THE QUALITY OF GOVERNANCE IN CHINA AND BEYOND: INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL ISSUE

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1 public administration and development Public Admin. Dev. 37, (2017) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).1802 THE QUALITY OF GOVERNANCE IN CHINA AND BEYOND: INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL ISSUE TING GONG 1 *, PAUL COLLINS 2 AND HON S. CHAN 1 1 City University of Hong Kong, China 2 Public Administration and Development, UK SUMMARY As a result of the movement from government to governance, various institutional reforms have taken place across countries to shift powers and responsibilities of government to public and private partnerships or quasi-government and nongovernment actors. Much has been said about the dynamics and processes of this shift, but its outcomes remain practically obscured and theoretically underexplored. Changing modes of governance does not necessarily lead to improved outcomes. Government service should be assessed not only by quantity but also by quality. For any society, healthy social development is no less important than economic growth and material affluence. As China s case indicates, the ways, processes and results of effective governance in fulfilling social, ethical and environmental responsibilities still remain challenging despite or because of rapid GDP growth, significant expansion of public services and considerable improvement in living standards. China s experience in dealing with a range of governance issues provides both positive and negative lessons for other societies that are facing similar problems. Copyright 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. key words New Public Management; the quality of governance; development models; government capability; China BACKGROUND The concept of governance has become increasingly important in the discussion of public administration in recent decades. From governance with government (Peters and Pierre, 1998) to governance beyond government (Wachhaus, 2014), scholars have expressed concerns with the traditional and hierarchical organizational forms of government and advocated more decentralized and collaborative models of governance. In practice, various institutional reforms have taken place across countries to shift powers and responsibilities of government to public and private partnerships or quasi-government and nongovernment actors. Much has been said about the dynamics and processes of this shift, but its outcomes remain practically obscured and theoretically underexplored. While the New Public Management (NPM) emphasizes outputs rather than inputs or processes, its 3Es approach economy, efficiency and effectiveness has nevertheless been criticized for sacrificing important social values such as equity, fairness, honesty and impartiality. Changing modes of governance does not necessarily lead to improved outcomes. Even if services are improved, public satisfaction with government or their trust in public organizations may not necessarily increase (Bouckaert and Van de Walle, 2003). Government services should be judged not only on quantity but also on quality. The emphasis on high-quality governance is concerned not so much with economic development or material affluence but with the healthy development of societies. It pays attention to the ways, processes and results of governance in fulfilling social, ethical and environmental responsibilities. *Correspondence to: Ting Gong, City University of Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong. tgong2@cityu.edu.hk The articles in this special issue are based on papers that were originally presented at a workshop held at the City University of Hong Kong in June We thank the Global China Studies project of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at City University of Hong Kong for sponsoring the workshop. The work was partially supported by a grant from the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong (project # ). Copyright 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

2 156 T. GONG ET AL. The quality of governance is context specific. There is no one-size-fits-all conceptual framework or action plan for explaining and improving the quality of governance. However, those societies experiencing rapid social and economic transformation and facing governance challenges may serve as intriguing cases to illustrate why we should care about quality of governance and what we can do about it. China is one of them. China has evolved from a backward country to the world s largest economic entity in the past three decades. In the course of its development, drastic and profound changes have taken place in state society relations and, particularly, in the structure and process of government and its impact on society. Improvements in government capability, if judged quantitatively, are revealed by the country s amazing GDP growth record, rapidly expanded provision of public goods and services and significant rise of income for most people. However, the quality of governance in meeting citizens social, environmental and ethical demands leaves much to be desired. Vested interests continue to profiteer from murky regulations; cash-strapped local governments fail to satisfy immediate community needs; popular contentions surge due to land grab or other official misconduct; sound social safety nets are still missing; and rampant corruption, while being tackled, shakes the very foundations of the political regime. In what forms and with what characteristics are these problems manifested? How and to what extent are