The Xi Jinping Shock: Improving China’s Food Safety Transparency?

• In Event: New Methods and Measurement Strategies in the Study of Democracy & Autocracy

Abstract

The ascension of Xi Jinping is widely viewed as a re-assertion of authoritarianism in China. However, this paper shows a substantial and substantive improvement in governmental transparency in one domain of human welfare—food safety—after the ascension of Xi.
Food safety is a serious policy and regulatory challenge in China. Both Chinese and Western researchers have widely acknowledged regulatory weaknesses as a major roadblock for solving China’s food safety problems. Improving regulatory effectiveness is a critical step in tackling the challenges of food safety problems. Our paper examines the effect of Xi Jinping and his anti-corruption campaign—collectively termed as a “Xi Jinping shock” in this paper—on the quality of Chinese food safety regulations.
Our findings are based on two datasets. One is a dataset on transparency measures of four food-related regulatory agencies, Chinese Food and Drug Administration (CFDA), Quality & Technology Supervision Bureau (SIQ), and Administration of Industry and Commerce (AIC). The transparency variable is at the prefectural-city level and the data span 342 Chinese cities between 2008 and 2018.
We created this dataset through a three-step process. First, we manually examined homepage features of 150 websites and this manual phase of work led to the development of a list of 28 keywords that denote four dimensions of transparency: 1) exposure of food safety incidents, 2) ability of citizens to lodge complaints, 3) food safety knowledge dissemination, and 4) the degree that testing results are made available to the public. The second step was to use the dictionary of keywords to build a text search and recognition computer algorithm in python. We then combined this algorithm with a web-scraping command to screen each target website and look for the keywords on the front page of each website. We coded the website as being transparent in the corresponding dimension (0/1 binary) if a given keyword existed in a given category. The transparency variable ranges from 0 to 4. The third step involved manual verifications of the machine-generated identifications and the match was 91 percent.
Our second dataset draws from the information published on the website of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and Supervision Department on the timing distribution of the anti-corruption central inspections of regions. We used the timing of the inspection as a measure of Xi Jinping shock.
We used the DID approach to compare the changes of transparency score of each city’s food safety before and after central inspection: 〖SCORE〗_(i，t)= β_0+β_1 INSPECTPOST+YearDummy+CityDummy+ε. Our estimations show that the impact of central inspection on the four indicators of food safety transparency is significantly positive at the level of 1%, which shows that a city is more likely to increase the disclosure and other transparency dimensions of food safety information and the transparency score will significantly rise after central inspection.
The Xi Jinping shock has the biggest impact on the agency most closely related to food safety regulation, CFDA. Among these three agencies, the CFDA’s disclosure of food safety information increases the most, with an average of 1.375 scores after a central inspection compared with the pre-inspection period, substantially more than the magnitude of increase of other agencies. This lends credence to the conjecture that transparency improvement was tied to food safety. This increase in transparency is not a form of “cheap talk,” but it is a feature that actually affects human welfare. In a separate paper, we have shown that more transparent regions of China do have a higher level of food safety. This is based on a dataset of over 2 million records of food safety testing data.
Our findings raise a number of implications. One is that our findings may serve as an input into ongoing academic and policy debates on Xi Jinping. Xi has moved China even more on an authoritarian path. This is not in doubt. The issue is whether he has done so in a populist fashion that, at least in the short run, could improve the welfare of the Chinese people. If our results stand, it is important to provide a more nuanced perspective on Xi Jinping as compared with the conventional narratives among China scholars, foreign observers and much of the policy-making community in the West.
The second implication is that our findings may serve as another illustration of what Andrew Nathan (1992) termed as “authoritarian resilience,” the ability of an authoritarian regime for self-preservation. We posit that a source of this authoritarian resilience derived from a populist mechanism.
Our third implication relates to the broader political science literature on authoritarian accountability. This literature unpacks an apparent puzzle that China can provide more public goods than democracies such as India. The findings are another illustration of this authoritarian accountability.

Author

• Yasheng Huang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology