For researchers studying Chinese politics, the concern is not whether factions are important, but rather how to identify them. In the Chinese context, factional affiliations are often concealed, requiring researchers to devote extensive efforts to parse them. Faction detection methods have transformed over time, from the “rumours-have-it” approach of first-generation scholars, to the “backgrounds-in-common” framing of the second generation, and the “practices-of-patronage” focus of the current generation. This article offers a systematic review of these approaches and finds Junyan Jiang’s patronage-focused, “within-tenure promotion” approach to be the most accessible and justifiable. Building on Jiang’s work, we propose two additional criteria to this identification method, “double promotion” and “promotional grooming.” Finally, we test all the verifiable approaches against the odds of China’s prefectural-level leaders crossing career thresholds between 2000 and 2020. The test results show that the background-based approach has limited validity and Jiang’s patronage-based approach thus requires further refinement. In contrast, our revised identification methods prove to be effective in clarifying the factional factor. This study thus proposes an improved, verified approach to identifying factions in Chinese politics and provides researchers with a reliable tool for identifying the “people factor” in the comparative study of political elites.

This research challenges the conventional wisdom that value-driven protests in China are exceedingly rare and face harsh state repression. Drawing on a hand-coded, multi-source dataset of over 3,100 protests in three Chinese megacities from 2014 to 2016, we identify 67 protests that reveal a hitherto unknown underbelly of everyday, value-driven contention. Qualitatively, we identify three main forms of contentious performances. Quantitatively, we show how value-driven protesters combine non-disruptive tactics with ambitious targets and virtually never extract concessions. Surprisingly, we find that such protests are less often policed and repressed than other protests. They are also never met with violence from non-state actors. We provide three interpretations for the counter-intuitive finding on repression. This study shows that the Chinese state coexists with a non-negligible amount of explicitly regime-critical contention. It adopts a containment strategy, tolerating a certain extent of value-driven performances when the risk of spill-over into wider society is limited.

How can China develop so quickly and yet maintain stability? Most scholars pinpoint the efforts of China's local government leaders as a primary factor. Regarding what motivates these leaders, however, scholars display wide disagreement. The widely accepted “promotion tournament” hypothesis stresses competition among local leaders as the driving force, but empirical test results vary considerably and create controversy. We argue that tests of promotion competition should target leadership behaviour rather than institutional inducements; the latter are, at best, a necessary condition of the former. Informed by extensive fieldwork, this study proposes an alternative and more direct approach to verifying the promotion tournament hypothesis by examining the impacts of promotion competition on leaders’ performance efforts. Our test results show, however, that competition for promotion has no significant impact on local leaders’ behaviour, thereby indicating that the promotion tournament hypothesis cannot be the primary explanation for China's economic achievements and regime resilience. In so doing, our study illuminates the oversimplified assumptions behind a prevailing proposition in Chinese politics and offers empirically informed insights into the tensions between political institutions and leadership behaviour.

China's political system has been characterized by two institutions since the 1980s: an explicit “layer-by-layer administrative hierarchy” and the “appointment of cadres one level down.” There have, however, been two departures from these administrative practices. First, some provinces have “empowered prosperous counties” by placing them in a dual-reporting relationship with both prefecture-level cities and provinces. Second, some provinces have restored personnel control going “two levels down” by appointing key officials at the county and urban district levels of government. These deviations evolved as responses to China's GDP-centric policy environment during the early reform era. Based on field interviews and nationwide analysis of city-level personnel data, this article argues that such adaptations have generated unintended conflicts between provinces and prefecture-level cities. While prior studies of evolutionary change in China highlight the relationship between state and non-state actors, this study demonstrates how interactions among state actors themselves may fundamentally transform the dynamics of administrative governance.

Whether local officials in China are promoted on a meritocratic basis has been the subject of long-standing debate. Merit is commonly gauged by a leader's ability to deliver local GDP growth. Although some find economic performance to be a strong predictor of the career success of local leaders, we argue that the existing measure, which focuses on the promotion outcome of a single career step, is problematic because the career success of individual local leaders is seldom determined by a single promotion, or the lack thereof. We propose an alternative measure that is more suitable for China's political context: the length of time until promotion. Analysing the time it takes to gain promotion for four types of local leaders, we find that good economic performance is associated with a shorter time until promotion. However, the cumulative time-reducing effect of economic performance is far from significant, as it is generally insufficient to help local leaders overcome the age ceiling for promotion.

Has survey nonresponse caused scholars to overestimate political trust in China? We analyse item nonresponse for sensitive questions on trust in government from our original survey of villagers conducted in China in 2012. We also analyse nonresponse in four other comparable surveys conducted in China between 1993 and 2014. We examine the association between nonresponse to politically sensitive questions and individual characteristics such as sex, level of education, Party membership and cosmopolitanism. We find that less privileged groups may be underrepresented in survey data generally. We find mixed results regarding the association between cosmopolitanism and nonresponse. We conclude that our understanding of political trust in China has been compromised by high rates of item nonresponse, leading to artificially high estimates of trust in the centre and exaggerated accounts of the gap between trust in central and local leaders.

Despite strict state controls, negative news about local officials is reported in China. Faced with political constraints and the incentive and pressure to earn profits, municipal television news programmes have developed and adopted the life news model (minsheng xinwen), which aims to help citizens solve problems. The production process of this news model has transformed the political role of the broadcast media at the local level. Many life news reports focus on disputes between citizens and local officials. Thus, addressing citizen grievances essentially facilitates public service provision. Based on an ethnographic case study of a municipal television news programme, this article finds that the production process of life news reports can facilitate public service provision by correcting local officials’ behaviour, regardless of whether the news reports are eventually broadcast. This unintended role is a result of the power negotiation between local officials and journalists who face immense commercial pressure.

The shift in Beijing's priorities to more balanced and people-oriented development has led some localities to make more efforts in developing social policy areas. By investigating the personnel institution, a political incentive mechanism, this article aims to shed light on the structure of political incentives in China and why local political leaders improve public welfare in a non-democratic setting. A content analysis of 69 regulations that cover one-third of all municipal leaders shows that the formal evaluation rules for leaders in some localities have become more welfare-oriented to reflect Beijing's new focus on social policy areas. A statistical analysis further reveals that different political incentives operate for municipal Party leaders and mayors, and that political incentives to develop social policy vary across geographic regions. The statistical analysis exploits an original dataset I compiled from an online archive and statistical yearbooks, and contains biographic and career history data on municipal leaders between 2003 and 2010.