they related to the objectives, structures or strategies of government? What has China done to tackle these problems? Has the quality of governance improved as new measures are taken to enhance policy effectiveness? What lessons, positive or negative, can China s governance experience offer for other countries? This special issue addresses these questions, discusses the quality of governance in China and explores its implications. Its goal is not to define and measure the quality of governance but to obtain a better understanding of theories and practices that may provide explanations and recommendations for high-quality governance in China and beyond. This special issue contains five articles. In what follows, we begin by highlighting the authors major arguments and insights. Following the summary, we outline some cross-cutting issues that emerge from the five essays and discuss their implications for future research. THE FIVE ESSAYS Individually, each of the five essays draws on its original data or case studies to examine a different issue and contributes to our understanding of the policy context in which the quality of governance is at issue. Pieced together, they provide a snapshot of the challenges and complexities of governance, which China and other countries have to tackle. The authors engage extensively with the relevant academic literature in their respective fields and, on that basis, develop in-depth analysis and offer unique insights. Focusing on the general theme of government quality and relating it to detailed discussion of specific cases, the five essays provide theory-driven and empirically sound research. Yujeong Yang and Mary Gallagher (Yang and Gallagher, 2017) discuss labour conditions and China s changing development model. In the last decade, as well noted, a large contingent of manufacturing firms in developmental zones on China s coast has moved to inland provinces. Scholars have debated the implications of this move inland for Chinese workers and raised concerns about the existence of a race to the bottom in labour standards resulting from the pressures of international capital mobility and increased economic globalization. These theories predict that as inland China develops and attracts a larger amount of foreign and domestic capital, inland governments will compete by offering cheap labour and lower or unenforced standards. The authors argument in the essay is contrarian in that they propose the possibility of a positive relationship between the movement inland and labour conditions. They suggest that the movement of manufacturing to inland China is not primarily about cheaper workers, but instead signals the beginning of a fundamental shift in the development model through the employment of a localized workforce. Ting Gong and Hanyu Xiao (Gong and Xiao, 2017) examine what they refer to as socially embedded anticorruption governance Hong Kong. From a macro micro interactive perspective, they seek to identify and explain what factors influence citizens propensity to confront corruption by reporting suspected corruption cases. They make two propositions focusing on intrinsic and extrinsic factors respectively. They believe, first, that citizens response to suspected corrupt behaviour is a good indicator of the level of their tolerance for corruption. If

3 THE QUALITY OF GOVERNANCE IN CHINA AND BEYOND 157 corruption is unacceptable to citizens, they would be more likely to report suspected corruption cases. However, a low level of tolerance of corruption alone does not necessarily explain why people report corruption. Gong and Xiao further argue that people s willingness to confront corruption is also affected by the extent to which they are satisfied with and have confidence in the government s anti-corruption endeavours. Drawing on data collected from an original survey of 1025 local residents in Hong Kong, they test these two hypotheses. Their findings confirm that the propensity to report suspected corruption results from both a low level of tolerance towards corruption and the positive perception of the quality of anti-corruption governance. The implications of their findings for other regions, especially mainland China, are explored. Yijia Jing and Yefei Hu (Jing and Hu, 2017) address the evolution of government nonprofit relations from contracting to collaborative governance (CG) in China. Specifically, they explore how and why CG between government agencies and nonprofit organizations has emerged. Their study suggests that service contracting, driven by NPM tenets, may unexpectedly evolve towards CG by creating and consolidating necessary conditions of CG. Case information in Shanghai, China, offers evidence that contracting nonprofits and governments may lead to joint decision making, enforcement of regulatory functions, setting rules and influencing community governance. The analysis shows that, over time, contracting may lead to the generation of mutual trust, acquisition of governing resources and consolidation of collaborative accountability. The evolutionary perspective provides not only a promising way to develop CG but also a theoretical link between NPM and New Public Governance. Ciqi Mei and Margaret Pearson (Mei and Pearson, 2017) write on the dilemma of managing for results in performance assessment of Chinese government officials. While China is not often thought of as a prime location for implementation of managing for results mechanisms of NPM, in fact, the reform era leadership consistent with implementation of many market mechanisms in the economy initiated cadre management principles imbued with result-based techniques. The