Leaders, institutions, and China's economic transition

This is a study of the interactions among the leaders, state bureaucracy and provincial governments in the context of economic policymaking during the reform era. The selection of these three actors is predicted on the observation that each of them has an established presence in the process. The outcome of the interactions as manifest in the subsequent policies has conditioned the path of China's economic transition.; Built upon the insights from the new institutionalism, this study shows that the institutional setting of state socialism, composed of the embedded organizational biases from centrally planned economy and normative order of Marxist economic ideology, renders political meaning to the economic policymaking process and shapes the outcome of the transition. Since the reform inevitably leads to the rearrangements of the existing institutional patterns and the positions of individuals and organizations in the new system, economic policymaking provides an arena where competing visions, conflicting interests, individual initiatives, and institutional persistency culminate.; Valuable contributions notwithstanding, institutional analysis seems inadequate in explaining the prominent role of top leaders in Chinese politics. The study, therefore, contrasts a leader-centered approach versus an institution-centered approach. It examines the inherently differentiated roles in the policymaking arena both in terms of institutionalized presence and policy mechanisms among the leaders, bureaucracy and provinces. It is proposed that the preponderance of personalistic or institutional factors over the other is related to respective power base, types of policy, and stages of policymaking.; First, whereas power of the leaders tends to be personalistic, power of the bureaucracy and provincial governments mainly derives from their institutional domain. Second, the role of the leaders seems to be more pronounced in the forming of major policies and on the other hand the bureaucracy and provincial governments are better fitted at making policies that are routinized and localized. Thirdly, although leaders are instrumental in policies initiation, bureaucratic organizations retain certain control of the policy content in the drafting process and the contributions of the provincial governments are mostly made in policy experimentation.