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Technocracy on the Ground: Cadre Competence, Expert Involvement, and

Scientific Advice in China's Local Governance

Chapter · February 2023

DOI: 10.4337/9781800883246.00018

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 Forthcoming in: Ergenc, Ceren and David S.G. Goodman (eds.), Handbook on Local Governance in
China: Structures, Variations, and Innovations. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Chapter 13

Technocracy on the Ground: Cadre Competence, Expert

Involvement, and Scientific Advice in China’s Local
Governance
Anna L. Ahlers

A sophisticated system of public administration has always been key for the government to
implement policies across China’s vast territory. After 1978, a central characteristic of the
Reform and Openness policy was to modernize and restructure this system, which included a
heightened demand for leaders and staff with certified expertise. No longer was the focus
only on “redness” i.e., pure loyalty to the Party, and mere practice-based merits as key
requirements for recruitment and promotion. Cadres working in government departments
down to the grassroots level were increasingly expected to possess specialized education and
training, ideally in the form of academic degrees in fields deemed politically important in the
People’s Republic of China (PRC). In 2002, leaders Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao introduced the
Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “Scientific Outlook on Development” which called on Party
and government officials to base their policies and also their day-to-day decision-making more
strongly on in-depth analyses and accurate data as well as to generally show more openness
to include expert assessments and scholarly commentaries on political issues. Observers of
Chinese politics usually see in these shifts the emergence of technocracy – which is commonly
defined as rule by (persons with) specialized training and expertise, usually in application-
oriented disciplines such as economics – with Chinese characteristics. The dynamics and
recent transformations of Chinese technocracy have been extensively explored in research at
the national level, especially in studies of Chinese elite and reform politics (Andreas, 2009;
Cao, 2004; Cheng & White, 1990; Lee, 1991; Li, 2021; Zhu, 2013, 2019). Less is known, however,
about if and how technocracy as well as the more recent calls to include scholarly expertise
and scientific policy advice play out on the ground, where policies must be adjusted to local
conditions and negotiated with different stakeholders. Not only have local government and
Party offices been increasingly staffed by highly trained personnel over the last few decades,
these office holders now also increasingly seek and commission external scientific expertise
and analysis from local universities and research institutes for the purpose of policy
interpretation, concretization, and innovation (Shen et al., 2021). How has the Chinese state’s
understanding of policy-relevant expertise – and how to obtain it – changed over the past
decades? Do these more recent shifts represent a turn from technocratic government to a
more general scientization of Chinese policy-making, for instance? And what do these trends
mean for our overall understanding of contemporary local governance in China?

1
So far, the diverse forms of cadre–academia linkages and interactions at the subnational, and
more importantly the sub-provincial level 1 , and the effects they yield are only seldomly
studied in the existing English and Chinese research literature. Acknowledging that local
governments bear the brunt of making policies work on the ground, published research
focusses most often on the intricacies of cadre management or on forms of public
participation of a wide range of local societal groups, of which experts, scientists and scholars
are just one small part. Symptomatically, whereas the inclusion of legal and other – most often
academic – experts in policy-making at the central government level is often labelled
consultative authoritarianism in the literature (Deng & Liu, 2017; Kornreich et al., 2012; Teets,
2013), in the local state, the same concept is often used to denote very broad forms of citizen,
that is, lay person participation and local governments’ general deliberation with community
groups. Only a few studies deal more specifically with individual scholars who advocate certain
policy initiatives (e.g. rural reconstruction) often in singular cases or localities, with non-
governmental organizations (NGOs) as ‘transmitters’ of scientific knowledge in local policy-
making (e.g. for environmental protection), or with instances in which scholars are
sporadically invited to partake in consultations and expert hearings on new laws and policies
or public budgeting (He, 2011; Thøgersen, 2011; Wu, 2013; Zhang & Wang, 2017; Zhu & Zhang,
2014). Altogether, whereas the evolution of government-internal expertise building is
relatively well covered in the literature, studies of the inclusion of external expertise and of
patterns of scientific policy advice in local governance are mostly scattered into very
specialized studies of an individual locality, or of certain policies. Hardly ever is the
contemporary Chinese understanding and practice of technocracy studied as the combination
of the two themes – the increase of government-internal professional, even scientific
competence; and the rising demand for governmental-external knowledge and analysis by
scientists and scholars – especially not at the local level.
While not being able to cover all details of this governance phenomenon, this chapter
attempts to generate new insights pertaining to forms of local technocracy that are accessible
through a combination and synthetization of existing scholarship and other sources on
Chinese local governance. It deals with shifts in what competence is required from
government (and Party) cadres, the growing involvement of certified experts, and finally with
emerging forms of broader scientific policy advice in the Chinese local state. The following
section will analyze the evolution and entanglements of these features over time and the
second part of the chapter presents a preliminary typology of state-scholar interactions in
local policy-making and implementation. In conclusion, the chapter will reflect upon how this
study contributes to a general understanding of the evolution of Chinese local governance
under Communist rule and point out a few avenues for what appears to be indispensable
future research in this area.

