The politics of performance measurement in China

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The politics of performance measurement in China§ Yijia Jing *, Yangyang Cui, Danyao Li Fudan University, China

Abstract Performance measurement (PM) has been widely used in China’s public sector to enhance performance and ensure accountability. Like in other countries, PM in China is an arena of political management and manipulation by which political priorities are articulated and political loyalty and responsiveness are sought. This paper develops a regime-centered analytical framework to understand the political nature of China’s PM. It identifies major political structures that influence the adoption and functioning of PM in China, including the unified political and administrative system, the Chinese developmental state and its performance legitimacy strategy, the unitary but decentralized intergovernmental systems, and the bureaucratic culture and informal rules. Despite their constraining effects, these structural attributes of the Chinese political system fundamentally account for the rise and popularity of PM in China. # 2015 Policy and Society Associates (APSS). Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Performance measurement (PM) became a formal practice in China’s public sector in 1985 when targetresponsibility system began to be adopted in local government management. Nonetheless, a PM culture could be traced back to the planned economy era when local governments and state-owned enterprises endeavored to meet quantitative targets assigned by the planning system, which was frequently interrupted or paralyzed by the vehemently turbulent political environment especially during the 1966–1976 Great Cultural Revolution. The adoption of PM in the 1980s and its entrenchment in China’s public sector happened in a process of incremental but decisive transition of China’s political economy, hence following a starkly different logic. PM became such a popular phenomenon that the use of PM especially visible numbers was itself a symbol of legitimacy in China’s public life. Major recent developments showed a strong commitment of the central government to formalize, institutionalize and systemize PM practices. In July 2010, Performance Management and Supervision Office (jixiao guanli jianchashi) of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection was established. In March 2011, the State Council approved the establishment of Inter-Ministry Joint Conference on Government Performance Management Work (IJCGPMW) that was composed of nine central agencies. In the following June, the State Council approved the IJCGPMW’s proposal to initiate pilot tests covering four major areas of performance management including local governments, central government agencies, central programs, and central budgetary expenditures. The grant information: The research is supported by National Social Science Foundation[3_TD$IF] of China (Grant Number 12&ZD021). * Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (Y. Jing).

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polsoc.2015.02.001 1449-4035/# 2015 Policy and Society Associates (APSS). Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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The popularity of PM in China is apparently part of the global trend of evidence-based and result-oriented government, which influenced China through its external learning and imitation (Christensen, Dong, & Painter, 2008; Worthley & Tsao, 1999). Borrowing of PM practices, such as the balanced scorecard and performance budgeting, from western societies has been popular for local governments pressured by increasing demands for effective and efficient service provision.1 The modernizing Chinese public sector management almost indiscriminately accepted reform ideals originated from western contexts such as small government, efficiency, citizens participation, and public private partnership. Meanwhile, it has been noticed that Chinese PM is far from a pure western transplant (Chan & Gao, 2009; Gao, 2009; Rosenbloom & Hahm, 2010; Walker & Wu, 2010). Significant differences exist regarding why, what, who(m) and how to measure, and regarding the consequences and impacts of PM. The adopted PM in China has, unsurprisingly, fit the local conditions by adapting itself in the actual process of implementation. Such a decoupling is not just a Chinese phenomenon. Despite the orthodoxy view of PM as administrative instrument for technical performance and organizational control (Behn, 2003; Boyne, Meier, O’Toole, & Walker, 2006; Johnsen, 2005), scholars have increasingly realized the fundamental role of the political, social technical, and cultural contexts to shape PM and make it meaningful and appropriate (Julnes & Holzer, 2001; Moynihan, 2009; Moynihan & Pandey, 2005; Pollitt, 1987; Radin, 2000, 2006; Rosenbloom & Hahm, 2010). The ‘‘chain of performance measurement’’ is essentially linked to the ‘‘use and location of power’’, and is socially constructed in the ‘‘interaction of institutional rules and the individual responses to these rules’’ (Lewis, 2015). This alternative perspective, which highlights the political causes and effects of PM, can be particularly powerful to observe the convergences and divergences of PM in different countries whose local conditions manage to accommodate the standard PM claims and purposes. Political factors of different levels, such as fundamental political values and institutions, basic governmental structures and processes, and organizational culture, can all exert influences. The many particular aspects of China’s political system undoubtedly set different incentives and constraints for PM, providing another case of the resilience of the Chinese political regime to imported managerial innovations. This paper intends to systematically understand the ways that politics influences PM in China. In the following we will first set the theoretical framework for understanding PM from a regime-centered perspective, then apply it to China’s PM practices to disclose its contextualized interactions with politics. The research is mainly based on literature review, case information, and theoretical analysis. Conclusions will be provided at the end. 2. The framework PM develops and evolves in given regimes. In this paper regime is defined as a set of enduring and mutually reinforcing political institutions that provide rules for actors within the system, for example by providing the boundary of appropriate and legitimate behavior, decision-making procedures, and standards of justice and equity (Young, 1980). Regimes are mixed products of purposeful designs and historical evolution, with both formal and informal elements (North, 1990). By having regime as a unit of analysis and having China as a targeted case, a framework of the politics of PM can be developed in Fig. 1, which identifies four important regime-level political attributes that may shape the adoption and functioning of PM. 2.1. Core political values and institutions ‘‘Regime values embody normative preferences, beliefs, passions, and views of government and society that are associated with a political community’s founding and historical development’’ (Baehler, Liu, & Rosenbloom, 2014). These values provide the basic foundation of political identity and legitimacy, and fundamentally shape the perceptions of the appropriate ways to organize and operate a government. Core political values are found in a country’s constitutional, legal, and historical framework, especially those formal statements about political justice, freedom, rights, and the political institutions and practices to realize them. Hence it is politically and legally binding for the public sector, specifically the government, to respect and maximize these values. PM, as an instrument to improve the government, has to avoid jeopardizing or hindering these values. In ideal situations PM should actively 1

