Factions and Spoils: Examining Political Behavior Within the Local State in China

Abstract

While students of Chinese politics have long been interested in the impact of fiscal and administrative decentralization on patterns of governance in China, few have examined the impact of decentralization on political dynamics within the local state. Focusing on the county-the level of government primarily responsible for delivering public services, managing local state-owned enterprises, and coordinating the economy-this article explains how the pressures and incentives associated with decentralization have changed the "rules of the game" at the local level. It argues, in an in-depth study of a rural county, that local politics is driven largely by a competition over spoils and that competition over spoils is organized around a relatively stable system of factionalism. The first part of the article examines the emergence of local factions in County X and their relationship to the formal institutions of Party and government. The second part examines the resilience of local state factionalism and its implications for central government control and one-Party rule. Studying the Local State in China From the late 1970s, decentralization has heralded a fundamental shift in the way China is governed. Local governments were made directly responsible for governing the local economy, delivering public services and for raising revenues. By the 1990s China had become one of the most decentralized states in the world as measured by sub-national governments' share of public expenditure. 1 Case studies from different regions taught us that China's "local states" responded to the challenges of decentralization in different ways. 2 In the more industrialized regions, some local states were able to capitalize on 1 Sub-national governments' share of public expenditure in China was 78.

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