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ABSTRACT
As the first country stricken by the COVID-19 pandemic, China deployed a policy response that was chaotic at the start but effective in the end. A complete account to explain China's COVID-19 experience should explain both. By examining policy changes in China's fight against the pandemic, I show that pandemic as an exogenous shock invalidated the normal policy logics followed by multiple policy actors, resulting in policy inconsistency and chaos. A policy mix comprised traditional measures, i.e. strict community lockdown, cross-jurisdictional mobilization of resources and officials' sanction contributed to the eventual effectiveness of China's response to the pandemic. I argue that the policy mix during crises should conform with rooted national policy style to be consistent and effective.

The public policy literature has long debated whether policy change results from conscious policy design or is contingent upon a political process involving both state and non-state actors. An experiment-based policy-making model based on China's experience attempts to reconcile such debate by arguing that policy makers can consciously make policies without deliberately designing them. That is, policy makers can encourage or initiate multiple small-scale experiments that will cumulatively translate into incremental policy changes. Through a case study of urban housing policy changes in China, this paper investigates the underlying logic of incremental policy changes, specifically the role of policy makers in successive policy experimentation. Our case study illustrates that the role of local policy experimentation has been overestimated because the central government controls the experimental variables, judges what constitutes the success of the experiment, and chooses which experiments are replicated at the national level. Adapted from the source document.

SummaryWhile China is not often thought of as a prime location for implementation of "managing for results" mechanisms of New Public Management, in fact, the reform era leadership—consistent with implementation of many market mechanisms in the economy—initiated cadre management principles imbued with results‐based techniques. This article discusses how dilemmas inherent in MFR principles play out in China's institutional context. It examines an understudied "punishing for results" technique employed in China, the "hold‐to‐account" system, and demonstrates how this punishment technique reveals inherent dilemmas that also can be expected if applied in other state‐centric developing countries. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Why do local officials in China often fail to comply with directives of the central leadership in Beijing? Existing scholarship suggests that local defiance results from reform-era decentralization, or from the difficulty of managing agents in a complicated policy environment. In contrast, we conceptualize threats by Beijing to punish local officials as deterrence signals, and analyze local officials' reactions to these signals as a dynamic process in which they consider the selectiveness, severity and retractability of sanctions, and the reputation of the center, when deciding to defy. Examining the case of Beijing's application of the seemingly powerful "hold-to-account" practice to curtail investment in iron and steel in 2004, its punishment of local officials in the "Tieben Incident", and the continued defiance of other local officials, we analyze the dynamics of central-local relations that lead to the failure of the center's deterrence efforts. (China J/GIGA)

While local government entrepreneurship has long been regarded as one of the main drivers of China's economic growth, it has increasingly been recognised as a potential source of a set of harmful policy consequences in recent years, such as rising government debt crises, pervasive corruption and environmental degradation. These criticisms have prompted questions about what types of entrepreneurship might be more desirable, and which incentive structures might be necessary to pave the way for the right kind of local government entrepreneurship. The articles in this special issue focus on new developments in local government entrepreneurship from a public policy perspective. Collectively, they explore the normative dimensions of local government entrepreneurship in China, with an emphasis on necessary policy changes to shape local government entrepreneurship in contributing to economic growth as well as other key policy objectives. (China/GIGA)