Chinese City Governments Research Articles

Regional Governance and Multiplex Networks in Environmental Sustainability: An Exponential Random Graph Model Analysis in the Chinese Local Government Context

Chinese city governments have collaborated increasingly to address regional environmental issues by participating in informal and formal collaborative networks. However, collaboration among cities involves collaboration risks. This study investigates how cities strategically select collaborative partners in informal and formal networks in the context of the Yangtze River Delta in China. This study addresses this question by assessing the nature of collaborative problems in the informal and formal networks, the extent of homophily in actors’ preferences, and their relationship multiplexity. Findings from Exponential Random Graph Analysis demonstrate: (1) city governments tend to connect to the popular actor and create relationship closure in the informal network, while only forging relationship closure in the formal network; (2) homophily (in water pollution) and heterogeneity (in air pollution) jointly affect city governments’ choices of collaborative partners in the formal network; and (3) the presence of relationship multiplexity wherein the formation of formal ties is built between city governments with pre-existing informal interactions. The findings advance our knowledge of collaborative partner selection and local collaborative governance in China.

City Government's Adoption of Housing Adaptation Policy Innovation for Older Adults: Evidence From China.

Utilizing policy innovation and diffusion theory, this study aims to explain why city governments adopt housing adaptation policies that primarily benefit older people based on the case of China. The data are drawn from an event history data set of a housing adaptation policy for older people collected from 283 Chinese cities from 2010 to 2018. Piecewise constant exponential models are utilized. The results indicate that cities facing greater internal pressure and a higher political status are more likely to adopt a housing adaptation policy for older people. Policy adoption by neighboring cities could further facilitate this process. Policy innovation and diffusion theory provide a useful framework for this study. That is, the Chinese city government's adoption of housing adaptation policy for older adults is initially driven by local needs and then accelerated by interactions among neighboring governments.

Multi-sectoral determinants of carbon emission inequality in Chinese clustering cities

Based on the data of 285 prefecture-level cities, hierarchical cluster analysis and a decomposition approach using the Gini coefficient were used to explore multi-sectoral determinants of the carbon emission inequality in Chinese clustering cities. The results indicate that the emission disparity of the industrial consumption sector is the main source of emission inequalities in clustering city groups. Compared with the base period, the emission inequality of each clustering city group decreased in the reporting period, which was mainly attributed to changes in emissions per capita, whereas an impact of population mobility on emission inequality was not detected. Our results have important implications for Chinese city governments that are to adopt differentiated emission reduction policies.

Running out of steam? A political incentive perspective of FDI inflows in China

Drawing on the sociological literature of state bureaucracy, we develop a political incentive perspective on FDI inflows. We argue that political term, as a core feature of career advancement in state bureaucracy, influences the incentives of newly appointed government officials and in turn their efforts toward achieving the state’s goal of attracting FDI. Due to the mandatory retirement age which limits the career advancement, officials in their first terms perceive that they have better chances of promotion and hence have stronger incentives to work toward advancement than those continuing to serve in the current position for the following term. We test this argument by examining Chinese city government leaders and FDI inflows in their cities from 2003 to 2010, using a difference-in-differences design. The results show that first-term leaders, who are newly appointed after political turnover, attract more FDI inflows than continuing leaders. The difference is smaller when the new leaders are close to retirement, but greater if they are appointed to cities with low prior GDP performance. This study offers a new perspective on intra-country FDI variations, and extends the literature on the role of political institutions by investigating the political incentives of government officials.

