As the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to thrive two decades after the Tiananmen incident, few China scholars are still willing to spend time pondering the possibility of regime collapse. Instead, many of them have attempted to account for the regime's resilience and adaptability. One of the major challenges to the regime's survival stems from economic and administrative decentralization. Pierre F. Landry explains in Decentralized Authoritarianism in China how the unitary and authoritarian regime in China has coped with this challenge by wielding the power of appointment and removal of cadres effectively.

To be sure, Landry is not the only one to note that the nomenclatural system of personnel management has played a key role in maintaining the political system. Andrew Nathan, for instance, argues that regime resilience in China has greatly benefited from the institutionalization of elite politics in the center (see “Authoritarian Resilience,” Journal of Democracy 14, no. 1 [2003]: 6–17). That conclusion, according to Landry, can be applied to the party's control of local elites as well. A number of norms, such as the retirement age, have been strictly enforced. The structure of organizational authority also conforms to formal rules. Furthermore, the understanding and implementation of norms and rules have been considerably consistent among different localities.

Landry illuminates how the CCP has been both adaptive and cautious. To rejuvenate cadres and enhance bureaucratic efficiency, the party changed a policy of appointing personnel from “two levels down” to “one level down,” abolished communes and replaced them with townships, phased out prefectures and put cities in charge of counties, and devised a few new types of local governments such as line-item cities and deputy provincial municipalities. Yet the regime avoided experimenting at the county level, which traditionally has been the boundary of the state's reach. Moreover, the efforts of decentralization have been balanced by the principle that any level of government always retains ultimate authority over the appointment of core officials at the lower levels under its jurisdiction. Furthermore, in order to prevent local interests from being entrenched, many local cadres, especially mayors, have been frequently rotated.

Most importantly, the party's domination in the political system has been carefully preserved through personnel policies. While the system values educational credentials and professional competence, political reliability has always been a key consideration for personnel decisions. Therefore, cadre promotion is highly correlated with specific professional experience in the party institutions. In addition, although village committee elections have begun to pose some challenges, the party still enjoys thorough penetration throughout the bureaucracy. The CCP's resilience seems to lie in its capacity for effectively sticking to some critical principles on a few core issues while being very flexible in other matters.

While Landry focuses mainly on the success of the personnel system, he does not overlook the limitations and difficulties in policy implementation. For example, the party has never come up with effective methods for evaluating cadre performance. Indicators are superficial and biased, and information tends to be manipulated. Consequently, the party cannot reward or sanction cadres strictly based on their performance. Landry indicates, however, that this may not be a fatal problem; the party can still reward a small but critically important subset of local officials. Moreover, the fact that a majority of cadres are neither rewarded nor sanctioned significantly according to their performance may carry some benefits—it helps to maintain “stability of cadres.” This approach is similar to the party's strategy for handling the problem of corruption. As it has no capacity for rooting out prevalent corruption, it concentrates on penalizing the most egregious offenders while leaving numerous other corrupt officials unpunished.

In addition to its many insights, this book also provides fresh evidence, which is presented in a rigorous manner. Landry has creatively utilized published materials. For example, his study of mayors mainly relies on biographical notices published by the Chinese Urban Development Research Council, and his analysis of village cadres on local yearbooks in Gaoyou, Jiangsu Province. It is encouraging that these easily available materials are able to support rigorous statistical analysis. The author also conducted a project called the Jiangsu Elite Study, which includes a survey of 245 county-level officials in Jiangsu.

Readers who are interested in the dynamics of historical change, however, may want to see a bit more theorizing on the modes and mechanisms of policy and institutional evolution. Landry largely attributes the changes to the intentional design of rules and institutions (p. 17). Although he pays some attention to experiments and resistance, he does not explore in depth the learning experience and often contentious process. For example, how have competition and emulation among local governments, and the bargaining between upper and lower authorities, shaped the changes observed?

This weakness notwithstanding, Landry's book is a valuable addition to the debate on authoritarian resilience in China.