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"Despite the dominant narrative of the repression of civil society in China, Civil Society Under Authoritarianism: The China Model argues that interactions between local officials and civil society facilitate a learning process, whereby each actor learns about the intentions and work processes of the other. Over the past two decades, often facilitated by foreign donors and problems within the general social framework, these interactions generated a process in which officials learned the benefits and disadvantages of civil society"--

Despite the dominant narrative of the repression of civil society in China, Civil Society under Authoritarianism: The China Model argues that interactions between local officials and civil society facilitate a learning process, whereby each actor learns about the intentions and work processes of the other. Over the past two decades, often facilitated by foreign donors and problems within the general social framework, these interactions generated a process in which officials learned the benefits and disadvantages of civil society. Civil society supports local officials' efforts to provide social services and improve public policies, yet it also engages in protest and other activities that challenge social stability and development. This duality motivates local officials in China to construct a 'social management' system - known as consultative authoritarianism - to encourage the beneficial aspects and discourage the dangerous ones

Will Xi Jinping's increasingly authoritarian rule stifle innovation by local officials, which has been instrumental in the Chinese communist regime's resilience and economic success?

Decentralised policymaking in China is often cited as a key success factor in economic reform and authoritarian resilience. Although the existing literature presents policy diffusion as a technocratic process where socially optimal policies diffuse, many examples exist where the reverse is true or where the central government sanctioned local innovation but the policy diffuses to other places regardless. The author contends that policy diffusion in authoritarian regimes should be understood as a political process, where local officials serve as policy entrepreneurs, rather than a technocratic one. Subnational officials do not respond uniformly to either incentives from the central government or local pressure, but rather adopt experimental policies as a strategy learned from other successful officials. Policy experimentation has emerged as a strategy for officials desiring either career advancement or security, resulting in an S-shaped curve of policy diffusion characteristic of a learning process whereby a few initially innovate but others quickly adopt the experiment once viewed as successful. (China/GIGA)

In this article, I address the puzzle of what motivates local officials in China to do something new-create a new policy, launch a pilot, adopt an experimental policy-especially when such innovation has uncertain outcomes. Despite the uncertainty and risk, we observe a great deal of policy innovation, both the creation and adoption of experiments, at the subnational level in China. In this article, I explore local policymakers' incentives regarding innovation to understand why they experiment with new policies under conditions of political risk and uncertainty. I utilize data from existing studies on policy innovation, including the Local Governance Innovation Awards (中國地方政府創新獎), to conduct this analysis. This analysis is significant because many scholars have noted that local innovation and adaptation is the key to authoritarian resilience in China. Therefore, the ability to encourage innovation (and capture good ideas) is vital to continued success, and Xi Jinping's administration must institutionalize innovation by realigning incentives to reward sustainable innovation rather than superficial or "face" innovation. This institutional change might help transform the political and economic system in China through incremental policy innovation rather than fundamental reform. (Issues Stud/GIGA)