If we were only to look at standard measures of governance, like the Polity or Freedom House indices, we would mistakenly conclude that the Chinese political system has remained completely stagnant for the past 30 years. Such indices fail to capture smaller governance innovations within the Chinese Communist Party's authoritarian architecture, and it is here where Jonathan R. Stromseth, Edmund J. Malesky and Dimitar D. Gueorguiev draw our attention. Their excellent new book, China's Governance Puzzle, provides the most comprehensive account to date on the effects of the Party's recent efforts to enhance transparency (i.e. Open Government Information regulations) and public participation (expert consultations, notice and comment processes, public hearings). The argument, in a sentence, is that we should be taking these reforms seriously.
As a point of departure, Stromseth, Malesky and Gueorguiev note the tendency among scholars to fall into two traps when discussing transparency and participation reforms under authoritarianism. We tend to view these initiatives as precursors to a democratic transition, or we dismiss them entirely as meaningless “window-dressings.” The authors argue that we should view these institutions in their own right, as they can enhance and strengthen authoritarian rule. Transparency provides a means for the regime to check the abuses of lower officials, and public participation provides a means to improve policymaking and foster compliance.
The book proceeds in two parts, the first assessing the effects of transparency on corruption (chapters two to four) and the second assessing the effects of public participation channels on outcomes related to policy efficacy and citizen compliance (chapters five to seven). In each section, the authors neatly give the theoretical motivation linking the reform with better governance, provide helpful background, and then test the effects with both quantitative evidence and qualitative process tracing in key cases. In chapters two to four, the authors show that transparency does indeed appear to reduce corruption in China, through what they term the “fire-alarm” mechanism. Open information allows citizens to identify malfeasance at the local level, attract attention from media or civil society, which in turn alerts central authorities, who then punish the officials involved. This model, pioneered in Guangdong under Wang Yang, proves more effective than the so-called “Chongqing model,” which relies on top-down, internal disciplinary mechanisms.
A parallel finding on public participation emerges in chapters five to seven. Here, we see that provinces that adopted public participation measures saw reductions in labour disputes, environmental violations and even mass grievances. Participatory policymaking proves most effective in areas with dense civil society networks.
The most impressive thing about China's Governance Puzzle is the data the authors bring to bear on the subject. The book grows out of the Chinese Governance Assessment Project (C-GAP), which pulled together a dream team of governance researchers – headed by Stromseth, Malesky and Gueorguiev, but including intellectual contributions from Wang Xixin, Lai Hairong, Lily Tsai and Jeremy Wallace, as well as a veritable army of 75 research assistants. This group mined archived provincial websites (2000–2011) to figure out which provinces adopted what sort of transparency and participation initiatives, and when they did it. The results are fine grained indicators built from the ground up, which show us stunning variation in the levels of transparency and participation across time and over space.
The book makes for good reading on an important but overlooked political development, and the non-quantitative chapters would be nicely at home on an undergraduate syllabus for a course on domestic Chinese politics. It will also be of use to graduate students seeking a model of how to blend quantitative and qualitative evidence, or for development professionals seeking to understand the effects of transparency and public participation initiatives in authoritarian settings.
At times, China's Governance Puzzle seems as it was written for Xi Jinping himself. One of the key arguments is that for transparency and public participation initiatives to be effective, they need to occur in an ecosystem where citizens can feel comfortable voicing their opinions and reporting abuses. They need civil society organizations and media outlets to serve as a conduit of communication between the population and the government. Xi's crackdown on civil society, combined with the broader repressive climate, effectively leaves transparency and public participation initiatives without oil in their engine. These reforms may sputter forward nonetheless, but they will hardly drive governance outcomes, and eventually they could peter out altogether. Chinese citizens have an important role to play in improving the governance of their country – China's Governance Puzzle shows us that definitively. It should be read widely.