Central government in China only spent 14.9% of China’s fiscal expenditures in 2012, and most central expenditures were for national defense, diplomacy, state security, foreign aid, central agency administration, relief, and national projects and programs, etc.

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Fig. 1. Regime’s political attributes and their components that influence PM.

advocate, facilitate and promote these values. Nonetheless, it is not rare that PM conflicts with these political values. Regimes values or the so-called mission-extrinsic values (Baehler et al., 2014), may divert agencies from PM efforts or complicate its adoption and implementation. Rosenbloom’s (1983) three-approach perspective highlights the competing values and their institutional watchdogs under a separation of powers system. Both the Congress and Court may intervene into PM practices to safeguard regime values through hands-on micromanagement (Behn, 1995). Boundary blurring driven by performance purposes may invite the imposition of public law norms on private contractors and may subsequently abate its potential performance gain (Freeman, 2003). While there are multiple channels for fundamental political attributes of a regime to influence PM, this paper specifically highlights two dimensions due to their relevance to China: the politics–administration relation and the government–citizen relation. The former is a classic topic of administrative studies and is directly related to the politicization of PM (Aberbach, Putnam, & Rockman, 1981). In reality political influences on administration vary across agencies, governments, and regimes in degree and in category, and are necessary for maintaining political accountability of the bureaucratic system. Competitive political systems may tend to offer more bureaucratic autonomy through a process of structural choice (Moe, 1989). A unified system, on the contrary, relies on sophisticate political empowerment and control to maximize designated outputs from the bureaucracy. While the manner of politicization is different, both systems have their efficiency deficits by design – the US Constitution is ‘‘deliberately inefficient’’ while Chinese system suffers a perpetual friction between the party and the state (Przeworski, 2014). The second dimension is the government–citizen relation that shapes the potential of citizens to participant in PM, do evaluation, and make governments accountable. This concern is not simply about the regime’s level of democracy, but also about citizen’s trust over government’s capacity and will to serve their interests. More democratic regimes may invite more citizen engagement, but may still suffer from public cynicism toward the government (Berman, 1997). The institutional insulation of government from citizens tends to make PM a tool of internal management rather than a device for more external accountability (Ebrahim, 2010). 2.2. Regime legitimacy and state building Besides the way a regime is built, regime legitimacy is practically realized through the regime’s performance to handle dynamic challenges and demands. Modern state building has been unfinished for many developing countries, including some obviously failed states (Fukuyama, 2004; Hehir & Robinson, 2007). Invariably, the core task of these countries is to institutionalize and enhance state capacities such as those of extraction, regulation, legitimation, and coercion (Wang & Hu, 1993). PM can serve state building by clarifying capacity demands to incentivize and steer the nascent and incapable public bureaucracy (Chan & Gao, 2009; Zhu, 2011). Historical path and current stage of socioeconomic development shape the priority sequence of capacity building, and hence the strategic foci of PM. For underdeveloped, developing and post-conflict countries, the quality of political transition, consolidation and development depends heavily on the state’s capacity to build and improve domestic market institutions and to survive and prosper in the global economy. Hence state-led economic modernization is frequently the foremost priority of PM (Johnson, 1982; Woo-Cumings, 1999). Subsequent private sector developments, citizen rights awareness, civil society growth, and other factors will derive new demands on the state and force it to adjust its PM priorities. Complex and inclusive PM matrix may reflect a stage of higher socioeconomic Please cite this article in press as: Y. Jing, et al., The politics of performance measurement in China, Policy and Society (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polsoc.2015.02.001

