This comparative study investigates China’s policy reform waves alongside global education trends, analyzing 334 central-level policy documents published by the National People’s Congress, State Council, and Ministry of Education between 1979 and 2023. The study identifies three waves: enhancing access (1979–1990), improving quality and accountability (1991–2010), and enforcing equity (2011–2023). Even though the decentralization of finance and administration of education led, a few years later, to equity and quality concerns, several key differences to global reform trends remained: decentralization did not lead to deregulation; outcomes-based regulation complemented but did not replace input-based regulation; equity remained central, especially in the final reform wave.
This paper investigates the profound influence of Tang Dynasty legacies on the subsequent Song Dynasty's distinct financial-military transformation. While the Tang era was characterized by an expansive cosmopolitanism, a decentralized military, and a complex interplay of central and regional powers, its eventual decline underscored critical vulnerabilities in state governance and defense. The Song founders, keenly aware of these historical precedents, embarked on a deliberate path of institutional re-engineering. This study argues that the Tang's "cosmopolitan crucible"—its blend of cultural openness, economic dynamism, and ultimately, military decentralization—served as a crucial historical backdrop, compelling the Song to forge a highly centralized, civilian-controlled financial-military complex. We explore how Tang's sophisticated, yet often unstable, fiscal mechanisms and its frontier-focused military organization contrasting with the rise of autonomous regional commanders, directly informed Song's innovations in state monopolies, paper currency, and a robust professional army under strict imperial command. By examining both continuity and rupture, this research illuminates the adaptive strategies employed by the Song to consolidate power, ensure stability, and sustain an unprecedented level of economic and military capability, fundamentally reshaping the trajectory of imperial Chinese statecraft.
In Qing Dynasty China, the inter-government fiscal arrangement was characterized by a “dual-track fiscal system” in which a formal system with a central budget of revenues and spending coexisted with a decentralized and fragmented informal local fiscal system financed by miscellaneous extra-legal taxes. Why did the dual-track fiscal system endure despite its obvious flaws? Why was the Qing state unable to establish a stable and rationalized fiscal federalism? This chapter investigates the causes and consequences of the dual-track fiscal system. Through historical institutional analysis and several empirical studies, we propose a novel explanation based on the opportunistic behavior and credible commitment by the central government. Due to the central government’s inability to credibly commit to not encroaching on the formal fiscal powers of lower-level governments, the decentralized, off-budget, and informal local finances represent an “institutional equilibrium”.
This study analyzes the two-tier local government models in France, Japan, Germany, and the United States to draw lessons for reforming the organization of state apparatus in Vietnam. Based on the theoretical foundations of local government organization, it clarifies the principles of decentralization, autonomy, accountability, and effective public governance. International experience highlights the importance oftransparent institutions, financial autonomy, competent personnel, and the application of technology in governance. In Vietnam, the two-tier model has been implemented since July 1, 2025, under Law No.72/2025/QH15, replacing the traditional three-tier structure. The article examines the challenges during the transition and proposes solutions to improve the legal framework, ensure substantive decentralization, enhance implementation capacity, reform public finance, strengthen oversight, and promote accountability - thereby contributing to building an effective, modern, and democratic local government.
This study investigates redistributive spending in China’s governance system, focusing on fiscal decentralization, interjurisdictional competition, and land finance revenue. Using multilevel modeling of data from 283 prefectural cities and 2,862 county-level jurisdictions, it finds that interjurisdictional competition prioritizes developmental spending over redistributive services. No significant relationship is observed between fiscal capacity—measured by tax revenues or intergovernmental transfers—and redistributive expenditures. However, higher land finance revenues are positively linked to increased redistributive spending. The study attributes this development-oriented strategy to the cadre promotion system, where local officials advance their careers by achieving policy goals through competition for economic investments. By integrating land finance into the analysis of redistributive spending, this research highlights its implications for equity and sustainability. It underscores the urgent need for fiscal and social policy reforms to balance developmental priorities with equitable social welfare provision.
Organizational coordination has been regarded as a vital factor to determine the environmental governance efficiency of local authority, while existing empirical studies mainly discuss the vertical decentralization but largely ignore the horizontal cross-departmental interaction within single government. Based on the data of 31 Chinese provinces from 2003 to 2017, this paper uses a panel vector autoregression (PVAR) approach, two-way fixed-effect models and dynamic panel regression with system generalized method of moments estimation (SYS-GMM) to investigate the environmental strategic interaction between two representative departments (finance department and environmental protection department) within local governments. The results indicate, on the whole, their environmental governance strategies show a significantly co-directional coordination. However, the cross-departmental interaction obviously varied in different periods and regions (even showed as conflict sometimes), and was synchronized with the dynamic trade-off between economic and environmental targets of China. This research helps understand the inner logic of environmental governance of Chinese government, and can be valuable guidance for other countries to accomplish multi-departmental sustainable development goal.
