Understanding China's Officials Accountability: What Makes Provincial Officials Might Not Be Absent from Accountability for a Coal Mine Accident in China?

Abstract

Unlike oil exploitation, most behavior of coal mine exploitation is out of the government’s control in contemporary China, but this is not enough to admit that officials can be absent from the accountability for a coal mine accident. Existing literatures to this puzzle pay more emphasis on the collusion among provincial officials, substrate officials and coal mine owners, but these researches neglect the facts that not all accidents involve in the provincial officials’ accountability. In this research we proposed an argument to probe into the puzzle on the basis of the institution of authoritarian regime, we found that the right division of coal mine safety regulation and its strategic decentralization under hierarchy can not only maintain the one party dictatorship, it also can avoid the political risk in the public goods supply of the regime, Then the provincial officials might be objects of the accountability as the result of this institution of risk aversion.