A Behavioral Model of “Muddling Through” in the Chinese Bureaucracy: The Case of Environmental Protection

How do we characterize and explain the behavioral patterns of the Chinese bureaucracy amid China’s great transformation over the past three decades? The prevailing “tournament competition” model presented in the literature emphasizes the role of incentive design to explain bureaucratic behaviors. We develop an alternative model of “muddling through”—characterized by a reactive response to multiple pressures, constant readjustments and a focus on shortterm gains—to explain the behavioral patterns of China’s intermediate government agencies. We explain the underlying multiple bureaucratic logics that induce these behavioral patterns and the institutional conditions under which such behavioral patterns prevail. We illustrate the research issues, analytical concepts and theoretical arguments, using a case study of a municipal environmental protection bureau implementing the Five-Year Plan, between 2006 and 2010. A the interests of local officials with the goals of the central authority in China’s transformation is difficult. The literature on the Chinese bureaucracy has given considerable attention to the role of incentive design. In early work on this subject, Walder and Oi showed that incentive mechanisms in the revenue-sharing taxation reform of the mid-1990s and the structure of decentralized authority at the local level led local governments to participate actively in promoting economic development in their jurisdictions.1 More recently, scholars have argued that the Chinese state’s incentive mechanisms for the career advancement of local officials have fostered effective governance and contributed to the leading role of the state in China’s economic growth and large-scale institutional change.2 1. Jean Oi, “Fiscal Reform and the Economic Foundations of Local State Corporatism in China”, World Politics, Vol. 45 (1992), pp. 99–126; Andrew G. Walder, “Local Governments as Industrial Firms”, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 101 (1995), pp. 263–301. See also Jean Oi, Rural China Takes Off: Institutional Foundations of Economic Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Susan H. Whiting, Power and Wealth in Rural China: The Political Economy of Institutional Change (New York: Cambridge University