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development so that multiple quality aspects of life could receive policy attention and political commitment at the same time. 2.3. Government structure and processes PM happens in intergovernmental webs. The vertical and horizontal structures of the regime are another arena that generates PM politics. The hierarchy with a principal–agent relation chain is one most noticed place of PM politics. Unitary system of government tends to rely on superordinate governments to set measuring strategies and indicators, do exact measurement, and provide rewards and punishments. While a unitary system tends to do better than a federal system in achieving goals set by higher governments, such capacity is still limited by multiple transaction cost factors like the distrust among governments, their physical distance, low quality of performance information, and the difficulty to have one-size-fits-all measurement matrix. Worldwide, unitary systems have increasingly used and enhanced PM as a hands-off strategy to secure control and accountability, in a reform effort toward more decentralization. To maintain upward accountability, competition pressures are often intentionally created by applying uniform PM to governments and agencies. Varying local conditions and the strong stake linked to PM results invite gaming behavior, forcing higher level governments to focus on most important, measurable, and divisible targets. As public sector goals are often ambiguous, multiple, complex and frequently mutually conflicting (Lewis, 2015), clearly defined measures lead to measurement paradoxes (Van Thiel & Leeuw, 2002). Competition behind a divisible measurement system discourages intergovernmental and interagency collaborations on cross-boundary issues. Agencies with horizontal functions, such as finance, auditing, personnel and statistical departments, tend to take the lead in providing, processing and interpreting performance information, making themselves rule makers and enforcers. 2.4. Administrative culture and informal rules Informal institutional contexts create subtle, nuanced but significant impacts on PM politics. Administrative cultures and traditions help agency and individual actors to make sense of PM and take context-appropriate attitudes and actions. Ideological inclination, uncertainty dispositions, risk preferences, power distribution, blame avoidance, vested interests, and psychological favor of convenience and consistency all influence the enforcement of PM (Hood, 2012; Lavertu & Moynihan, 2013). Established knowledge and causality links and perception of appropriate departmental functions and boundaries also influence attitudes toward PM. Comparatively, organizational culture oriented to missions and achievements tends to emphasize the opportunities brought by PM innovations (Garnett, Marlowe, & Pandey, 2008). Symbolism may characterize PM and explains apparent decoupling. As a purposeful intervention that seeks changes, PM may be trapped in political struggles for new legitimacy, opportunities, and ascendancy. Difficulty of systematic reform and coordination and problematic attention lead to institutional isomorphism (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). PM may be ‘‘undertaken as a goal in itself to indicate policy and organizational rationality’’, as a new method of political discipline (Lewis, 2015). Simply adopting or announcing a PM reform earns credits, although lack of the will and resources of implementation denies a real change. Vague goals and outputs may be allowed. Symbolism makes PM a game of satisficing. A special factor of administrative culture is how PM may be personalized. Agency leaders play important roles in PM by defining strategic issues, designing and operating PM, and deciding the use of PM information (Berry, Brower, & Flowers, 2000; Moynihan & Pandey, 2010; Moynihan & Ingraham, 2004). A context favoring rule of man may encourage leaders to adopt PM innovations as a practice of leadership discretion. However, short-term behavior and lack of shared consensus may cause easy fluctuation and interruption in implementation. PM experiences most serious setbacks during leadership turnover if its further implementation and success will be attributed to a former leader. 3. The politics of performance measurement in China The above framework is used to reorganize existing literature and evidence of China’s PM practices so a general picture of the PM politics in China could be drawn. While China’s PM politics has a lot in common with its western counterparts, the focus of this paper is to identify the regime-specific differences. Please cite this article in press as: Y. Jing, et al., The politics of performance measurement in China, Policy and Society (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polsoc.2015.02.001

