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China’s Campaign-Style Implementation Regime: How is “Targeted Poverty Alleviation” being achieved locally?

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Abstract

By integrating policy regimes and campaign theories, this article investigates the institutional mode by which China’s local governments transcend their structural-interest constraints and overcome their capacity deficits to successfully implement targeted poverty alleviation (TPA) policies. Using a “campaign-style implementation regime” framework and three counties as cases, we analyzed and coded the institutional structures, elements, and mechanisms for achieving the counties’ TPA goals. First, the case study indicates that the campaign redistributed local political attention and became the “idea glue” for policy integration. Second, through the campaign, horizontal and vertical, formal and informal, institutional arrangements were constructed to redistribute decision-making power, and coordination mechanisms were built within the Tiao/Kuai system. Third, the campaign constructed complex interest-alignment mechanisms within the political system, involving many actors and changing their motivational structures. In addition, we found that the campaign-style implementation regime was achieved through local governments’ institutional reintegration and recombination between structures and actors. Theoretically, the campaign-style implementation regime provides a new analytical perspective on the dynamics of regime construction and the institutional elements within a campaign. Practically, it offers an escape route for developing countries ensnared in a capacity trap.

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Notes

  1. < Poverty Alleviation: China’s Experience and Contribution > , The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, April 2021. Available online, http://www.scio.gov.cn/zfbps/32832/Document/1701632/1701632.htm (accessed September 13, 2021).

  2. Regime theory originates from international relations [25] and urban governance [6]. Regime is also an important concept in the study of policy processes (e.g., [48, 56]). The policy implementation regime theory is an integration of these basic concepts. It provides theoretical guidance for opening the black box of a policy system.

  3. The main goal for TPA was for 56.3 million poor residents in rural China (2015) to obtain “one ‘have’, two ‘non-worries’, and three ‘guarantees’” (liang bu chou, san baozhang 两不愁三保障) by 2020. Specifically, every poor rural resident would have a stable income of 4,000 yuan per year (one “have”), enough food and clothing to live on (two “non-worries”), and adequate access to compulsory education, basic medical care, and housing (three “guarantees”). To be considered lifted out of poverty, the county government had to meet the “three ‘rates’ and one ‘degree’” (san lv yi du 三率一度) standard. “Three rates” refers to the target rates for the incidence of poverty (< 2%), the rate of missed targeting (< 1%), and the rate of wrongful removal from the poor households list (< 2%). “One rate” refers to the public satisfaction rate (> 90%). All three counties met the “three ‘rates’ and one ‘degree’” standard, so we coded them as achieving TPA’s policy goal.

  4. “Double leaders” refers to the poverty alleviation headquarters set up the Party secretary and the head of the county government as two leaders.

  5. “Five secretaries” refer to the five secretaries of the CPC Central Committee, the Provincial Party Committee, the Municipal Party Committee, the County Party Committee, and the Village Party Committee.

  6. It means that Party members and cadres are mobilized to help the rural poor, just as they would help their own relatives.

  7. “Danwei” is a special organization based on China’s socialist political system and its traditional planned economy system. It provides a variety of functions such as political control, professional division of labor, and living guarantees. Currently, the term Danwei mainly refers to all public institutions within the Party-state. The typical form of an urban Danwei includes the Party and government institutions (xingzheng Danwei 行政单位), state-owned management and service institutions (shiye Danwei 事业单位), and SOEs.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to our interviewees for their selfless cooperation in this research, and Qiyao Shen for her help in the process of data collection and processing. This research was supported by National Social Science Fund for Young Scholars of China (17CGL053), National Natural Science Foundation of China (72104084), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 2022WKYXZX007).

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  1. College of Public Administration, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China

    Changkun Cai & Na Tang

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Correspondence to Na Tang.

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Cai, C., Tang, N. China’s Campaign-Style Implementation Regime: How is “Targeted Poverty Alleviation” being achieved locally?. J OF CHIN POLIT SCI 28, 645–669 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-022-09823-1

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