The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) fiscal system is characterized by very high expenditure decentralization and heavy reliance on transfers to finance public services. The government’s embrace of inclusiveness and equalization as national goals has raised questions about whether transfers can deliver equalization. This paper seeks to answer this question by analyzing newly available fiscal data compiled from government websites. We find the allocation of central transfers remains strongly region based, resulting in high intra-regional inequality among provinces. Poorer provinces also tend to retain more central transfers at their own (provincial) level. Those provinces with greater pretransfer inequality tend to exert greater equalization efforts, but these are not necessarily proportional to their pretransfer inequality. As a result, some localities are left out of the PRC’s countrywide equalization program. These equalization patterns remained highly persistent during the coronavirus disease shock in 2020. Collectively, the findings highlight that the PRC’s complex intergovernmental fiscal system still poses challenges for equalization.
Blockchain originated from the aspiration for decentralization, and in Western countries, its association with freedom from governmental and corporate dominance remains unwavering. However, in China–where blockchain has taken an intriguing foothold–the socio-technical imaginaries of blockchain diverge significantly. As China rises in blockchain development, critical literature examining its ventures is notably lacking. This article analyses state-led initiatives and corporate endeavours related to blockchain deployment in rural China. While blockchain's roots lie in libertarian ideals, within China, it serves as a ‘state techno-solutionist’ tool, empowering authoritarian capitalism for enhanced state control and corporate profit through data exploitation. Although the application of blockchain in agricultural tracing and finance is heralded as a blessing to elevate smallholder farmers from poverty and enhance agricultural practices, the reality contrasts sharply. Instead of empowering farmers, the technology exacerbates power imbalances, embedding them in a system marked by extensive data harvesting and surveillance. Such integration entangles these farmers subsisting on China's economic fringes within broader national and global capitalist financial frameworks, rendering them more susceptible to exploitation and manipulation. Moreover, blockchain in rural China epitomizes authoritarian capitalism, where capitalists aligning closely with state agendas. Blockchain's transparency, traceability, and tamper-resistant features, instead of diminishing government interference, are harnessed by capitalists to amplify the social credit system, strengthening the data dominance of platform companies and supporting state surveillance. Therefore, blockchain emerges as a threat to rural China's ways of life–all driven by the pursuit of corporate profit and the government's quest to reclaim national greatness.
Central bank digital currency (CBDC) is generally defined as the digital form of a country's fiat currency.Based on the distributed ledger technology and other financial technology, CBDC could improve the efficiency of domestic and cross-border payments, increase payment safety and soundness, and promote financial inclusion.However, it is argued that the introduction of CBDC would threaten data security and invade personal privacy.Currently, this issue has received growing concern, and some recommendations are proposed by countries or international organizations, like privacy design, restrictions on public authorities and payment intermediaries, and establishing independent supervisory authority.Other suggestions include getting countries involved in international coordination and promoting the formation of unified standards.Among major economies, China is the first to launch CBDC, which is known as e-CNY.Based on an overview of the privacy protection legislation in China, this article attempts to describe the rules that should be followed when dealing with personal data generated in e-CNY circulation.
Decentralized court finance and personnel management practices have been criticized for breeding extra-judicial interventions and corruption in China. Determined to advance law-based governance and to constrain recalcitrant local leaders, the Chinese leadership under Xi Jinping in 2014 rolled out reforms to centralize local court finance to the provincial level with the aim to sever local courts from local influence. Despite high expectations, implementation is at best partial. Close to half of all provinces have not accomplished the required changes, and more than half of all court expenditure continues, to date, to remain reliant upon local governments. The direct reason is that provincial governments lack sufficient and sustainable fiscal capacity to finance the operation of local courts without central assistance. Different interests between major stakeholders, namely the courts and the fiscal bureaus, also add to coordination problems and difficulties in reform implementation, in particular the tension between fiscal adequacy pursued by the judiciary and fiscal management efficiency stressed by finance bureaus.
Using panel data from 275 prefecture-level cities in China spanning from 2003 to 2019, this paper employs the multiperiod difference-in-differences method to empirically analyze the policy effect of land negotiation policy on local governments’ hidden debt. The paper also investigates the influence mechanisms of land finance, budget soft constraints, fiscal decentralization and government competition. The empirical results reveal that: (1) Land negotiations promote the expansion of local governments’ hidden debt, which is counterproductive to the sustainable development of government finances. (2) The impact of land negotiation policy on local government’s hidden debt is transmitted via its effects on land finance. (3) The greater the degree of soft budget constraint and the degree of government competition, the less the expansion effect of land negotiations on the hidden debt of the government. The greater the degree of fiscal decentralization, the greater the expansion effect of land negotiations on the government’s hidden debt. (4) Land negotiation promotes the expansion of hidden debt in eastern China and inhibits it in central China, with no significant effect observed in western China. (5) Cities with larger urban scale and higher economic development levels experience stronger effects from land negotiation policies. Therefore, it is imperative to deepen the land negotiation system further, develop policy indicators and feedback mechanisms tailored to local conditions, and introduce a multiparty supervision system to enhance implementation of the land negotiation system.