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3.1. Chinese political system and its core values One fundamental perspective to understand China’s political system and its development is the party–state relation, and above all, the historical sequence of them. Different to western political systems, China’s long feudal history and its learning from the west driven by national crisis created the fact that modern political parties emerged preceding a modern Chinese state and led the birth and development of the latter. In the Preamble of China’s Constitution, this history is recognized. Both the victory of China’s new-democratic revolution and the successes of its socialist cause have been achieved by the Chinese people of all nationalities under the leadership of the Communist Party of China. Consequently, the political leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) over the state and its ideologies are constitutionally recognized. The Constitution says that ‘‘under the leadership of the Communist Party of China’’, ‘‘the basic task of the nation is to concentrate its efforts on socialist modernization by following the road of Chinese-style socialism’’. The integrated party–state is one single most important feature of China’s political system. Although such a unified system has its entrenched problems such as those pointed out by its own leaders,2 major reform attempts were proved to provide no effective alternatives to coordinate and develop the still immature Chinese modern state. Hence core values of Chinese political system are those upheld by the CPC, which has been dynamically adjusting itself and effectively transformed from a revolutionary party to a modern ruling party. Political flags, from Deng Xiaoping’s ‘‘Reform and Opening up’’, to Jiang Zeming’s ‘‘Three Represents’’,3 to Hu Jintao’s ‘‘Outlook of Scientific development’’, and to Xi Jinping’s ‘‘Modernization of State Governance System and Capacity’’, confirm a decisive path of political development that combines CPC leadership and modern state building. For example, the 2005 Civil Service Law, being a milestone to modernize China’s civil service, affirms ‘‘the principle that Party supervises cadres’’. The unified political system significantly determines what to measure, who measure, and how. A first characteristic of PM in China is the inclusion of political performance indicators. According to the 2009 Provisional Methods to Comprehensively Appraise and Evaluate Local Party-Government Leadership Collective and Leading cadres (hereafter the Provisional Methods) issued by CPC’s Central Organizational Department, local governments at or beyond county level should be evaluated in five areas including ideological and political work, leadership capacity, actual work performance, promoting integrity and anti-corruption, and accomplishing major goals and tasks; and major local officials should be evaluated regarding morality, capacity, diligence, performance, and integrity. Within this general framework, actual work performance of local governments is composed of economic development, social development, sustainable development, livelihoods improvement, social harmony, and party–government working style, while performance of local leading cadres is composed of work thoughts, work efforts, work achievements, policy implementation, working style, and public image. This regulation reflects and recognizes existing PM practices in China’s reform era. Inclusion of political and ideological performance indicators as above conveys a denial of the view of politics– administration dichotomy. Governments and officials are both expected to actively maintain the political legitimacy of party–state and enlarge its citizen support in a time of fast transition. The basic criteria of cadre selection are morality and capacity, showing a traditional mandate to simultaneously impose political and managerial accountabilities on all government officials. In the 1980s there were ever failed reform attempts to classify civil servants as political and professional so they could be evaluated differently. Recent civil service reforms classified civil service positions as comprehensive management, professional–technical, and administrative law enforcement, focusing on internal and technical division of labor (Jing & Zhu, 2012). Consequently, political indicators consistently exist in PM of governments, agencies, officials, programs, and projects as important incentives and constraints. Regime values embedded in PM are straightforwardly advocated and inculcated. In local practices, evaluation of nonprofits receiving contracts or subsidies from governments also include

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For example, Xiaoping Deng, in 1941, wrote to object micro-management of the state by the party (Deng, 1989, pp. 10–16). According to the Constitution of the CPC, Three Represents means that ‘‘Our Party must always represent the requirements for developing China’s advanced productive forces, the orientation of China’s advanced culture and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people’’. 3

