The main point of the analysis highlighted this week from Yutian An and Taisu Zhang, a Phd candidate at Princeton and a Professor of law at Yale Law School, is summed up in the last line of their 60-page monograph: “For better or worse, China has now entered a new administrative paradigm”
The researchers take us back to the recent pre-COVID past and remind that at that time Chinese authorities were divided in terms of how they felt about devolving power to local administrative units.
The good of such a policy would be greater responsiveness to citizen’s needs and an increased ability to monitor societal development at the grass-roots level. The bad would be a loss of control by the center and the possibility of some roll back of anti-corruption gains.
Then, COVID-19, and the issue was settled. Start at P. 34 in the linked document for chapter and verse on how China’s administration evolved in response to the pandemic. As we now know China instituted a system of command and control unlike any other in the world with the thrust of this intervention being at the local level.
The paper concludes in the present and notes as China has yet to rescind a lot of the changes made during the pandemic it may have thus created an apparatus the citizenry, absent existential crisis, will in time resent.
This is a big subject and a situation worthy of note and monitoring. I would add however the work concludes today and this is an evolving dynamic. A system that’s taken time to establish is unlikely to be dismantled quickly and to draw a straight line from the present to the future may therefore be premature.
Moreover, there may be benefits that accrue in time from a more devolved administrative apparatus and, as the researchers note, the cost of maintaining some aspects of this system make their removal likely if they serve no purpose in the post-COVID world.
The conclusion that works best for me on all this, and for now at least, is ‘we’ll see’.
Happy Sunday.
[This link will take you to the work in full Chinese Administrative Expansion]