk breakfast shop, a Brazilian steakhouse, and a French-style bakery that sells freshly made and tasty whipped-cream birthday cakes, complete with candles. Instead of nearly deserted, dusty roads, the county has an extensive network of well-lit and well-maintained asphalt roadways, including a number of six-lane boulevards. Traffic jams are now common, especially in the city center, as more ordinary citizens have acquired cars and as trucks deliver goods and services throughout the area.¹²

The government and party headquarters have moved to a gleaming new high-rise complex of metal and glass, with skylights, brightly lit offices, nicely appointed furniture, greenery inside and out, and central air conditioning.¹³ Instead of a walled government compound in the center of town, the new combined offices stand on a small hill, anchoring a new development of parks and housing, including those for government staff. Many officials now own their apartments in the new housing development.

County revenues have grown immensely. In 1992 total county revenue was a just under 67 million renminbi (RMB).¹⁴ By 2003 it had increased to 104 million RMB, by 2011 it reached 1.4 billion RMB, and in 2015 it reached 10.6 billion.¹⁵ The scope of the growth is further reflected in the total gross output of the county. Adjusted to constant 1990 yuan, in 1993 total gross output was 4.5 billion RMB; by 2009 it had increased more than tenfold, to 47.3 billion RMB. By 2015 the number amounted to 81.8 billion RMB.¹⁶

In light of questions about the reliability of government numbers on revenue and output,¹⁷ one can look to proxies to provide further measures of the county’s growth.¹⁸ Zouping’s total electricity consumption steadily increased, rising from 3.00 billion kilowatt hours in 2003 to 11.13 billion kilowatt hours in 2011. In 2014 Zouping consumed 15.7 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, of which 15.1 billion was used by industrial production.¹⁹ The volume of railway freight has increased considerably as well, almost quintupling from 640,000 tons in 2006 to 3 million tons in 2011. The amount of new loans issued by banks shows a slightly different trend: the annual growth rate is moderate, apart from a drastic jump from 153.29 million RMB in 2004 to 1.6 billion RMB in 2007.²⁰ Growth in government revenues has allowed the county to increase expenditures on education as well as social services. Social insurance per capita more than tripled, from 1.50 RMB in 2006 to 4.65 RMB in 2011. The per capita expenditure on education for the same period rose from 189.33 RMB to 1,311.33 RMB.²¹

Precisely because it has undergone a dramatic economic transformation, Zouping remains an ideal window on China to help us understand how governing structures have been able to adapt to dramatic economic and social changes with little apparent political institutional change. Moreover, the wealth of earlier research and published works on Zouping provide a rare and invaluable baseline to help us understand exactly how the county has changed, both economically and politically, and to allow us to better gauge the evolution of its institutions of governance. What has transpired in Zouping provides a unique opportunity to examine both continuity and change in great detail.

We begin with a detailed overview of the economic transformation in Zouping. The ...