1
For the study at hand, “local state” will be used to denote the city/municipality/prefecture and county/city
district levels, which are usually seen as the most pivotal actual local tiers of government and governance in
China (Ahlers, 2014; and also Jaros, Goodman and Cartier in this volume); “grassroots level” will be used for the
township/subdistrict and village/neighborhood levels.

2
Overall, it becomes obvious that scholarly and scientific input in Chinese local policy-making
today is qualitatively different from traditional forms of bureaucratic tacit knowledge and
expert rule in pre-PRC times and even from the type of so-called technocracy of the earlier
phases of Reform and Openness. It seems that the primary difference in the inclusion of
professional knowledge into processes of local governance today is one of functional
differentiation and of the increasing openness towards government-external input of
expertise. Expertise is no longer expected to rest only with the incumbent of political offices;
the Party state also recognizes the existence (and sometimes superiority) of professional
competencies and analytical capacities in different elite groups in society and increasingly tries
to siphon this knowledge. Most importantly, over the past few decades, scholars have
described the institutionalization and diversification of this selected and selective input of
expertise in Chinese local governance (Maags & Holbig, 2016; Sagild & Ahlers, 2019a, 2019b).
Moreover, the government’s tendency to actively seek external scientific advice displays an
increased political desire for analytical accuracy and adaptive responsiveness, including on the
ground. It is often through these means that local officials can propel their career by being
particularly innovative and by developing defendable and replicable solutions for pressing
problems. When, how and to what extent policy makers seek external expertise and scientific
advice varies greatly across the country, however. Asking for expert advice requires a certain
level of confidence and risk tolerance that local leaders may not always possess, and which is
also to some extent conditioned by the overall political climate in China. Especially in recent
years, under the leadership of Xi Jinping, scientific input into local governance in the PRC once
again appears to be more heavily controlled and this altogether reflects some of the core
dynamics and tensions present in modern Chinese authoritarianism.

A Tradition of Expert Involvement in China’s (Local) State? A Brief Historical Overview

For analysts of Chinese politics it has become common sense to draw a direct connection to
the tradition of “scholar officials” or “literati” (士大夫)2 and of meritocracy in imperial China
when trying to identify the specialties of bureaucracy and technocracy, cadre management,
and policy-making in the country today (Baark, 2007; Bell, 2016; Gu & Goldman, 2004; Perry,
2020). While certain continuities are indeed striking, it is important to note some shifts over
the course of Chinese political history up to the present, particularly in the ways in which a)
political personnel are recruited and in how (and which) b) knowledge, expertise and analysis
are employed to make policies. The chapter cannot claim to capture the thousands of years
of Chinese history and cannot do justice to the many details it embraces, but a short historical

2
The terms are often used interchangeably in English-language literature with no one authoritative definition.
A distinction, however, can be made between local educated elites holding a formal political office (for which
another label, “mandarin”, is often used), and those learned elites who graduated from a Confucian academy
but did not pass the civil service entrance exam. The latter group still played a semi-official role in imperial era
local governance in China. All sub-groups of the “scholar official/literati/mandarin” category formed part of the
local gentry, which was made up of – often entangled – scholarly, political and economic elites; see Elman
(2000), Esherick & Rankin (1990).

3
overview seems appropriate for reasons of illustrating the progression and transformations
of professional competence, expert advice, and scientific input in Chinese politics. In line with
the interest of this book, in these brief summaries of different epochs special attention will be
paid to the question of how much these phenomena were actually observable at or described
for local politics in China.