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the support of party leadership as one major criterion (Jing, 2015). Since political indicators are in general difficult to quantify and measure, it lends lots of space to formalism and power politics. For example, aforementioned ideological and political work as part of PM of local governments includes political directions, ideological style, theoretical studies, and enforcement of democratic centralism, none of which has clear quantifiable standards like the growth rate of GDP. The measurement, then, heavily hinges on the discretion of measuring agencies and superordinate leaders. The resulting uncertainty pushes risk-averse governments and officials to safeguard themselves by learning and adopting general practices and by approaching measuring agencies or staff of the leading officials for their hints how to maximize performance. Political engagement explains the wide use in PM of indicators that are not based on agency missions. A unified political–administrative system tends to be more sensitive and capable of discerning the political consequences of social and public issues and using PM to mobilize the whole administrative system to internalize these potential ‘‘externalities’’. Non-mission-based performance targets ‘‘include family planning, corruption control, party building, environmental protection, maintaining comprehensive social order, ensuring safety at work, and the handling of mass complaints’’ that are extrinsic to agency missions (Gao, 2010; Rosenbloom & Hahm, 2010). An evolving and expanding list of such targets partially substitutes a system of multiple veto players by forcing the administrative system to respond to plural demands, and can be quite effective by relying on the unitary and hierarchical party–state system. But apparently the potential disadvantages are that too many non-mission-based performance targets may create accountability confusion and lead to mission drift of functional agencies. It is also true that non-mission-based values are only selectively prioritized. Some may lose their political sensitiveness in China’s context. For example, the densely installed cameras in public space significantly enhance crime-control capacities at a price of potential loss of citizen privacy. A second characteristic is the prominent role of political agencies in PM. Who measure, interpret, and use performance information determines who control. As a unified political system always faces a permanent task to exert political control over bureaucracy, PM in China has been mainly the jurisdiction of party agencies. The CPC’s Central Organizational Department (COD) has been a major agency to make and implement the rules of evaluation for local governments and cadres. As a party agency of cadre management, the use of PM information by COD has strengthened its capacity to make informed and objective decisions. Besides COD, the Ministry of Inspection (MOI) is another major player in China’s PM. Having MOI as a major institutional promoter of government performance reflects two important concerns: the use of PM in China as an anti-waste, anti-bureaucratism, and anti-corruption instrument, and the lack of expertise of the executive office of the central government. MOI is organizationally integrated with the CPC’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, with its minister staffing the vice Secretary of the latter. This confirms the leadership of CPC as the propeller and controller of PM, as ‘‘one concrete way to manifest and reinforce the principle that the party controls cadres’’ (Chan & Gao, 2013). A third characteristic is the use of PM as an instrument of internal management. The ascendancy of party organizations and superordinate government agencies in designing and operating the PM system is maximized by imposing PM in a top-down manner. PM is mostly deemed as an effective management tool to deal with principle– agent problems within the party–state, instead of an intervention to reshape the relation between government and citizens. Disclosure of PM information to the public is in general quite limited, limiting the potential of PM to build and strengthen downward and horizontal accountabilities. It ‘‘does not seek to heighten external oversight over agencies. Nor does it seek to respond to changing citizen needs’’ (Chan & Rosenbloom, 2010). Nonetheless, CPC’s traditional mass line principle and its recently established principle of orderly political participation engendered practices of citizen participation in PM. The 2009 Provisional Methods requests a combination of democratic recommendation, democratic evaluation, opinion poll, individual talk, and actual performance analysis to have comprehensive appraisal of local governments and officials. These methods, except for actual performance analysis, all engage to some extent different stakeholders. Some recent local practices piloted resident satisfaction surveys and public assessment to disclose citizens’ perception of government performance (Burns & Zhou, 2010). 3.2. Chinese state building: from economic to comprehensive performance legitimacy Chinese state building since 1978 got on a different track. Giving up ideology-based class struggle, the state redefined development under a marketizing economy as its first priority. Comparatively faster economic growth and quicker livelihoods improvements were demonstrated as fundamental evidence of the ‘‘supremacy’’ of a socialist Please cite this article in press as: Y. 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regime. Performance legitimacy especially economic performance legitimacy became a key pillar of the regime ([4_TD$IF]Yang & [5_TD$IF]Zhao, [6_TD$IF]2015; Zhu, 2011). Hence in the 1980s and 1990s a government capable of economic steering and coordination was the major task of state capacity building and thus a major target of PM. Local government performance was mainly measured in economic terms, such as the growth of GDP, industrial outputs, fiscal revenues, and foreign direct investment. Economic performance targets were disaggregated and assigned downward until reaching lowest level governments and, not rarely, to purely service-delivering agencies. Even in the late 1990s some township governments were only assigned economic targets from above (Zhou, 2010, pp. 127–128). In 2007, economic targets still accounted for 60% weight of PM for township governments in Jingbian County (Chan & Gao, 2009, p. 54). While there were some priority targets with veto power such as family planning that must be met, economic targets tended to be hard requirements and tended to be areas of serious local competition (Edin, 2003). The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the successor of the State Planning Commission in China’s planned economy era, played a key role in distributing economic targets to local governments (Burns & Zhou, 2010). The dominant role of economic targets in PM was not only due to the party–state’s judgment that a well-off society affirmed its domestic and international competence, but also due to the essential need to consolidate the party–state by overcoming internal contradictions, for example the conflict between political and legal authorities (Przeworski, 2014). A unified political system could not be simply maintained by exerting control over the state, but by creating mutual interests and stakeholdership. This got more realistic in the reform era as the Party’s ideological holiness and absolute authority vanished. The failure of the planned economy, which likewise emphasized economic outputs of local jurisdictions and SOEs, was a partial result of its denial of the organizational and individual interests of the bureaucracy and thus its incapacity to incentivize and engage the latter. The post-1978 economy-centered PM created goal alignment by bringing direct benefits to the bureaucracy. First, local governments got more economic decision making powers. Local state corporatism, the extreme case, emerged in the 1980s, referring to local governments that behaved like ‘‘diversified business corporations’’ and made critical resource allocation decisions (Oi, 1992). Second, local governments and agencies became direct beneficiaries of local economic performance. Besides revenue sharing systems including the pre-1994 fiscal contracting system and the subsequent tax assignment system, high performing governments and agencies could get all kinds of commissions, bonus, awards, and subsidies. Third, local governments and agencies were de facto allowed to operate profit-making economic entities in order to fulfill assigned performance targets. These quasi-public quasi-private entities may become the cash cow of their government sponsors (Francis, 2001). Finally, PM gave local governments extended discretion in local economic affairs. Although post-1978 reforms aimed at creating a ‘‘self-regulating’’ market, PM targets pushed governments to take micro-management strategies. Governments may intervene in industrial and financial organizations’ internal management and decisions like the timing of investment, debt financing, tax submission, and profit accounting to optimize local statistical data. All above benefit-sharing mechanisms created bureaucracy’s enthusiasm of and compliance with the economy-centered PM system, and maintained the attractiveness of governmental positions to elites. The recognition of bureaucratic interests was returned with a Chinese economic miracle. Yet the one-sided focus on economic targets not only ignored important aspects of economic quality, but also aggravated government corruption, social inequality, and environmental degradation. The marginal value of further economic growth to strengthen regime legitimacy was gradually offset by its social costs. Upon this background the PM matrix began to seriously include new targets like social and environmental targets. The central government took the lead to reduce the minimum target of annual national economic growth and adjusted the components of economic targets toward quality development.4 Various researches notice the increasing use of noneconomic targets in PM and the increasing weight assigned to them (Baehler et al., 2014; Gao, 2010; Rosenbloom & Hahm, 2010; Walker & Wu, 2010). For example, municipalities in Fujian Province in 2006 were measured in terms of sustainable development (32%), harmonious society construction (25%), administration by law (18%) and progress in modernization (25%) (Zhou, 2010, pp. 130–131). By examining second-tier components, noneconomic targets accounted for slightly more than half of the weight. Since 2008, Guangdong Province established ‘‘Level of Scientific Development’’ targets for its municipalities and bureau-level officials, in which economic targets only accounted for about 30% weight.

