This paper examines how the delegation of legislative authority from the central to local governments in China affects environmental regulations. While this legislative decentralization has achieved some of its intended benefits, such as introducing balances within local governance and legitimizing administrative and fiscal decentralization policies, there is also the problem of legislative dilution. Two major institutional flaws in China's legislative system exacerbate this issue: the absence of competitive elections for local People's Congress representatives and insufficient resources for constitutional review by the National People's Congress. Consequently, local political and economic elites capture legislative power to primarily advance their own interests. We substantiate this analysis with a systematic evaluation of local adaptations of the Atmospheric Pollution Prevention and Control Law and find evidence indicating that provincial legislatures have weakened national regulations, resulting in deteriorating air quality. Enforcement data from local government agencies and the spatial mobility of polluting firms further support this hypothesis. Moreover, the extent of legislative dilution varies with local contextual factors, such as direct central supervision and informal patronage networks with the center. This research contributes to the broader discourse on decentralization by focusing on the benefits and challenges of legislative authority delegation, a dimension of decentralization that has not been thoroughly examined in existing literature. Our findings on how local institutional quality affects decentralization outcomes align with similar results observed in other areas of decentralization.

We study the promotion of provincial level officials between 1978 and 2022 and cannot find empirical support for the meritocratic argument. Work ties with top leaders, particularly with the leadership core, have provided provincial officials with advantage in promotion. Methodologically, we use official individual fixed effects to estimate a cleaner effect of social ties and show that previous research has underestimated this impact. This study contributes to the debate about elite politics in contemporary China and offers a firmer empirical grounding for understanding the political foundation of China's economic policies and overall development.

This study interrogates the theoretical and empirical validities of two dominant theories about Chinese state in the post-Mao period. The authors argue that the meritocratic view has under-theorized the innate contradiction between officials' personal competence and political loyalty. In order to survive political struggles, political leaders need to rely on patronage networks to recruit followers and solidify trust, often at the expense of official competence. The popular view also misrepresents China's cadre assessment system in several important ways. The authors supplement this theoretical and anecdotal evidence with a systematic study of provincial level officials between 1978 and 2020. Contrary to the meritocratic view, leaders' economic performance does not increase their promotion chances. Work ties with central leaders, on the other hand, have provided provincial officials with advantage in promotion. This study contributes to general theories of autocratic state and inform the debate about autocratic growth in the political economy literature.

Under intense fiscal pressure, China's local governments raced against each other to offer business-friendly policies to mobile industries. Lax environmental enforcement was widely adopted across the country and many poor regions became havens for polluting factories. We argue that this adverse effect went deeper than the interjurisdictional competition argument. Within each jurisdiction, urban and rural communities engaged in a similar rivalry. Local governments, facing stronger societal environmental pressure from urban communities, prioritized urban environment and allocated fewer administrative resources to rural environment enforcement. As a result, polluting enterprises found refuge in the rural part of these jurisdictions. We merge a national firm registry database with a national survey of polluting enterprises firms and find strong evidence supporting this hypothesis. Our research extends the scope of the pollution haven hypothesis from an inter-jurisdictional dimension to the urban-rural divide, a source of environmental injustice that is understudied in the literature. Our study of firm location choices also complements current researches on Chinese rural pollution by highlighting the political and economic causes of pollution.

Do non-Westerners donate differently? Drawing on a unique survey after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, this article reports some empirical findings about Chinese donation behavior. Our empirical analysis confirms the importance of various socioeconomic factors in charitable giving. What distinguishes the Chinese case from other societies is the role of politics. Political attitudes affect how people donate: Less trustful individuals and less dependent communities do not embrace state-centered charity enthusiastically. Our research expands the spatial coverage of the charity study that is dominated by experiences and practices from European and North American countries. To generate hypotheses about political attitudes, we develop a simple political model of charity. Placing politicians’ survival motivation at the center opens up new inquiries that are underexplored by current literature. It also inspires further research into comparative institutional designs of charity across national boundaries.