Imperial China and the ideal of the scholar official generalist

The “scholar official” concept captures the expectation that formalized scholarship and a
political mandate coexisted in holders of offices in China’s far-flung imperial state apparatus.
Having a comprehensively knowledgeable and thereby capable bureaucracy was necessary in
a vast empire with a large variety of geographical, economic and social conditions across its
many regions. Emerging in the Han Dynasty (206 BC – 2020 AD) and perfected and expanded
since the Tang Dynasty (618 – 907 AD), a sophisticated system of schools and academies that
mainly taught the Confucian canon was established with the aim of educating and preparing
young men for governmental service. A harsh examination procedure at the end of their
studies meant that only few of them made it into the mandarinate (Elman, 2013; Esherick &
Rankin, 1990). As the building block of officialdom on all levels of the governmental hierarchy,
the examination system existed until the beginning of the 20th century,3 and some might argue
that one can find its traces in the entrance exams public servants are still taking in the People’s
Republic of China today (Wu, 2019). Arguably, the study of mostly Confucian canon, classic
poetry, and bureaucratic protocol rather trained these men in adopting a common language,
style, moral, and habitus than endowing them with practical knowledge and skills. However,
once on the job they then had to further prove themselves to be competent and smart enough
to handle the everyday challenges of their offices, thus being able to continuously rise through
the ranks (Schäfer, 2011). A tradition emerged that was based on an attempt to, in theory,
recruit officers based on meritocratic principles rather than hereditary ones. It valued
scholarship and educational accomplishments as well as it fostered problem-oriented
expertise and the striving for tangible achievements on the ground (Hartman, 2022). These
features of the imperial officialdom can be distinguished from instances of external advisors
to the central imperial court that are well documented in historical accounts (think of, for
example, the early astronomers who assisted the court in keeping the official calendar, or later
the Jesuit missionaries who were accepted as consultants and even given official ranks; Elman,
2005). Scholar officials were not unique exceptions, but a built-in feature of the imperial state
and thereby of local governance. Most importantly, as Elizabeth Perry noted very pointedly,
the core function of academies of higher learning was to recruit governmental personnel and,
in effect, to form a local gentry across the empire: higher education and pre-modern types of
research were almost one, and “while the imperial state exercised the prerogative of ranking

3
Joshua Hill in his 2019 book on the history of elections in China claims that it were especially new forms of
public voting for candidates for offices, which were part of the reforms and modernization efforts of the late
Qing dynasty and then the Republican government, that effectively replaced the examination system.

4
and licensing academic merit, scholars themselves enjoyed the prestige and material benefits
of state-conferred recognition” (2020: 4).

Ideologized and selected expertise in the (People’s) Republic and Mao era
In modern times, the first real change occurred after the end of imperial rule and the short
Republican era, with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, when a new credo
for what was deemed a required education and “merit” for state officials evolved. Since the
final decades of the Qing dynasty, ideas of science and modern education circulated and
formal degrees from the relatively new public universities in China (or abroad, of course) had
become an important qualification for public service (Chen, 2021; Schäfer, 2018). With the
building of the People’s Republic, technical and practically applicable knowledge became ever
more important (Lee, 1991). Replacing the “scholar official” ideal of old China, the New China
was rather seeking worker or revolutionary officials. Ideally, as Julia C. Strauss writes, they had
to possess “technical skills, a modicum of formal education, and a class background that
wasn’t obviously landlord or reactionary” (2020: 48). Furthermore, the Communist Party no
longer tolerated any references to the country’s “feudal past”, and so any explicit adherence
to classic ethics was eradicated and replaced by tests of ideological steadfastness and political
loyalty (Andreas, 2009; Strauss, 2020; see also Goodman in this volume). Being “red and
expert” was the formula the political leadership promoted, while the first criterion clearly was
privileged over the second one. To ensure the CCP’s governing capacity throughout the
administrative hierarchy of the new People’s Republic, a twofold process emerged: practical
and professional training was obtained on the job or in public vocational schools – or
sometimes universities – while political education was offered on the job as well as in the
many emerging Party Schools across the country. With this, the Party leadership envisioned
to foster cadres that were both practically competent as well as politically aligned and reliable.
Political aspects in recruitment and promotion to positions of power were often most
important, and the effects of frequently occurring renunciation of professional competence
in decision-making processes throughout the Mao era are well documented (Dikötter, 2010;
Shapiro, 2001). Across-the-board collaboration with non-Party or non-governmental
professionals, as well as academic advisors, was apparently not an institutional and regular
practice in Maoist China, with the exception of assistance by engineers and other technical
experts sent by the Soviet Union – a practice that ceased in 1960 in conjunction with the Sino-
Soviet split (Klochko, 1971; Shen & Alitto, 2002).4 This may seem logical, given the ideological
rejection of bourgeois science and the academic class by the Communist Party (Andreas, 2009)
and their “uselessness” for revolutionary struggles ahead.