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Since 2012 the Central Government reduced its annual economic growth expectation to 7.5%, after pursuing 8% for 7 years between 2005 and 2011.

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Inclusion of noneconomic targets created internal conflicts of PM. Increasing social expenditures would divert discretionary money from economic purposes, while environmental regulatory targets directly restricted productive activities or inflated production costs. These changes would benefit some agencies and got their support, such as the Bureau of Environmental Protection, but brought about negative impact on the general economic interests of the bureaucracy. Interagency power structure had an impact on the relative importance of PM targets. While the new trend brought about new opportunities for noneconomic agencies to safeguard their favorite targets in PM, these were still relatively weak institutional players within the government and had to carefully avoid setting aggressive targets to avoid blame and backlash. There are many recent examples that environmental goals were sacrificed for economic growth. Economically developed areas, due to their more affluent public finance and stronger citizen demands on noneconomic performance, demonstrated more willingness to follow these new directions of PM.5 A more fundamental issue is the conflict between PM’s goal of bureaucratic mobilization and China’s civil service modernization since 1978. PM has been used to mobilize the bureaucracy to realize the developmental state goals by recognizing its self-interests and allowing more discretion. The new emphasis on noneconomic goals did not reverse such a path. Noneconomic agencies made use of the new targets to wield power, control resources, and collect economic benefits. Meanwhile, another major goal of state building was to introduce a legal-rational bureaucracy that is driven by legal and professional mandates and that can best safeguard important administrative values like policy consistency, equal treatment, due process, and anti-corruption. A rule-based and neutral bureaucracy may conflict with its capability to achieve major state goals. This echoes the long-standing conflicting demands for stability and liveliness/vitality in China’s civil service reform (Lam & Chan, 1996). 3.3. Decentralization and intergovernmental gaming Post-1978 reform recognized local interests to spur development incentives and local entrepreneurship. Incremental decentralization reforms happened in fiscal, economic, personnel, SOE management and other areas (Lin & Liu, 2000; Wang, 1997), making local governments effective locomotives of economic growth and innovations. Decentralization was made effective by credible encouragement of innovations through policy experimentation. In the 1980s, the central government first started policy experimentations by establishing five special economic zones with delegated economic powers. Local governments were the major source of innovations, which may be learned, institutionalized, and promoted at a higher and even the national level (Heilmann, 2008). Under a partially decentralized regime, a top-down designed and credibly operated PM system not only clarifies priority development goals of higher level governments, but also affords new tools of hierarchical control and political manipulation. High-performing local elites are selected to move upward (Gao, 2009; Guo, 2007). From central to township governments,6 a result-oriented PM system continuously disaggregates and assigns PM targets (Chan & Gao, 2012), replacing the old planning system that directly controlled local resources and activities. Consistent downward PM pressures are imposed from above. As every level tends to assign to their subordinate agencies and governments higher performance targets than its own, such pressures continues to increase until reaching grassroots governments and until getting impractically high (Gao, 2009). Gaming is widespread due to preference divergences, unrealistic performance targets, information asymmetry, enforcement distortion, complex political intentions, and insurmountable costs of error corrections. Opportunistic behavior exists at all levels of the interlocking principle–agent chains. Higher level governments, as the principles, can manipulate the PM in many ways. They, while receiving PM targets from even higher level governments, have much discretion to set new targets or adjust existing targets and to harden their favorite targets. They have the authority to single out targets and define them as ‘‘political tasks’’ for subordinate governments. The central role played by local leaders to determine PM targets provides them with an effective way to control, monitor, mobilize, and intrude permanent professional agencies and subordinate governments. To make longitudinal and parallel comparisons possible, targets are mostly quantifiable. Direct measures like auditing and patrol, and indirect measures 5 For example in 2008 Guangdong Province voluntarily proposed the strategy of ‘‘evacuating the cage and replacing the bird’’, which aimed at economic restructuring so resource-intensive, labor-intensive and polluting industries could be transferred and replaced. 6 China has five formal levels of governments: central, provincial, municipal, county, and township.