Intergovernmental fiscal and finance relations have a deep impact on characteristics of China's economy and the behavior of local government at all levels. This paper wants to figure out the basic logic for the allocation of financial resources among regions under the implicit financial decentralization. Based on local government financing vehicles' (LGFV) debt data and by exploiting “Province Managing County” (PMC) reform as a policy shock to construct a DID framework, this study find that city governments with better economic and fiscal status can gain more funds through bank loans and municipal bonds when facing PMC reform, whereas the less developed ones are less capable to utilize the new opportunity, thus widening the regional gap of local government financing. Mechanism analysis implicates that city's economic and fiscal status are the deciding force of the above procedure. However, the catching-up pressures and developing incentives of less developed regions can't be realized in reality. This study argue that this might be an explanation for the expansion of regional disparity along with the reform of China's central-local relationship.
Long before the creation of blockchain platforms, the rise of personal computing and Internet connectivity brought with it a digital, online dimension of the material world, leading to the socio-technical construct known as ‘digital identity’. After the online discussion boards and emailing lists of the early 90s, individuals started socializing via the Internet more predominantly using social networks. One specific type of platform links this online socializing and transacting to blockchain-based spaces: dark web marketplaces. Identified as second-generation cryptocommunities, dark web marketplaces deployed cryptography for the use of pseudonymous identity, for communication, but also currency. This paper explores two questions in this fascinating space: what was the role of identity on the Silk Road, and what governance lessons can be drawn from this illustration for the purpose of applying them to more recent cybercommunities such as Ethereum? The paper is structured as follows. The first part describes the Silk Road and sketches its essential characteristics. The second part looks at how individuals could become platform users on the Silk Road, by analyzing the contractual relationship between the Silk Road and an individual user based on the rights and obligations enshrined in the Silk Road Terms of Service (ToS). The third part critically reflects on arbitrariness as the main pitfall arising out of the private regulatory framework created by the Silk Road, and contributes to existing narratives surrounding the regulatory nature of code by proposing a code-as-procedure perspective for analyzing this regulatory framework. Part four concludes.
The Chinese developmental model has seven distinctive characteristics: First is an essentially capitalist development under decisive authoritarian leadership and purposive governance. Second is a vertical production structure where basic capital goods are produced in monopoly state-owned enterprises and the much-larger rest of the economy is under private ownership often connected with local party officials dispensing local monopoly rights. Third, at least in the post-Mao decades China is politically stable in relative terms. Fourth, the model is characterized by state-guided nationalist industrial policy and finance, subsidized access to land and credit for business, repression of labor rights and of yield on household financial savings. Fifth, there are massive investments in infrastructure funded by a very high national savings rate (particularly because of large undistributed profits of companies). Notably, per capita stock of government investment in fixed assets in 2017 was larger than that in Germany or UK, and five times that in India. Sixth, one notes rural industrialization in a decentralized framework with acute competition over jurisdiction, particularly in the early decades after reform. Seventh, there is openness to foreign trade and acquisitions and learning from foreign technology.
A multiplicity of spatial plans in a planning system can have different ways of co-existing under different institutional organizations. Having a highly centralized government like China, the phenomenon of a multitude of national-level plans dominating at the same time has its own unique characteristics. Much literature emphasizes only the lacking of coordination between governmental institutes. However, this research finds that the current constitution of the Chinese planning system profoundly reflects the relations between central and local governments. This paper first examines the characteristics of the Chinese political system, briefly reviewing the iterative process of "centralization-decentralization-selective centralization", showing the rise and fall of spatial planning as an administrative tool of local governments. Especially since the 1990s, the central government has raised revenue from the local level, which leads to local governments depending more on selling land for quick money. But as the urban expansion accelerates, the state asserts its control on local development by the National Mainfunction Plan and National Land-use Plan, which seriously impedes the coordination of spatial plans at different levels. Therefore, this study argues that spatial planning reform in China requires not only generating integrated information platforms and technical standards, but more importantly, establishing new relations between central and local government. In the end, some suggestions are made on central authorities reducing the constraints of a planning censorship system and rebalancing the responsibility and the public finance of local government on planning matters.