4
Interestingly, Coco Dijia Du and Erik Baark (2021) claim that under the aegis of more reform-oriented Party
leaders such as Zhou Enlai, scientists together with some bureaucrats engaged in some policy advocacy
regarding the issue of pollution control and thus helped form the early traits of the PRC’s environmental policy
in the 1970s. This acknowledgement of “scientifically substantiated planning” (p. 43), however, and the direct
inclusion of external experts remained an exception and confined to the – at that time – very marginal policy
issue of environmental protection.

5
At the same time, the CCP, while consolidating power in China, created an extraordinary
institution that was supposed to fulfill an advisory function, the Chinese People’s Political
Consultative Conference (CPPCC). Especially during the transition period of the 1930s-50s, the
CCP faced a considerable amount of quite powerful and sometimes oppositional societal
groups, including large parts of the old intellectual and academic elites. Those groups and
individuals who were not immediately excluded or outright eliminated had to be somehow
appeased or coopted into the new regime. Their nominal inclusion in the new body was
supposed to signal some degree of political consensus and bestow the new rulers’ actions with
a kind of broad societal legitimacy. At the same time, by offering these groups some type of
advisory role via the consultative conferences from the central down to the local level,
theoretically, the Party could also tap into any social, intellectual and professional
competence not (yet) present in its ranks. Altogether, as research on generations of PPCCs
has shown, their function in practice did not lie primarily in tangible expert policy advice. Their
impact on actual policy-making in China remained rather minimal. Similar to how it still
functions today, this institution seemed to be instead an attempt at elite cooptation and of a
premodern type of think tank that could help the CCP diversify and make acceptable policies
that had already been announced at the top Party and governmental level.5

Turn to technocracy with the start of the Reform Era in 1978

With the beginning of the Reform and Openness Era at the end of the 1970s, pragmatism and
institutionalization began to largely replace ossified ideology as a basis for political decision-
making in the People’s Republic of China. Consequently, the leadership came to openly stress
different qualities of its Party and government personnel: no longer were cadres merely loyal
Party soldiers and knowledgeable practitioners, but they now had to possess specialized and
formally-certified expertise (Marinaccio, 2021). By the 1990s, the term “technocracy” was
employed by observers looking to import a handy analytical concept to grasp this turn to
rational problem-solving and the heightened influx of concrete competence into the Chinese
political process (Brødsgaard, 2017; Lee, 1991). During the first decades of reform, China’s
technocrats were mainly engineers – a slight difference to the European notion, where so-
called technocrats were traditionally economists and lawyers. President Jiang Zemin and
fellow top Party leaders now almost all had engineering degrees, and so did provincial leaders.
Beyond the top governmental levels, political offices at all levels were to be filled with capable
officials who knew how to develop their jurisdiction because they knew ‘their stuff’. In other
words: China’s new technocrats were now entrusted with taking decisions largely based on
their professional knowledge and with more flexibility and discretion than in the Maoist
decades before (Ouyang, 2003; Xiao, 2003). This trend in the administration matched the
overall drive to produce highly skilled workers for China’s economic development alongside

5
See detailed descriptions of these various aspects in Sagild and Ahlers (2019a, 2019b). For an interesting
description of another form of cooptation of intellectuals for practical political work in the Mao era, “work
team participation” (a practice that is reoccurring under Xi Jinping, see below), see Perry (2021).