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like whistle blowing by local media and citizens, are used to verify the self-reported information from subordinate governments. Party and government agencies do their best to promote their departmental missions for stronger commitment from major local leaders and from lower government leaders. They may issue performance targets to local governments in an uncoordinated way. In reality local government performance is more frequently measured by concrete individual targets or aggregate targets in specific areas. Focusing on concrete PM targets helps higher level governments to find and address concrete problems, and reserves discretion in making reward and punishment decisions. Lower level governments as the agents are not passive receivers and compliers. Besides an unquestionable mandate to demonstrate before higher level governments their willingness and capacity to achieve assigned PM targets, they calculate benefits and costs of their enforcement efforts. Selective implementation of different PM targets is a natural response due to limited local resources, the intention to optimize most visible targets, the internal conflicts between PM targets, and the informal channels to disclose higher level government’s real priorities. PM targets that are quantifiable, emphasized by higher level governments, and related to promotion and other personal benefits receive most implementation efforts (O’Brien & Li, 1999). Lower level governments may also strategically focus on PM targets that are traditional local strengths. Further, information asymmetry makes falsification of performance information attractive. Government agencies may assign apparently impractical PM targets, punish those that could not provide good figures, and reward those that did, thus inviting aggressive and sometimes violent and predatory implementation efforts, dishonest reporting practices and purposeful hiding of problems and failures. As PM figures are of such important stake, lower level governments, their agencies, and the enterprises within their jurisdictions may in fact have three account books: one for themselves, one for supervising governments or agencies, and another for the public. A prominent example was the increasing gap between aggregate provincial GDP and the national GDP of China. In 2012, the sum of GDP reported by provinces was RMB 5708.2 billion more than the national GDP (RMB 51,947 billion) reported by the central government.7 Since 2005, such a gap accounted for over 5% of national GDP and continued to increase. Gaming and moral hazards along the vertical hierarchy will not paralyze intergovernmental cooperation if PM concentrates on economic goals and creates shared interests. Serious conflicts may appear when higher level governments include binding social, environmental, and rule-of-law targets in PM. The countervailing relation between these and economic targets will make the maximization of the latter impossible. This poses a long-term challenge to maintain current intergovernmental cooperation under a so-called pressure-driven (ya li xing) PM system. Meanwhile, using individual subordinate governments and agencies as PM units creates disincentives of inter-local and interagency cooperation due to the lack of cross-jurisdiction and cross-agency performance targets. This is not surprising as existing PM system highlights purposeful creation and maintenance of local competition to incentivize compliance with centrally made performance goals. 3.4. Bureaucratic culture and informal rules Symbolism, widely practiced in China’s administrative reforms and innovations (Christensen et al., 2008), has facilitated the widespread adoption of PM in China. Past governmental reforms, with a consistent emphasis on marketization and rationalization, have set a favorable context for adopting PM as a useful technical instrument. After decades of practices, PM has been socially legitimated and become a formal requirement for planning new public programs and projects, although actual institutional, technical, and resource environments hardly provide adequate conditions for its success. PM schemes may be announced without knowing the exact problems to handle and preparing necessary resources for implementation. While adoption of PM may follow a logic of institutional isomorphism and make itself decoupled from actual work, the noncompetitive Chinese political regime prepares less challenges to the symbolic practices. This creates a systematic favor of inputs and outputs instead of results and impacts. One popular phenomenon is the habitual use of simple figures for PM, for example the use of the number of nonprofits per 10,000 citizens in Shenzhen Municipality since 2010 as one indicator of 7 Data from China Statistical Yearbook 2013. The provincial GDP is reported by the provinces, while national GDP is reported by the State Statistical Bureau of the Central Government. The gap may be partially created by reduplicated calculation of cross-province economic activities by provinces, different data sources, and purposeful exaggeration and even falsification by local governments.

