Loyalists, Localists, and Legibility: The Calibrated Control of Provincial Leadership Teams in China

• Author: Kyle A. Jaros,David J. Bulman
• Date: 01 June 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0032329220908691
• Published date: 01 June 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329220908691

Politics & Society

2020, Vol. 48(2) 199 –234

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329220908691

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Article

Loyalists, Localists, and

Legibility: The Calibrated

Control of Provincial

Leadership Teams in China

David J. Bulman

Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies

Kyle A. Jaros

School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford

Abstract

Selecting provincial leaders is a fraught task for authoritarian regimes. Although

central authorities more readily trust provincial leaders with close ties to the

center, such loyalists may lack the local knowledge and connections necessary

to govern adeptly. Using an original data set on the tenures and backgrounds

of China’s provincial party standing committee members, this article explores

how Beijing fine-tunes provincial leadership teams to resolve this dilemma.

The analysis challenges the conventional wisdom that Beijing exerts its tightest

personnel control in strategically important provinces. It shows that Beijing

tolerates significant embeddedness of local leadership in provinces with complex

governance challenges even when these provinces are important. Moreover, it

finds that when the center reasserts control through appointments of loyalist

personnel during times of crisis, it does so in a balanced manner. These calibrated

personnel strategies highlight the extent to which authoritarian systems rely on

local expertise and experience as well as top-down control.

Keywords

China, personnel management, central-local relations, authoritarian regimes, legibility

Corresponding Author:

David J. Bulman, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, 1619 Massachusetts Ave. NW,

Washington, DC 20009, USA.

Email: dbulman1@jhu.edu

908691PASXXX10.1177/0032329220908691Politics & SocietyBulman and Jaros

research-article2020

200 Politics & Society 48(2)

Governing the provinces is among the most sensitive challenges faced by large author-

itarian states like China. The central state depends on political support and economic

resources from the provinces in order to function. Regime stability can be threatened

when provinces are insubordinate or when governance failures lead to regional crises.

However, central authorities lack the information and organizational capacity to gov-

ern the provinces directly; they must delegate at least some power to subnational

actors over whom they have imperfect oversight. Of course, central control over the

appointment and removal of provincial leaders remains a potent political tool in China

and other authoritarian systems.1 But provincial leaders’ simultaneous roles as agents

of the center and stewards of their regions create serious political conundrums,2 and

choosing regional leaders involves dilemmas in its own right.

A key difficulty in selecting regional leaders is the trade-off between tightening

central control and ensuring responsive regional governance. Appointing individuals

with close ties to the central state rather than local politicians to serve as provincial

leaders limits the risk that provinces will challenge central authority or flout central

policies. However, greater central control may come at the cost of ham-fisted regional

governance: provincial leaders who are loyal to the center but lack local knowledge

and working relationships may adopt inappropriate policies for their regions or alien-

ate local elites. Indeed, past research has found that “centralists” and “localists” behave

differently in provincial leadership posts, with important implications for provincial

governance and development outcomes.3 Central leaders are thus forced to weigh

competing concerns, especially in large, regionally diverse countries such as China.

As Jae-Ho Chung notes, “The leaders of the People’s Republic—whether Mao, Deng,

Jiang, or Hu—all agonized over the task of keeping an intricate balance between pro-

moting national goals and safeguarding local interests.”4

How do central authorities reconcile the need for control with concerns about

responsive regional governance when selecting provincial leaders? What explains the

decision to appoint more politically loyal centralists to provincial leadership posts in

some cases while placing more regionally connected localists in other instances? Past

scholarship on authoritarian regimes demonstrates that central authorities appoint top

regional leaders in tailored ways, opting for different types of leaders depending on

which concerns loom largest.5 In regions of strategic importance to the country as a

whole, autocrats may install centralist leaders to ensure sufficient control. In less

strategically important areas or regions that are culturally distinctive, autocrats may

instead appoint localists who are more familiar with the regional political landscape.6

Targeted selection of top provincial leaders is an important political instrument, but it

is a crude one. Some strategically important regions also pose idiosyncratic gover-

nance challenges that require a careful balance of central control and regional respon-

siveness. And individual leaders are unpredictable, so there is always a risk of

misbehavior by wayward regional bosses.

Focused on contemporary China, this article seeks to clarify how central authorities

resolve these quandaries of provincial governance. Building on insights from past schol-

arship, we provide a more nuanced account of how authoritarian regimes use the levers

of personnel control to keep provinces both loyal and competently managed. We contend

Bulman and Jaros 201

that, beyond strategically choosing provincial chiefs, central authorities assemble larger

provincial leadership teams in ways that balance central control and regional governance

considerations. The top leaders (yi ba shou) of China’s provinces are very powerful fig-

ures, but second-tier provincial leaders also play key roles in provincial po litics and

policymaking.7 We highlight how the central party-state’s control over the composition

of provincial party standing committees (PPSCs)—key leadership groups of roughly a

dozen members that oversee politics and policymaking in China’s regions—enables it to

set leadership lineups that mix centralists and localists in different proportions.

Looking at larger provincial leadership teams also changes our view of central

authorities’ personnel appointment strategies. Previous scholarship on China’s person-

nel strategies, focused almost exclusively on appointments of top provincial leaders,8

has highlighted a logic of central control, arguing that Beijing appoints centralists to

run the most politically and economically important provinces, where control is per-

ceived as most essential to maintaining regime stability. However, we argue that a

logic of responsive governance becomes equally or more important when it comes to

larger provincial leadership teams. Personnel decisions are constrained by the need to

ensure locally sensitive governance, which is a greater challenge in some places than

others. We contend that the degree of personnel centralization Beijing chooses depends

to a large extent on regions’ relative “legibility”9—on how intelligible local affairs are

to state actors. Less legible provinces have more localized PPSC teams, which help

ensure responsive governance in difficult settings.10

After laying out this argument, we present empirical evidence from an original data

set containing career information on all PPSC members for the period 1996–2013.

Analysis of almost two decades’ worth of data for thirty-one province-level units allows

us to observe PPSC composition across multiple leader tenures and provincial leader-

ship reshuffles and makes possible a more comprehensive assessment of the degree to

which provincial leadership lineups are centralized. Using this data set, we explore how

different types of individuals are combined on provincial leadership teams to balance

different competencies. We document wide variation over time and across provinces in

the extent of overall personnel centralization on PPSC teams. We find that even as per-

sonnel centralization has gradually increased across all provinces, most likely enabled

by improvements in central state capacity that increase legibility, the use of calibrated

personnel strategies that combine centralists and localists on PPSCs continues.

We go on to show that the pursuit of responsive governance is just as important

as the need for central control in determining the centralization level of provincial

leadership teams. Although we do find systematically greater centralization of lead-

ership teams in regions of political importance, such as the capital region and China’s

province-level municipalities, we find that provinces with less legible governance

landscapes—those that are economically dynamic, geopolitically sensitive, and

socioculturally complex—tend to have more localized rather than more centralized

PPSC lineups, even when they are nationally important. For example, China’s most

conflict-prone ethnic minority regions have had relatively localized leadership

teams, which suggests that local knowledge remains crucial even amid the imple-

mentation of repressive strategies by the party-state.