Party Adaptation Strategies for Provincial Standing Committees in Post-Mao China

Abstract

The Chinese Communist Party has been surprisingly successful in carrying out its plans in the face of various challenges in the post-Mao era. Compared to their central counterparts, the operating patterns of local institutions in tackling such difficulties have been less examined. This paper aims to fill this gap by exploring the party’s management of provincial standing committees (PSCs). As the highest level of local collective leadership, the PSC essentially sets the agenda for the province. Using a new database of PSC members from 1980 to 2016, this study provides a systematic illustration of the historical composition of provincial collective leadership. Instead of making drastic changes, the party has subtly shifted the roles of provincial leaders: it has redefined the role of the vice party secretary, adjusted the number of posts in the provincial government, and raised the level of professionalism.

Policy Agendas and Environmental Protection: How Agenda-Setting Matters

“…This "real power" includes not only the absolute authority to appoint personnel at the next level of government, but also the power to make final decisions on important public matters (Wu and Zhang 2018). In everyday politics, the PSC is the core policy venue of each province (Lee 2021). It is usually composed of twelve or thirteen members, each of whom is in charge of a specific area, such as macroeconomics, government operations, public policy, and other party affairs (Figure 1).…”