essay discusses how dilemmas inherent in NPM principles play out in China s institutional context. In particular, it examines an understudied managing for results technique employed in China, the hold-to-account system, and demonstrates how this punishment technique produces inherent problems that can be expected if applied in other state-centric developing countries. Finally, Xiaowei Zang (Zang, 2017) asks how cohesive is the Chinese civil service in a study of street-level bureaucrats in China. Institutional analyses of the developmental state claim that the principal source of state capacity is internal cohesiveness, which is defined as the tendency for the rank and file of the civil service to be in unity while working together towards national goals. In the literature on the China model, the strong capacity of the Chinese state has been taken for granted and internal cohesiveness in the Chinese bureaucracy has not been problematized. Drawing on data about the Bureau of Urban Management (i.e. Chengguan) in China, Zang questions the extent of collaboration between higher authorities and their subordinates (i.e. vertical cohesiveness). He suggests that the bureaucratic logics may undermine collaboration among government bureaus (horizontal cohesiveness) as well. The research finds no solid evidence of horizontal and vertical cohesiveness in the Chinese bureaucracy. This calls for an effort to reassess the validity of the China model. CROSS-CUTTING ISSUES AND IMPLICATIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH The geographic focus of the essays is China, but the issues being discussed and their theoretical and practical implications go beyond a single region. They concern societies undergoing social and economic transformations but at the same time facing governance challenges. They serve as intriguing cases as well as illustrating why we should care about the quality of governance and what we can and should do about it. The issues flagged in the authors research, such as labour conditions, social service provision, public private partnership, civil service reform, interagency collaboration, corruption control, urban management and policing, testify to the imperative of enhancing governance quality in development processes. All too often, policy makers set economic growth as the priority when dealing with development problems but lose sight of social development, quality of service provision and citizens well-being. They are invariably confronted with the problems and challenges posed by compelling demands from citizens for moving beyond growth-centric policies. What conclusions can be drawn from the five essays for policy making and further research in China and beyond?

4 158 T. GONG ET AL. A number of cross-cutting conclusions and future research topics are suggested by the five essays. First and foremost, underlying the notion of the quality of governance is the conceptual and practical difference between government and governance. While the concept of government focuses on the role of state institutions in policy making and implementation, theories of governance stress the importance of networks, the blending of public and private resources and the changing state capacity from control to influence (Peters and Pierre, 1998). The evolution of government to governance marks a transition from hierarchy-based to network-based interactions in policy making. Improving the quality of governance, accordingly, requires collaboration between government and citizens and between the public sector and nonprofits. Gong and Xiao highlight the mutually reinforcing effect of zero social tolerance for corruption and vigorous government performance in coproducing corruption-free societies like Hong Kong. Jing and Hu pinpoint the evolutionary processes through which contracting-out over time has led to new levels of trust among actors and networks in collaboration and more fruits of quality provision of goods and services. These analyses not only reaffirm space for more state society partnership in different areas of governance and the positive impact it may have on governance quality but also shed light on the theoretical evolution from NPM to New Public Governance. Second, the essays in this special issue raise the question of the relationship between governance capacity and governance quality. Governance is a multifaceted concept encompassing all aspects of the exercise of authority through formal and informal institutions. The quality of governance is thus determined by the impact of this exercise of power on the quality of life enjoyed by its citizens (Huther and Shah, 2005: 40). This indicates the importance of a better understanding of how institutions of governance function and exercise their authority. Zang s piece engages with this line of thinking and highlights the capacity deficits of the Chinese bureaucracy in urban governance as reflected in the lack of vertical and horizontal cohesiveness of formal and informal institutions. Fragmented power coupled with entrenched parochialism has significantly undermined the quality of urban management. Institutional capacity and the quality of governance thus go hand in hand with each other as they embody a cause-and-effect relationship. Third, the essays note that for the same purpose of enhancing governance quality, sources of governing capacity may be different and complex and may lead to very different policy outcomes. In theory, governing capacity is institutionalized and rule-based, but it may be politically enabled and energized. As Rose-Ackerman suggests, governance is deeply intertwined with incentives and opportunities