Labor force is very important to drive urban development. Labor contributes skills and generate positive knowledge spillovers to urban economy, especially high-skilled labor. Labor also constitutes the tax base that determines the fiscal wellness of the city. Moreover, the major source of urban and regional population change is through internal migration. Given the importance of labor in urban economy, there has been long-lasting research interests in factors that drive inter-city migration. Jobs, amenities and living costs are regarded as the main determinants of labor migration. Recent research also points to the importance of local informal institution, such as culture and attitude to migration, in urban development. However, labor mobility within the national border can face formal policy barriers as well. In China, due to the household registration system, many migrants cannot access local social services in host cities due to the lack of local Hukou, especially social insurances and housing provident funds. Due to the decentralized financing and governance of these social services, cities vary greatly in their coverages of social services among urban migrants. Using this cross-city variations, I define local inclusiveness as the extent to which a city government allows migrants to access local social insurances and housing provident funds and construct an urban inclusiveness index to measure it. I examine how local inclusiveness affects urban development via the quantity and quality of labor supply. Specifically, I study three inter-related questions. First, at the individual level, how does local inclusiveness affect migrantsâ choices of destination cities? Second, at the city level, how does local inclusiveness impact urban development through aggregate urban labor supply? Third, what factors may explain a cityâs inclusion for migrants? Using a conditional discrete choice model to examine the role of local inclusiveness in migrantsâ choices of destinations, I find inclusive cities attract more migrants, controlling for expected wage, housing costs, and a host of urban characteristics that affect quality of life. I then construct a two-sector structural model to estimate how urban inclusiveness affects urban productivity through the quantity and the composition of labor supply. I use historical cultural openness to instrument for urban inclusiveness. I find more inclusive cities perform better economically through higher labor supply, especially high-skilled migrants. Using spatial statistics to correct for spatial error dependence, I find a cityâs inclusiveness towards migrants largely depends on its fiscal capacity and labor demand, instead of cultural factors. This research reveals the connection among local inclusion, internal migration, and urban development in China. Evidence suggests the importance of attracting and retaining migrant labor through an inclusive local policy agenda.
Research on Chinese civil society has tended to focus on the relationship between non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the state. Such work has underestimated the complexity of the emerging institutional environment where Chinese NGOs are often caught between the state, the market, and a constrained civil society. How do civil society organizations and their respective nonprofit sectors emerge, what forms do they take? More specifically, how do organizational forms and strategies reflect political and market structures at the time? Chinese nonprofit sectors re-emerged in the late 1990s, and their relationships with the state have been contentious. The rapid transformation of the nonprofit sectors provides a unique opportunity to look at the emergence of a new organizational field. Using strategic action fields (SAFs) theory, I examine how organizations within the field of nonprofit organizations attempted to establish and defend their positions vis-à-vis the state and market. I conducted comparative case studies of two leading China's NGOs –Civil Society Center (CSC) in the city of Guangzhou and Excellence Promoter (EP) in the city of Shanghai. I traced the histories and current development of CSC and EP and their connected organizations and used ethnographic, interview, and survey data to triangulate the emerging urban nonprofit sectors in the context of an authoritarian state. I argue that, in different periods, the nonprofit organizational fields of Guangzhou and Shanghai reflected political and market structures at the time. In the early 2000s, Guangzhou’s nonprofit organizations were grassroots-driven, and a State Avoidance Autonomous field arose as large organizations decentralized into smaller organizations to decrease state scrutiny and intervention. In contrast, in Shanghai, where the state promoted nonprofit organizations as an extension of governmental programs, a State Alliance Social Market Field developed. This State Alliance Social Market Field prioritized business values and practices to guide organizational strategies rather than the ethical commitments that had been the center of the State Avoidance Autonomous field. By partnering with government, EP was able to rapidly expand while its Guangzhou counterpart, CSC, remained small and marginal. Powerful e-commerce companies such as Tencent, however, have been changing the rules and norms that used to govern the field. They entered the nonprofit field through the creation of a new fundraising platform that opened up alternative resources for Chinese NGOs. The involvement of the market through corporate foundations and new technologies has provided alternative funding for grassroots NGOs under the attack from the state. My study contributes to nonprofit studies and China studies by providing insight into how NGOs interact with different state and market players and the consequences of such interactions on organizational strategies.
This chapter explains the interactive relationship between blockchain technology and the corresponding policy responses of governments it has provoked. It reviews existing global governance and global political economy literatures on the implications of technology change. The chapter explores the origins of Bitcoin and the challenges it has brought for governance. Nearly a decade since its inception, the global popularity of Bitcoin reveals the increasingly established nature of the emergent technology. The extant literature largely ignores the regulation of Bitcoin in China. China has grown to be the largest Bitcoin market globally. Despite the existing problems and uncertainties in the future, China provides both the Global South and the Global North an alternative between two other polarized extremes of either liberalization or prohibition. Bitcoin is exposed to market risks and volatile speculation. Investors have flooded into the market and pumped up Bitcoin prices. The two common illegal uses of Bitcoin across jurisdictions are in digital black markets and for money laundering.