Demarcating the Responsibilities of Government across Tiers in China: Reform Discourse, Change Processes, and Significance

The efficient allocation of tasks and responsibilities across levels of government in a country is a perennial problem. In China, ambiguous and overlapping responsibilities between the national and local governments have for long been said to account for many ills of government administration. However, only recently has this issue grabbed the attention of Government leaders as a reform priority. In the meantime, we have seen a stream of adjustments, experiments and ‘coping strategies’ at both sub-national and national levels. But now that reform is on the agenda, it is timely to review the experience of these changes and to see what we can learn from them in order to inform future directions. As well, we should see how the reform discourse has evolved, whether it has taken note of this experience and to what extent it has also been informed by international reform ideas. This study thus has a dual focus: first, on how changes to allocation of tasks and responsibilities have come about ‘on the ground’ and what effects they have; and second, on the development of recent national reform strategies and the reform discourse. Thus, it looks both at local case studies where national initiatives and local events have led to some reallocation of responsibilities in a specified arena (education) and also at the national level reform discourse to see what sorts of problems and solutions, in more general terms, are being identified. In exploring these different aspects of the process of administrative development, the study not only seeks to contribute to the policy debates about directions of reform in inter-governmental arrangements in China but also aims to contribute new insights to wider theories on institutional change and administrative reform.