Is China's public housing programme destined to fail? Evidence from the city of Changsha

AbstractSince 2011, China has implemented a large‐scale public housing programme, constructing tens of millions of apartments to cope with increasing housing shortages and difficulties. Using the case study of Changsha, this study explored the likely fate of this inchoate but significant social policy initiative. We propose a ghettoisation framework for the underlying and interrelated socio‐economic mechanisms that produce and maintain the problem‐ridden public housing development. By applying the analysis framework, this study assessed the status of physical, economic and social decay in public rental housing in Changsha. It is concluded that Chinese public housing projects foster physical dilapidation, economic deprivation and social marginalisation and, at the extreme, may be turned into urban ghettos similar to those found in many other countries, if this downward spiral of physical, economic and social decay persists. Chinese city governments have been aware of the physical dilapidation of public rental housing and have endeavoured with physical improvement and upgradation and government procurement of operation and management services. However, these endeavours are doomed to eventually be fruitless without systematic amelioration of economic and social decay. This study can be applied to worldwide cities with public housing development programmes, by guiding policymakers to advocate for concentrated efforts in problem‐ridden projects and for broader, system‐wide reforms to prevent the worst case scenario of ghettoisation.

Temporality alignment: how WeChat transforms government communication in Chinese cities

Drawing on media practice and mediation literature, this study explores how the media practices of WeChat account employees have transformed government communication in major Chinese cities. In-depth interviews were conducted with government WeChat account (or Fabu) employees in Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Shenzhen. The analyses of the interview transcripts demonstrated that in daily media practices, the Fabu employees penetrated deeper into internal government decision-making processes by identifying themselves with the municipal authority, building binding ties by forging trustworthy dependence relations with other government offices, and spreading multiple WeChat expert networks to public sectors of the entire city. These routinized practices aligned the digital temporality of WeChat-based public engagement to the legacy temporal order of communication within Chinese city governments. The findings of this study contribute to the literature by suggesting that WeChat engenders temporal alignment as a reconciliatory and asymmetrical mode of mediation that exploits trust and interpersonal relationships to re-establish the time–space order of (semi)authoritarian city governments in which certain processes are difficult to change.

Transitioning to Sponge Cities: Challenges and Opportunities to Address Urban Water Problems in China

At present, the Sponge City Concept (SCC) is gaining ground, Sponge Cities technologies are becoming more and more accepted by Chinese city governments, and the first best practices are being shared. However, there are still many challenges ahead which hamper effective implementation and upscaling. This paper presents an overview of some opportunities and constraints for the take up of this approach and has drawn upon international experiences. In China at the national level, the State Council has set a progressive target for the SCC initiative to be achieved in 2030. This target seems to be ambitious as the time needed for integrative planning and design and implementation is much longer than traditional sectoral approaches often omitting to address social well-being, the (local) economy, and ecosystem health. This particularly holds true for the existing building stock. Transforming the existing building stock requires a long-term planning horizon, with urban restoration, regeneration, and modernization being key drivers for adapting the city to become a sponge city. A key challenge will be to align the sponge city initiative (SCI) projects with infrastructure and urban renovation portfolios. Moreover, substantial investment needs and a lack of reliable financing schemes and experience also provide a huge challenge for China. This calls for an integrative opportunistic strategy that creates enabling conditions for linking the SCI investment agenda with those from other sectors. These transformations cannot be made overnight: completing the transformation process will typically take a life time of one generation. The progress in sustainable urban water management is also impacted by innovations in technologies as well as in management strategies. These technological innovations create fertile ground for businesses to adapt state-of-the-art developments from around the world and contextualize them into fit-for-purpose products. China is well-placed to play a leading role in this process in the coming decade.

A Research on the Debt Sustainability of China’s Major City Governments in Post-Land Finance Era

Land finance, i.e., a city government’s revenue, depends deeply on the revenue from transferring multiannual land use rights and is a phenomenon unique to China. However, due to increasingly tense land supply, increasingly prominent social conflicts, and the slowdown of urbanization in China, the country is entering what we may label the “post-land finance” era. Therefore, revenue from land finance is decreasing, which threatens the sustainability of Chinese city governments’ debt, especially in major cities. This paper tests the long-term sustainability of major Chinese city governments’ debt. Different from intuition, the empirical results show that the debt of these major city governments is still sustainable at the macro level. This paper also constructs a quadratic function model to predict the critical value of the local government debt. Our results suggest that despite the fact that debt is still sustainable, critical value may be reached quickly, as debt is growing rapidly. There is thus a need for local fiscal reform that divides financial power and authority between the local governments and the central government more reasonable and clearly, improves the current assessment mechanism of local governments’ officials, and speeds up the legislative work on property taxes.

