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Deliberate Differentiation by the Chinese State: Outsourcing Responsibility for Governance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2019

Taiyi Sun
Taiyi Sun*
Affiliation:
Christopher Newport University
*
Email: tsun@cnu.edu (corresponding author).
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Abstract

Do authoritarian governments’ responses towards different civil society organizations (CSOs) reflect policy differentiations? Building on the existing literature of graduated control, diversification of civil society, and consultative authoritarianism, this paper utilizes an online field experiment,1 and interviews with government officials and CSO leaders to demonstrate that local governments have the tendencies to intentionally treat different CSOs with different policy responses, referred to as “deliberate differentiation” in this paper. However, contrary to what the existing literature would suggest, this study reveals that at the local level, such differentiation is driven more by the state's interest in extracting productivity and outsourcing responsibility for the provision of public goods and less by the state's need to acquire information from CSOs, including politically sensitive advocacy groups.

摘要

威权政府对不同民间社会组织 (CSO) 的回应是否反映了政策差异？在现有的分级控制，民间社会多元化和咨询性威权主义的文献的基础上, 本文利用在线实验和对政府官员和民间社会组织领导人的访谈, 证明地方政府倾向于有针对性地用不同的政策对待不同的组织, 本文将此现象称为 “刻意分化” (deliberate differentiation)。然而, 与现有文献的观点不同, 本研究表明, 在地方层面, 这种差异化更多地被国家提取生产力和外包公共产品供给责任的兴趣所驱动, 而不主要因为国家从民间社会组织 (包括政治敏感的团体) 获取信息的需要。

Keywords

deliberate differentiationcivil societyauthoritarian resilienceconsultative authoritarianismgraduated controlfield experimentChina刻意分化公民社会民间社会威权韧性咨询性威权主义分级控制实地实验
Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 240 , December 2019 , pp. 880 - 905
Copyright
Copyright © SOAS University of London 2019 

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Footnotes

†

The sentence in italics is the only difference between the control and treatment emails. The treatment emails include it; the control emails do not.

1

IRB approval was received on 10 April 2014 in accordance with CFR 46.101(b)(2) at the author's institution.

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