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the newly advocated social construction.8 Such a quantitative target may push forward lower governments in Shenzhen to facilitate nonprofit development, but may also lead to goal replacement and even moral hazards. Preferences of agency leaders play a crucial role in shaping PM practices. China’s rule-of-man tradition, although declining, offers leaders powers as well as accountabilities more than their counterparts in developed countries. The major unit of PM in China, different to many western countries, is individual leaders who are responsible for both their individual and their agencies’ performance. PM is in general carried out under leading cadre’s responsibility system. While this lends critical political support to PM, PM may be easily manipulated in a way to serve chief leaders’ calculation and their career ambitions (Edin, 2003). A recent extreme example was the slogan of a formal party secretary of Yunan Province, who was arrested due to corruption in 2014, that ‘‘fast development dominates all other things’’. As a result, compliance with assigned PM targets is not only a symbol of dutifulness, but also an important ritual of upward face-giving and loyalty-displaying. Leadership commitment and subsequent heroic stories and success often personalized the past PM achievement, and may create policy inconsistency as new leaders may have different preferences, or simply want to avoid a path labeled after their predecessors. Nonetheless, leader’s visions and initiatives may not always receive enthusiastic and effective compliance from the standing bureaucracy. Vested interests, fear of extra work, and risk aversion may lead to half-hearted and selective implementation. While straightforward opposition is rare, bureaucrats may manipulate their information, institutional knowledge and memory, conflicts between policies, and unintended and unanticipated policy consequences to frustrate the political will of intervention. Implementation failures may be tacitly ‘‘displayed’’ to warn political leaders of the infeasibility of their less informed decisions and their tough style of enforcement. As most Chinese leaders have administrative experiences in their early career stages, they avoid a zero-sum game by taking strategies like engagement, compensation, obfuscation, and division. This often makes PM a fragmented and chaotic process of ‘‘garbage in, garbage out’’. Further, traditional bureaucratic sense of supremacy hinders citizens to access performance information. By keeping itself a myth, government maintains its social esteem and escapes external suspicion and accountability. As detailed performance information may expose failures and messy administrative practices, tolerance to information disclosure depends on who can have and use the information. The 2007 Bylaw of Government Information Disclosure of PRC does not specify if PM information disclosure is automatic or subject to citizen request. In practice it is not common to find on the internet or somewhere else detailed PM information of a local government, its major leaders, or its agencies, except for anecdotal, piecemeal, and case-based information. 4. Conclusions Public administration realism reminds us of the fundamental rationality to understand PM from a political perspective. As an intentional intervention to administrative practices, it is unavoidable that PM leads to a process whereby ‘‘fundamental political interests, within the bureaucracy and outside, seek access, representation, control, and policy benefits’’ (March, Olson, & Olsen, 1983). While politicization of PM exists despite temporal and spatial differences, different institutional environments produce varying dynamics and consequences of PM politics. A regime-centered perspective identifies important locations of PM politics by considering the origin, fundamental legitimacy, and current goals and challenges of the regime. Such a perspective argues that PM is far from a neutral management tool. It serves multiple political purposes and dynamics that are evolving in a certain web of politics. The case study of China demonstrates how PM has been adapted by its political and governmental systems in a way to meet endogenous political demands. The unified political system in China makes it a natural practice to incorporate political targets in PM, to have political agencies as evaluators, and to treat PM basically as an instrument of internal management. Shifting foundation of state legitimacy in post-1978 China made economic performance a first priority of state building. A growth coalition between the political and administrative systems was forged so externally imposed PM targets were accepted as incentives. Nonetheless, increasing inclusion of social, service, and nonmission-based targets such as transparency, rule of law, and environmental protection has been altering existing 8

The quantitative target was that the number of nonprofits should increase by 15% per year, and reach 8 nonprofits per 10,000 citizens at yearend of 2015.

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balance. Likewise, China’s unitary intergovernmental system has strategically used benefit-sharing PM as a hands-off strategy to secure top-down control and upward accountability in its transition toward economic and administrative decentralization. Dual opportunism in the interconnected principle–agent relation chains is allowed only when drift of state goals does not happen. Again, new trends of PM may shake existing pro-growth coalition along the hierarchy. Finally, bureaucratic inertia and sense of supremacy, symbolism, and leader preferences all shape PM in China. Enabling administrative culture and informal rules are to be developed. The findings suggest that PM in China is far from merely a technical instrument for performance improvement and organizational efficiency. Rather, it has played a major role to serve China’s political governance and state building in its reform era. The regime-centered perspective provides angles to recognize and understand this much extended use of PM in post-1978 China. The most important advantage of a regime-centered perspective lies in its comparative approach that treats political factors and their influences on PM in a contingent way. From this perspective we find that China’s fundamental political attributes, stages of socioeconomic development, incessant efforts of bureaucratic empowerment and control, in a combined way, forged its PM politics, which matters for the general success of the state. Political leadership and will have lent critical support to the adoption and functioning of PM and prepared resources and pressures to incentivize and tame the bureaucracy. When general government performance targets are set, the unified political–administrative system and unitary intergovernmental system can approach them in a faster pace. 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