China S Local Administration

The remarkable changes in China over the past three decades are mostly considered at the national level, whereas local government – which has played and continues to play a key role in these developments – is often overlooked. The themes of China’s local administrative hierarchy, and its historical evolution, have until now received scant attention; this book fills that gap, and presents a comprehensive survey of China’s local administration, from the province down to the township. It examines the political and functional definitions and historical origins of the nine local administrative levels or categories in contemporary China: the province, the centrally-administered municipality, the ethnic minority autonomous region, the special administrative region, the deputy-provincial city, the prefecture, the county, township and urban district. It investigates how each of the different levels of China’s local administration has developed historically, both before and after 1949; and it explores the functions, political and economic, that the different levels and units carry out, and how their relationships with superior and subordinate units have evolved over time. It also discusses how far the post-Mao reforms have affected local administration, and how the local administrative hierarchy is likely to develop going forward.

Thomas G. Nimick, a leading authority on Ming government, draws on Chinese sources to provide the most detailed account of local Ming government available in English. Rational bureaucratic administration is one of China's greatest contributions to the art of governance. After centuries of evolution, the Chinese civil service system reached new heights during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). Local Administration in Ming China traces the origins and evolution of the lowest level of administrative offices over the course of the dynasty. It starts with the Ming founder's experiments with using members of the local elite to collect taxes and goes on to the increased reliance on magistrates and prefects sent out from the center. The story concludes with the fiscal problems at the end of the dynasty. This work includes the following contents: Introduction, Local Government in Early Ming, Changes in Local Government int he Fifteenth Century, From Specially Selected Officials to Province and Magistrate, Fiscal Pressures and Operational Changes, Continued Possibility of Structural Changes and the Climax of Fiscal Troubles, Conclusion, and Annotated Bibliography

Local government innovation has become one of the most important topics on China’s policy agenda in recent decades. This book explains why some local governments are more innovative than others. This book uses a novel theoretical framework and points out that in China’s multi-level government structure, the administrative hierarchy and the span of control could shape local governments’ innovation motivation, innovation capability, and innovation opportunity, thus influencing local government innovativeness. The author systematically analysed the 177 winners and finalists of the biennial Innovations and Excellence in Chinese Local Governance (IECLG) Awards Programme from 2001 to 2015 to provide convincing empirical evidence to support this theory. This book adopts an institutional approach to explaining local government innovativeness in China and may be a useful reference to help us learn more about local government decisions and behaviours.

After over a decade of administrative and economic reform in mainland China, the center has become increasingly remote and less important for many localities. In many ways, the mobilization capacity of the central government has been weakened. Central government policies are often ignored and local officials are often more interested in personal projects than in centrally directed economic plans. In this study of local government and politics in China, the author explores when and why local government officials comply with policy directives from above. Drawing on interviews with government officials in various municipalities and a review of county records and other government documents, he provides the first in-depth look at policy implementation at the county and township levels in the PRC. The book examines the impact of the Chinese cadre system on the behavior of local officials, local party and government structure, relationships among various levels of Chinese local government, policy supervision mechanisms at local levels, village governance of China, and more.

The Mongolian Yuan dynasty, 1272-1368, is a short but interesting chapter in the long history of Sino-Mongolian relations. Faced with the challenge of governing a huge sedentary empire, the traditionally nomadic Mongols acceded to some Chinese institutional precedents, but, in large part, adhered to their own Inner Asian practices of staffing and administering the government apparatus.Yuan administrative documents provide information that permits a fairly accurate reconstruction of the day-to-day functioning of the local government bureaucracy. From these materials, Elizabeth Endicott-West has put together a detailed picture of the Mongols' methods of selecting local officials, the ethnic backgrounds of officials, and policy formation and implementation at the local level.

Despite a centralized formal structure, Chinese politics and policy-making have long been marked by substantial degrees of regional and local variation and experimentation. These trends have, if anything, intensified as China’s reform matures. Though often remarked upon, the politicsof policy formation, diffusion, and implementation at the subnational level have not previously been comprehensively described, let alone satisfactorily explained. Based on extensive fieldwork, this book explores how policies diffuse across China today, the mechanisms through which local governments actually arrive at specific solutions, and the implications for China’s political development and stability in the years ahead. The chapters examine how local-level institutions solve governance challenges, such as rural development, enterprise reform, and social service provision. Focusing on diverse policy areas that include land use, state-owned enterprise reform, and house churches, the contributors all address the same overarching question: how do local policymakers innovate in each issue area to address a governance challenges and how, if at all, do these innovations diffuse into national politics. As a study of local governance in China today, this book will appeal to both students and scholars of Chinese politics, comparative politics, governance and development studies, and also to policy-makers interested in authoritarianism and governance.

This book attempts to describe, analyze, and interpret the structure and functioning of local government at the chou and hsien levels in the Ch'ing dynasty. It contains an introduction, ten chapters, conclusion, notes, index, bibliography, and glossary.