open to political actors (2016: 23). This argument features Mei and Pearson s work. They find that the post-mao practice of the result-based management of cadre corps is faced with some fundamental dilemmas. Although it embraces the NPM principle of managing for results by holding cadres accountable to ill performance, the authoritarian state is nonetheless reluctant to impose serious punishment on its elite members as the regime cannot afford losing their administrative expertise and political loyalty. This consequently contributes to substantial inefficiencies in governing the bureaucratic corps. Last but not least, it is worth noting that there are no universal recipes for improving governance quality, although there is always the temptation to seek universal models for resolving local development problems. Good governance has often become a panacea for a great many ills suffered by people around the world (Grindle, 2016: 18). Yang and Gallagher enter the debate about western theories versus Chinese realities with the question of whether the latest movement of manufacturing to inland China is a race to bottom of cheap labour that has taken place in many developing areas. They contend that the movement is not so much about cheap labour as it is about the advantages of backwardness of inland China, which are related to the specific historical conditions of these areas and which also resulted from early reform policies. CONCLUSIONS This special issue has addressed the impact of various political, social and economic forces on the quality of governance. The Chinese government has clearly set engagement with social organizations as a high priority on its governance agenda. One of the fundamental challenges is to open wider space for more state society partnerships. This is a daunting task, both conceptually and practically. Nevertheless, robust state society partnerships render traditional ways of thinking obsolete. It has become increasingly clear that the one-party

5 THE QUALITY OF GOVERNANCE IN CHINA AND BEYOND 159 Chinese state is neither able to mastermind nor dominate the emerging socialist market. Cumulative social and economic changes from within China after its opening-up to the West inevitably drive the Chinese state to trail along a new trajectory. New modes of governance need to be sought, experimented and put on policy agendas. The second challenge is to ascertain the capacity level of the Chinese bureaucracy. Many China watchers seem to take the regime resilience as something given. While it might well be the situation, cases of capacity deficits within the Chinese bureaucracy can also be easily found. The crux of the issue is that the higher the need for a responsive state, the greater the difficulty in asserting the hegemony of the regime. When political expediency takes precedence, the quality of governance is compromised and even dampened. The third challenge is the extent to which the Chinese party-state can replicate reform experiences elsewhere. The Chinese bureaucracy has experimented with oft-cited reform ideas, including result-oriented mechanisms or CG. It has always been difficult to affirm a high level of policy diffusion. Many studies including this special issue provide further research evidence of localized reform strategies. Clearly, there is a need for further work to examine the notion of governance beyond government. Governance is a highly contextual idea. In the current context of China, governance is, to a large extent, a matter of tipping the balance of political, social and economic interests. In the past, the Chinese party-state looked up to the outside world for prescriptions for its domestic problems. Nowadays, many developing countries have turned to the Chinese ways or the China model for problem solving. To be sure, there is no panacea for all ills. But the Chinese ways illuminate how a one-party state has struggled, with some success, to deal with intriguing governance issues. China s reform experience can provide lessons, positive or negative, for other societies that are confronted with issues of similar kind and nature. REFERENCES Bouckaert G, Van de Walle S Comparing measures of citizen trust and user satisfaction as indicators of good governance : difficulties in linking trust and satisfaction indicators. International Review of Administrative Sciences 69(3): Gong T, Xiao H Socially embedded anti-corruption governance: evidence from Hong Kong. Public Administration and Development 37(3): Grindle M Good governance, R.I.P.: a critique and an alternative. Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions 30(1): Huther J, Shah A A simple measure of good governance. In Public Services Delivery, Shah A (ed). The World Bank: Washington DC. Jing Y, Hu F From service contracting to collaborative governance: evolution of government-nonprofit relations in China. Public Administration and Development 37(3): Mei C, Pearson M The dilemma of managing for results in China: won t let go. Public Administration and Development 37(3): Peters G, Pierre J Governance with government? Rethinking public administration. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory. 8(2): Rose-Ackerman S What does governance mean? Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions 30(1): Wachhaus A Governance beyond government. Administration & Society 46(5): Yang Y, Gallagher M Moving in and moving up? Labor conditions and China s changing development model. Public Administration and Development 37(3): Zang X How cohesive is the Chinese civil service? A study of street-level bureaucracy and the China model. Public Administration and Development 37(3):