From Hu to Xi: A Corpus-Based Approach to Describing Policy Diffusion in China

• In Event: Authoritarian Durability & Adaptability

Abstract

From “Smart City” to “Belt and Road,” how do policy initiatives diffuse across the Chinese bureaucracy? Have these patterns of diffusion changed as China moved from Hu’s collective leadership to Xi’s more personalist and centralized rule? In this paper, we adopt a corpus-based approach to describing China’s policy diffusion process, expanding on previous research that predominantly relies on case studies in a specific policy area or certain localities to understand policymaking. Analyzing the nearly comprehensive corpus of central and local policy documents published by the Chinese government between 2006 and 2017 (267,000 ministerial documents and 1,517,000 local documents), we identify a typology of three main patterns: top-down (central policy signal predates local diffusion), bottom-up (local diffusion predates central signal and is unperturbed by later central signals), and hybrid (limited local diffusion is significantly augmented by central signal). We find that truly bottom-up diffusion is quite rare in Hu’s or Xi’s administration. Under Xi, however, top-down surpassed hybrid as the dominant mode of diffusion. These findings suggest that Xi’s politics has had a substantive impact on policy diffusion in China, resulting in more initiatives that are formulated entirely from the top. Our corpus-based approach and data also suggest a new methodological avenue for studying China’s policymaking process.

Authors

• Weiyi Shi, University of California, San Diego

• XueYing Hu, University of California, San Diego

• Yang Yang, UC San Diego