Enthusiastic Policy Implementation and its Aftermath: The Sudden Expansion and Contraction of China's Microfinance for Women Programme

Abstract

Many China scholars have explored shirking by local officials and “effective implementation,” but fewer have examined polices that are implemented with great enthusiasm. The Microfinance for Women Programme fits in this last category. Especially in Sichuan, targets for lending were set by the province, exceeded, raised by cities and counties, and then exceeded again. The immediate reason that lending took off in 2012 was the relaxation of collateral requirements that shifted the risk of defaults away from local authorities. But the surge in lending also had deeper roots in the policy's vagueness, institutional incentives, bureaucratic pressure, and local fiscal and organizational interests. Although enthusiastic implementation occurred (and generated much-needed revenues for local governments), the history of the programme also shows that it can be halted, as was the case when instability loomed and the authorities reversed bureaucratic pressure by calling for local cost-sharing and introducing uncertainty over whether interest subsidies would continue.

Mobilizing cadre incentives in policy implementation: Poverty alleviation in a Chinese county

“… 5. Yanhua Deng, Kevin J. O’Brien, and Jiajian Chen, Enthusiastic policy implementation and its aftermath: The sudden expansion and contraction of China’s microfinance for women programme, The China Quarterly 234, 2018: 506–26. …”

When Collaborative Water Governance Meets Authoritarian Environmentalism: The Dilemma of Safe Water Supply Project in Coal Mining Villages of China’s Shanxi Province

“…Under such circumstances, "selective implementation" and huge gaps between environmental policy and implementation, which were lamentable hallmarks of the Hu-Wen era, have given way to "over-implementation" or "enthusiastic policy implementation" in recent years [47]. Officials at each level face ever-increasing responsibility attribution pressures thanks to a number of supervision, inspection and investigation campaigns in recent years.…”

2. Rural Financial Services in China

“…That being said, while the vast majority of research is top-down, structurally-oriented, and largely neglects (or minimises) local agency, there is a small body of scholarship which examines the processes and dynamics involved in the acquisition and utilisation of financial services from the perspectives of local actors through in-depth fieldwork in the Chinese countryside. This research explores the local political economy of formal and informal financial intermediation (Hu, 2003;Ong, 2006;Tsai, 2004), and often finds that rural financial services -and even 'external interventions' such as microcredit -become 'embedded' within existing socioeconomic and socio-political contexts at the local level (Bislev, 2010(Bislev, , 2012Deng, O'Brien, & Chen, 2018;Hsu, 2017). In particular, it has been observed that access to financial information -especially with regard to subsidised loans -is differentiated based on existing social relations, power, and widening social stratification in rural society (Bislev, 2010(Bislev, , 2012Tsai, 2000Tsai, , 2004Unger, 2002;Y.…”