The Political Economy of Land Finance in China

The heavy reliance of Chinese local governments on land‐leasing revenues in recent decades has attracted widespread criticism due to its potential risks and problems. This research, using a panel dataset of 280 prefecture‐level cities in China from 1999 to 2009, explores what factors affect Chinese city governments’ dependence on land finance. The findings provide strong support for hypotheses concerning the effects of both fiscal incentives and political incentives on local fiscal behavior. Both fiscal factors—such as local reliance on fiscal transfers and fiscal decentralization—and political factors—including local top leaders’ tenure and their distance to mandatory retirement—have exerted significant impacts on city governments’ reliance on land finance. These findings point to the significance of intergovernmental fiscal arrangements and political institutions in affecting local government fiscal behavior in developing countries.

Person–Job Fit and Work-Related Attitudes Among Chinese Employees: Need for Cognitive Closure as Moderator

The current research examined the moderating role of employees' need for cognitive closure in the relationship between their perceived person–job fit and their work-related attitudes. In Study 1, a survey was conducted among 176 Chinese employees from various organizations, and the results confirmed that both demand–ability fit and need–supply fit were positively related to employees' job satisfaction; moreover, these relations were stronger among people with higher need for closure than those scoring lower in need for closure. In Study 2, a survey was conducted among 242 employees from a Chinese city government, and the results replicated the findings of Study 1, but also found that need for closure moderated the relation between demand–ability fit and turnover intention. These results have important implications for research in organizational psychology and human resource management.

Future Prospects for Performance Management in Chinese City Governments

Contrasting views are presented on the nature and rationale for public management reforms in China. One school argues that they are strongly influenced by international practice, whereas the other holds that they reflect the characteristics of Chinese politics and administration.The authors explore this proposition in the arena of performance management, where they pay particular attention to whether future prospects for performance management are likely to be associated with international practice or Chinese characteristics. The authors’ concern with the future leads them to implement a Delphi study focusing on performance management in city governments, from which they find that performance management has particular Chinese characteristics and that it will continue to be used as a control mechanism. However, expert respondents also indicate the desirability of orienting performance management and evaluation outward to citizens and other key stakeholders, and of enhancing service delivery and performance, in keeping with the international performance management movement. The authors conclude by discussing the research and practice implications of these findings.

The Structure of Chinese Urban Land Prices: Estimates from Benchmark Land Price Data

Taking the recent benchmark land prices published by the Chinese city governments, the paper estimates commercial and residential land price curves of Chinese cities using cross-sectional data, controlling for urban population size and income level. The urban land leasing price–distance relationship is estimated based on the argument that monocentric urban structure is representative for Chinese cities. Both population size and income level are found to positively affect urban land price and price–distance gradients. Commercial land prices are higher than residential land prices except in suburbs or outer central urban areas, where the land prices of different uses converge. In most situations, commercial use price gradients are larger than those of residential use.

Land and Transportation Development in China

This paper presents an economics perspective to help make city governments’ involvement in land and transportation development in urban China understandable. Chinese city government plays a monopolistic role in land supply because of the current land ownership by the state and the management power of the city government. City government behaves like a profit-maximizing organization because of the revenue assignment and service responsibility under the current public finance scheme. Conditioned on these institutional elements and responding to an incentive structure that lacks public involvement, rational city governments have pursued continuous new town development and neglected updating infrastructure in the older parts of cities. Road infrastructure has been emphasized, but transit investment has been neglected. Without changing the basic institutions such as land ownership, public involvement and land revenue spending regulations are essential to make city governments more responsive to the demand from the urban public.