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"Despite the dominant narrative of the repression of civil society in China, Civil Society Under Authoritarianism: The China Model argues that interactions between local officials and civil society facilitate a learning process, whereby each actor learns about the intentions and work processes of the other. Over the past two decades, often facilitated by foreign donors and problems within the general social framework, these interactions generated a process in which officials learned the benefits and disadvantages of civil society"--

Will Xi Jinping's increasingly authoritarian rule stifle innovation by local officials, which has been instrumental in the Chinese communist regime's resilience and economic success?

Decentralised policymaking in China is often cited as a key success factor in economic reform and authoritarian resilience. Although the existing literature presents policy diffusion as a technocratic process where socially optimal policies diffuse, many examples exist where the reverse is true or where the central government sanctioned local innovation but the policy diffuses to other places regardless. The author contends that policy diffusion in authoritarian regimes should be understood as a political process, where local officials serve as policy entrepreneurs, rather than a technocratic one. Subnational officials do not respond uniformly to either incentives from the central government or local pressure, but rather adopt experimental policies as a strategy learned from other successful officials. Policy experimentation has emerged as a strategy for officials desiring either career advancement or security, resulting in an S-shaped curve of policy diffusion characteristic of a learning process whereby a few initially innovate but others quickly adopt the experiment once viewed as successful. (China/GIGA)

In this article, I address the puzzle of what motivates local officials in China to do something new-create a new policy, launch a pilot, adopt an experimental policy-especially when such innovation has uncertain outcomes. Despite the uncertainty and risk, we observe a great deal of policy innovation, both the creation and adoption of experiments, at the subnational level in China. In this article, I explore local policymakers' incentives regarding innovation to understand why they experiment with new policies under conditions of political risk and uncertainty. I utilize data from existing studies on policy innovation, including the Local Governance Innovation Awards (中國地方政府創新獎), to conduct this analysis. This analysis is significant because many scholars have noted that local innovation and adaptation is the key to authoritarian resilience in China. Therefore, the ability to encourage innovation (and capture good ideas) is vital to continued success, and Xi Jinping's administration must institutionalize innovation by realigning incentives to reward sustainable innovation rather than superficial or "face" innovation. This institutional change might help transform the political and economic system in China through incremental policy innovation rather than fundamental reform. (Issues Stud/GIGA)

This article examines the evolution of the Yunnan model of civil society management, and through a pretest-posttest research design, finds that new regulations in 2010 create a larger role for the local state in developing civil society. These changes bring the Yunnan model closer to the more supervised model of social management pioneered by Beijing and away from the more autonomous model exemplified by Guangdong. This has important implications for the future regulation and development of civil society as the central government debates adopting one of these models as a national system of social management. While both the Guangdong and Beijing models encourage relaxing registration requirements, the social management model in Yunnan develops new channels for state guidance of civil society such as government training, funding, and project collaboration or supervision. (J Contemp China/GIGA)