Decentralized Meritocracy

Abstract

The article explains the ongoing resilience of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime as a dynamic process of continual institutional adaptation of the CCP’s threat-management system, which simultaneously must address vertical (popular) and horizontal (internal) challenges. The author finds that the CCP central leadership’s current top-down intervention into subnational governments, featuring Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign, reform of local government financing platforms (LGFPs), and consolidation of personal power over the party-state, is the second of two major actions over the last thirty years designed to maintain the stability and survival of the single-party system. Notably, many of the contemporary challenges faced by the regime, such as a local government budgetary crisis and rampant official corruption within subnational governments, are in many respects the unforeseen consequences of an earlier intervention by the Center conducted in the mid-1990s under Jiang Zemin.