Binding Fiscal Decentralization and Personnel Control: Rediscovering Chinese Central-local Relations and Policy Implementation

Abstract

Once focus on the field of Chinese Central-local relation and policy implementation in China, we may find it hard to induce a consistent pattern, but it doesn’t mean the features are chaotic as to cannot be observed. In this paper, we mainly choose the perspective of fiscal relations between central and local governments and personnel system existed in the bureaucratic hierarchy. Based on the analysis of institutional transition of finance and personnel system, we can understand the cause of selective implementations which have been promoted by local governments as an organization (institution) or by the cadres as individuals. After 1949, China became a unified and multiethnic socialist country. Since then, center and local governmental relations are lasting to play an important role in the development of the country. In the view of the governmental organizations, we can see the different and subjective interests of the two parts (center and local governments), which hold most of the county’s resources and authority of the financial distribution, using the macro directions and the micro policies to distribute the resource and generate benefits in the name of the whole value of the people who they should response to , and without showing their own purposes in different ways of interpreting policies. In the other view of the individuals who are working in the government, we can also see how the personnel system influences the behaviors of cadres in different levels of the governments and how they use power to make their own benefits in the name of the whole value of governance. Not only the governmental organizations, but the cadres themselves can influence the implementation of policies, and the selective implementation is a complex and interesting phenomenon to be understood in China.