Local government innovation in China has been researched extensively in the last decade, and many scholars argue that it is a key factor in solving governance challenges. Youlang Zhang seeks to contribute to this literature by examining innovation as a practice, and not researching only one policy pilot or place. Zhang's book focuses on the motivation and capacity for local government policy innovation, and it is divided into two theory chapters, two empirical chapters, and a short introduction and conclusion.
Zhang relies on the logic of the Chinese process of promotion to argue that higher-level government officials have fewer incentives to adopt innovative practices, given the diminishing returns of the performance signals. However, the lowest levels of government do not have enough policy autonomy or resources with which to innovate. Thus, he proposes an inverse U-shaped relationship between administrative hierarchy and local innovation, such that he predicts that county or city governments should be the most innovative (p. 26). Zhang then tests this hypothesis on data gathered from the Chinese Local Governance Awards Programme. This programme was administered by the China Compilation and Translation Bureau (CCTB) from 2001 to 2015, and was modelled after a similar programme run by the Harvard Kennedy School in the United States. Chapters four and five offer detailed information on local innovation captured through this programme; however, this choice of dependent variable limits the author's research scope to “signals of innovation” and not innovation itself. Local officials must nominate their pilot programmes for this award, and there are only 177 cases for this time period. Based on this data, Zhang finds that most innovation is occurring at the city and county administrative level.
The patterns in the data are interesting as far as regions that are most innovative (Zhejiang), and the prevalence of types of innovation (service innovation). The argument is logically sound; however, the causal explanation is not well developed. For example, Zhang offers a figure sketching the theoretical framework (p. 31) at the very end of the theory chapter and does not cite supporting literature, so the reader does not know if the assumptions underlying the theoretical framework are established facts or arguments that are still debated. For example, the discussion of promotion, which has been extensively researched, is confined to two paragraphs and summarized as being more competitive at higher levels. This is a missed opportunity for Zhang to rely on this extensive literature to clearly explain the variation in motivations for innovation, such as age, state, party position, etc. Additionally, many scholars have examined the idea that local officials are not necessarily practising governance as much as performing it, and that these signals are used for promotion. Incorporating extant research on how local officials are assessed, especially how signals are sent and interpreted, would have greatly strengthened Zhang's argument.
Additionally, the literature review in chapter two is underdeveloped, and should have included a discussion of causal arguments to answer the research question of why some local governments innovate more than others. There has been a lot of research in this area, so Zhang needs to group this together to assess the causal arguments and supporting evidence. Without this analysis, the reader does not really understand the incentives for innovation. For example, he uses the terms “bottom-up,” “top-down” and “horizontal learning,” but does not clearly outline the arguments about why innovation might happen along different pathways. This is a shame because Zhang includes a great schematic in figure 2.2 of existing explanations for local innovation that would have been a good way to organize a thorough review of existing literature.
There have been large changes in Chinese governance under Xi Jinping, but Zhang only briefly discusses these in the last two pages of the conclusion. Without this discussion, it is unclear if these dynamics are still occurring or if this should be understood as a historical analysis. I would have been interested to see how he analyses governance centralization under Xi influencing both the motivation and resources underlying local innovation. For example, how does centralization change the span of control? We know that there is less innovation being reported, and in fact the awards programme was stopped after 2015, but does that mean less innovation is occurring? In short, is it signalling that has stopped or innovation itself due to changing incentives? In our research (Jessica Teets, Reza Hasmath and Orion Lewis, “The incentive to innovate? The behavior of local policymakers in China,” Journal of Chinese Political Science 22[4]: 505–517, 2017) we find that innovation continues to a lesser extent, but is either top-down as designated pilot cities or occurs at a local level and is not signalled upward. Regarding resources for innovation, Christine Wong in her recent working paper “Plus ça change: three decades of fiscal policy and central–local relations in China” (2021) finds increasing central transfers to lower levels such as county and prefecture, so does this lead to more or less “autonomy” necessary for innovation at these levels? These changes also allow us to analyse if motivation outweighs resources, if motivation is decreasing but resources are increasing, as well as disaggregating “resources” into fiscal and political (in the form of policy autonomy).
Given the underdeveloped theoretical framework and literature review, this book is most suitable for those with an expertise in local innovation. For policy innovation scholars, Zhang's inverse U-shaped relationship between the administrative hierarchy and local innovation contributes to understanding variation across subnational government. Additionally, the data from the awards offers an interesting glimpse into a period of local experimentalism that appears to be ending, or at least changing dramatically.
