China's "basic State Policy Under The Perspective Of Historical Institutionalism"

“Basic national policy” is a unique policy term almost known to all in China anda series of policies specified as “the basic national policy” constitute a special “policygroup”--“the basic national policy group”. This special policy group is not only animportant perspective to review the practice of reforming and opening up, but also avital topic in the discussion of China’s policy development. However, when it comesto questions as follows: what is “the basic national policy”, how many basic nationalpolicies does China has, why there are significant difference between theimplementation of these policies as well as how will the basic national policy evolvein future and its impact to the policy development, neither academic nor practicaldepartments can provide satisfactory answers.This paper, adopting the perspective of historical institutionalism, targeting theclearly stated as the basic national policy in normative documents, focusing on theirimplementation effect, tries to make preliminary exploration on these issues. Theessay firstly discusses the basic national policy in three-dimension, respectively theclassification of “public policy”, structural change of constitution and the clearlystipulated basic national policy in documents. From the last dimension, China hasstated10policies as its basic national policies since its reform and opening up. Thesedesignated policies reflect China’s strong desire to return to the right track ofsustainable development after the “Cultural Revolution”. But the implementation ofthese policies are fundamentally affected and restricted by the dominant policyparadigm, featuring economic construction taken as its central task. In other words,whether a certain basic national policy can be really performed and to what extent isdetermined by its contribution to economic growth. If the deep-rooted developmentmode of purely focusing on economic growth is not thoroughly changed, basicnational policies such as protecting arable land, saving resources and protectingenvironment will always be in the dilemma of poor execution. At the same time, twoother factors will lay great influence on the performance of basic national policies.One is the characteristics of the policy itself, while the other is the implementingnetwork structure based on interests gaming. As a result, to advocate a certain policyto be designated as a basic national policy isn’t a ready-made panacea to deal withsome hard issues that are neglected. So it is blind, unnecessary and of no avail to follow and worship the successful practice of family planning policy. It is proved suchadvocacies are receiving less and less support from the policy maker. The practice ofbasic national policies indicate that we can no longer satisfy with working out policyprinciples which are grand but impractical, with only a fuzzy consensus on policygoals. Instead, we should head to a policy style of making fine, coordinated andoperational decisions and strictly performing them. With the concept and practice of“scientific development”, it is predicted the chance of proposing a new basic nationalpolicy is getting slim and the execution of the established ones will be greatlyreshaped. As a special policy discourse emerging in a specific background,“basicnational policy” will gradually fade away and eventually quit the stage of history.