China launched a massive poverty alleviation program in the 1990s that focused on nationally designated poverty counties. By injecting earmarked transfers with clear spending mandates, the central government hoped for major investments in productive capacities in the poverty counties so they could develop sustainably. Comparing fiscal data of county governments through a regression discontinuity approach, we show that the opposite was true. Poverty county officials failed to make extra investments in production-oriented areas while diversion of central transfers for administrative consumption was rampant. This article develops a better empirical strategy to challenge some earlier findings. Theoretically, this article offers a different case of elite capture under a non-democratic regime. Our focus on poverty regions also reveals the importance of maintaining bureaucratic support in local politics. It complements the popular notion that Chinese local officials are mostly geared toward growth.

This article explains the regional variation in the electoral rules governing village election in China. We argue that China’s fast urbanization and land development have undermined the quality of rural democracy because local government officials faced pressure to ensure “right” cadres elected, and therefore had motivation to manipulate election rules. A panel dataset covering two rounds of elections in 2005 and 2008 is utilized to test the hypothesized relationship. Our findings are robust to various refinements in measurement and model specification. These findings contribute to the general literature on land and democratization as well as the recent debate about competitive elections in authoritarian countries.

This article examines the institutional foundations of the remarkable growth of the Chinese economy, paying particular attention to official incentives, institutional constraints, and local developmentalism. It begins by outlining two approaches that explain the role of local officials as agents of economic growth: the fiscal incentives approach, which views local officials as revenue maximizers; and the fiscal federalism approach, which views officials as promotion maximizers. It then discusses the tournament thesis based on Chinese policy and empirical data before proposing a three-pronged framework that analyzes China’s political economy and explains why the country’s revenue-maximizing local officials have pursued a particular form of developmentalism since the early 1990s. This framework takes into account a number of phenomena in China’s economic development and transition, including massive industrialization and urbanization, local protectionism, the privatization of state-owned enterprises, and the rise of TVEs (township and village enterprises).

China is undergoing an urbanization process that is unprecedented in human history. Scholars have made some advancement in understanding its impact on Chinese society and economy. How rapid urbanization has affected Chinese politics is a relatively understudies topic. In this paper, we explore this aspect and argue that China’s fast urbanization and land development has undermined the quality of rural democracy because local government officials faced pressure to ensure “right” cadres elected, and therefore had motivation to manipulate election rules. A panel dataset covering two rounds of elections in 2004 and 2008 is utilized to establish the causal relationship. Our findings are robust to various refinements in measurement and model specification. These findings contribute to the general literature on land and democratization as well as the debate about modernization in a comparative context.

China's rising demand for natural resources and its growing presence in many poor and resource-rich countries have been criticized for promoting neo-colonialism in the 21st century. Using panel data for 135 developing countries from 1995 to 2007, the present paper empirically evaluates the validity of such claims. Our findings do not support the resource curse thesis in the areas of industrialization and economic growth. Moreover, the effect of resources is conditional on the initial quality of political institutions in a country.

China’s new development wave since the mid-1990s is distinguishable by its strong urbanism. Urban governments, particularly at municipal and county levels, rushed to build industrial parks. Urban landscape was also fundamentally transformed by their massive investments in infrastructures – both residential and commercial properties. How to explain local governments’ continuing drive for development? Why has this particular policy combination gained traction among local officials? We approach these questions by making a simple assumption about local governments as revenue maximisers. Their desires for more revenues are constrained by two institutional changes. Vertically, the central government recentralised the fiscal system, leaving local governments in fiscal shortages. Liberalisation and regional competition in the late 1990s further exacerbated their revenue imperative. The land regime provided the final institutional link that enabled local officials to leverage urban infrastructure and real estate for industrial expansion. This study can shed some light on the ongoing debate about China’s development model in the urban literature.

The functionalist reasoning of institutional changes builds on individual rationality and explains institutional changes from the demand side. While insightful, a comprehensive understanding also needs to take into account the supply side. The state, as the ultimate supplier of institutional changes, plays the pivotal role of agency; therefore, its willingness and ability decide how such regime change occurs and what particular form the new regime takes. Since the mid-1990s, the Chinese economy has embarked on a path of rapid industrialization and urbanization. The contestation over rural land development rights in China offers an excellent case to illuminate the importance of state agency in institutional changes. Drawing on case studies in China's three major urbanizing regions, this article analyzes how villages brought their own land directly to the land market and reaped handsome profits. We argue that the three successful cases, Nanhai in Guangdong, Kunshan in Jiangsu and Zhenggezhuang in Beijing, all represent a product of active agency on the supply side. The Chinese state's fragmented authority provides a favorable institutional environment for such changes.

