All the theories that explain post-Mao China’s economic success tend to attribute it to one or several “successful” policies or institutions of the Chinese government, or to account for the success from economic perspectives. This article argues that the success of the Chinese economy relies not just on the Chinese state’s economic policy but also on its social policies. Moreover, China’s economic success does not merely lie in the effectiveness of any single economic or social policy or institution, but also in the state’s capacity to make a policy shift when it faces the negative unintended consequences of its earlier policies. The Chinese state is compelled to make policy shifts quickly because performance constitutes the primary base of its legitimacy, and the Chinese state is able to make policy shifts because it enjoys a high level of autonomy inherited from China’s past. China’s economic development follows no fixed policies and relies on no stable institutions, and there is no Chinese model or “Beijing consensus” that can be constructed to explain its success.

This study examines the influence of voter heterogeneity, measured as religious fractionalization, on how the introduction of elections affects public goods in rural China. We document religious composition and the introduction of village-level elections for over two hundred villages and examine the interaction effect of average heterogeneity and the introduction of elections on village-government provision of public goods. We find that the increase in public goods due to elections declines with heterogeneity of villages, which we interpret as evidence that voter heterogeneity constrains the potential benefits of introducing elections.

This paper draws on evidence from loosely structured interviews and data from original surveys of 5,130 delegates in township, county, and municipal congresses to argue that congressional representation unfolds as authoritarian parochialism in China. It makes three new arguments. First, popularly elected local congresses that once only mechanically stood in for the Chinese mass public, through demographically descriptive and politically symbolic representation, now work as substantively representative institutions. Chinese local congressmen and women view themselves and act as “delegates,” not Burkean trustees or Leninist party agents. Second, this congressional representation is not commonly expressed in the quintessentially legislative activities familiar in other regime types. Rather, it is an extra-legislative variant of pork barrel politics: parochial activity by delegates to deliver targeted public goods to the geographic constituency. Third, this authoritarian parochialism is due to institutional arrangements and regime priorities, some common to single-party dictatorships and some distinct to Chinese authoritarianism.

Authoritarian governments produce internal assessments of the quality of governance that allow them to identify and address brewing problems before they threaten regime stability. This paper provides a theory of how the information necessary to produce such assessments is gathered. The empirical focus of the paper is on China, which is used to illustrate how information-gathering channels in communist autocracies differ from those used in electoral autocracies. In particular, petitions rather than elections function as the main channel for gathering information on popular perceptions about governance problems in communist autocracies. The paper argues that information compiled through the analysis of petitions is valued in China because it allows the leadership to identify problems with policy implementation; to track corruption; and to monitor the level of popular trust in the regime. Therefore, petitions serve as a barometer of public opinion regarding governance problems. The paper is based primarily on archival sources and on internal-circulation (neibu) materials collected in China.