Xi Jinping's rise to power in late 2012 brought immediate political realignments in China, but the extent of these shifts has remained unclear. In this paper, we evaluate whether the perceived changes associated with Xi Jinping's ascent – increased personalization of power, centralization of authority, Party dominance and anti-Western sentiment – were reflected in the content of provincial-level official media. As past research makes clear, media in China have strong signalling functions, and media coverage patterns can reveal which actors are up and down in politics. Applying innovations in automated text analysis to nearly two million newspaper articles published between 2011 and 2014, we identify and tabulate the individuals and organizations appearing in official media coverage in order to help characterize political shifts in the early years of Xi Jinping's leadership. We find substantively mixed and regionally varied trends in the media coverage of political actors, qualifying the prevailing picture of China's “new normal.” Provincial media coverage reflects increases in the personalization and centralization of political authority, but we find a drop in the media profile of Party organizations and see uneven declines in the media profile of foreign actors. More generally, we highlight marked variation across provinces in coverage trends.
Selecting provincial leaders is a fraught task for authoritarian regimes. Although central authorities more readily trust provincial leaders with close ties to the center, such loyalists may lack the local knowledge and connections necessary to govern adeptly. Using an original data set on the tenures and backgrounds of China’s provincial party standing committee members, this article explores how Beijing fine-tunes provincial leadership teams to resolve this dilemma. The analysis challenges the conventional wisdom that Beijing exerts its tightest personnel control in strategically important provinces. It shows that Beijing tolerates significant embeddedness of local leadership in provinces with complex governance challenges even when these provinces are important. Moreover, it finds that when the center reasserts control through appointments of loyalist personnel during times of crisis, it does so in a balanced manner. These calibrated personnel strategies highlight the extent to which authoritarian systems rely on local expertise and experience as well as top-down control.
It is clear that some subnational governments are better than others at orchestrating major policy programs, yet important questions remain about how and why subnational government capacity varies from case to case. Scholarship that emphasizes political agency in explaining subnational policy outcomes is not always clear as to where such agency comes from. Meanwhile, research that defines the power of subnational units in terms of their formal administrative authority, fiscal capacity, and political status does not fully explain how these structural endowments translate into effective agency. This article works toward a conception of subnational government capacity better able to integrate these approaches and bridge the agency-structure divide. I call for greater attention to the connective structures that enable subnational governments to take the initiative in policymaking and mobilize resources, stressing provinces' internal cohesion and upward political ties. To illustrate the need for a broader conception of subnational capacity, and to show the importance of connective power in action, I analyze the contrasting outcomes of regional development strategies in two Chinese provinces.
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