Rural residential land represents one of the most important land use types in China. However, the literature so far has paid insufficient attention to the patterns and efficiencies of this type of land use. To fill in this gap, this paper uses a national survey to analyze the institutional setups for rural residential land use, to assess the effectiveness of existing regulations, and to evaluate the efficiencies in rural residential land use. Farmers' subjective receptiveness toward rural residential property regulation reform is also investigated. We find that rural residential properties are inefficiently utilized under the existing land use regulations, that those who are younger and who had previous migration experiences are more likely to support the free trading of rural residential properties while the village cadres are more likely to oppose it. A coordinated policy reform package that includes free trading of rural residential properties and Household Registration System to facilitate permanent migration out of the countryside is proposed to address the existing efficiencies in China's rural residential land use.

Safe and affordable housing is accepted as a basic right in the modern world. Studies on transitional societies have demonstrated how politicized the housing market can become and how housing consumption is determined by both economic forces and public rules. Rural housing in China offers a unique institutional environment. While residential land is collectively owned and allocated, villagers have the freedom to make decisions with regard to construction space. Drawing on a large national survey, this paper provides the first systematic analysis of the consequences of these different institutional rules. In terms of housing resources, residential land is distributed in a relatively equitable fashion, but the building of structures on that land is defined by a higher degree of social stratification. These findings extend the current literature and confirm the power of institutional rules in housing consumption.

The burst of housing bubbles in 2008 triggered the worst economic crisis in the United States since the Great Depression. Financial globalization has exacerbated the contagion and a worldwide crisis soon followed. As a major trading country, China depended heavily on export markets in the United States and Europe; therefore its economy experienced serious setbacks. After the double digit growth in 2007, the Chinese real estate market started to take a nose dive. In the first quarter of 2008, the average house price in 70 major cities grew 11 percent, but by the fourth quarter the growth rate slowed down to only 0.5 percent. The first quarter of 2009 even saw a decline of 1.1 percent, the first drop since 2000. The parallel between the United States and China, however, stopped there. While the American housing market continued to be sluggish after a steep decline, the housing market in China rebounded dramatically. After two consecutive quarters of negative growth, house prices rose again in the third quarter of 2009 and double-digit growth reappeared by the first half of 2010. In April 2010, for example, the average house price grew by 12.8 percent, the fastest rise since 2000! The national average actually understated the extent of price hikes in the hottest real estate markets, for example, Shenzhen (18 percent), Hangzhou (17 percent), Wenzhou (22 percent), Haikou (53 percent), and Sanya (52 percent).

To explain China’s dramatic economic growth,researchers have proposed a "tournament thesis." According to this thesis,the central government’s ability to set growth targets has played a crucial role in growth since political promotion is largely based on local economic growth.We use provincial officials’ career mobility data to test this thesis.For both time periods（1979-1995 and 1979-2002）,economic performance,measured in annual,average and relative terms,did not affect these officials’ career advancement.We then sketch an alternative analytical framework to explain Chinese local officials’ strong urge for developmentalism and,finally,draw policy implications from this explanatory framework.

Villagers' committee elections in Chinese rural areas highlight the promise as well as the challenge of democratization in a one-party state. Why are there huge regional variations in terms of voter turnout rate? Based on a large survey conducted in 2005, we argue that electoral procedures have played a crucial role in signaling the democratic intent of local governments. Villagers were more responsive to more meaningful elections with higher-quality electoral procedures. In addition, competitive politics has reactivated traditional social ties and networks in village lives, which have mobilized villagers to voting stations. The results are robust to endogeneity tests and other model specifications. These empirical findings highlight electoral dynamics that are common in many transitional democracies. They also imply some major challenges facing China's rural democracy.