6
with the expansion of the country’s vocational training and higher education infrastructures.
As Joel Andreas notes:
“in just three years, from 1982 to 1984, the proportion of municipal leaders with college
degrees increased from 14 percent to 44 percent, and the proportion of college-
educated county cadres increased from 14 percent to 47 percent. At the top, the
proportion of college graduates on the party’s Central Committee increased from 26
percent in 1977, to 55 percent in 1982, 73 percent in 1987, 84 percent in 1992, 92
percent in 1997, and 99 percent in 2002” (2009: 240).
An accompanying development which facilitated this trend were pervasive political structure
reforms (政治体制改革) that started in the early 1980s with initiatives by Deng Xiaoping and
continued under the Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao administration. As part of these reforms,
governmental offices were to be nominally separated from Party offices (党政分开), and the
responsibility for decisions on funding and the concrete implementation of policies was
further decentralized to enable more local adjustments of programs. China’s economic boom
and the regime’s performance legitimacy relied on functioning and, ideally, efficient
governance on the ground. The old recipes of static and ideologically rigid top-down command
government no longer worked for this (Yang & Zhao, 2015).
At the same time, the whole policy process became more diversified and more stakeholders
became involved, such as different governmental departments and agencies at different levels,
influential individuals and interest groups in local constituencies, public organizations, among
others. This complexity and the challenges it brought about for governance and policy
implementation is usually described as “fragmented authoritarianism” in the China studies
literature (Cheng & White, 1990; Lieberthal & Lampton, 1992; see also Mertha, 2009). To stay
ahead of the game department officials had to be especially well trained and to possess an
array of skills in order to defend their positions and navigate these processes. For most local
officials below the leadership level, authority increasingly had to be earned through evoking
an aura of professionalism and by claiming superior knowledge and problem evaluation
capacity. Governments at all levels established “research” units (政策研究室/中心) that were
primarily tasked with collecting as much policy relevant data as possible within their
jurisdiction, to interpret central policies and to make careful suggestions for their local
implementation.

Boom of a “scientific outlook” on policy-making (mid-1980s – 2010s)

The mid-1980s brought about the flourishing of think tanks in China, institutions that conduct
analytical research on problems considered politically relevant and in order to advise or lobby
the government. Zhu Xufeng (2013) distinguishes between governmental, semi-governmental
and nongovernmental think tanks. According to his study, the mid-1980s saw a first peak in
the establishment of semi-governmental research institutions, in a time of more open debate
and fierce attempts to restructure China’s economic and in parts also political system (Zhu,
2013: 29-30). The government was quick to see the value of such input and officially supported
the creation of such centers under its sponsorship. As a result, the new think tanks appeared

7
as outside the government, although most of their funding and the main incentives for
activities were still government-dependent. Fields of study and advice at that time were
relatively limited, or rather: specialized, and oriented at the central policy agenda. Academic
advice on topics such as tax reform or enterprise reform was deemed most important to fuel
China’s economic rise. The most influential and largest of these new public institutes were,
not surprisingly, clustered around the center(s) of power, in Beijing, in Shanghai, or in a few
other metropoles.
The 1990s then saw a diversification of both the nature and thematical areas of China’s
booming policy research institutes. Zhu Xuefeng calls it the dawn of “nongovernmental think
tanks” (2013: pp. 28-30). More and more think tanks arose that were either attached to
already existing departments or centers in universities, independent start-ups under the
leadership of entrepreneurial academics, or “civil society” and “professional” organizations
built around certain policy issues (Yu, 2003). The government welcomed this integration of
diverse and innovative expertise for the implementation of policies, especially when it was
identifiable with renowned individuals. The most prominent cases are probably Wang
Shaoguang and Hu Angang’s advocacy for fiscal reforms (Frenkiel, 2015) and numerous
scholars’ consultancy on the design of China’s public health care and insurance system
(Kornreich et al., 2021). Later, with the ascent of climate change to the political agenda,
scientific advisors from relevant fields also enfolded “significant impact” on related policy-
making in China, as Jost Wübbecke found (2013). Interestingly, as Zhu Xuefeng documents,
there were also several cases of high-profile think tank directors who were transferred into
central level political offices, such as Zhu Rongji or Wang Qishan (Zhu, 2013: 28). Topics and
areas of activities increasingly included all sorts of pressing societal and environmental
problems that arose in Chinese society and were now not only proposed by the government
but also – as hinted earlier – promoted by public and professional interest groups (see also Li,
2017). Beyond economics which was the core focus in earlier phases of reform and scholarly
policy advice in the PRC (Keyser, 2002; Weber, 2021), issues like rural development, health
care, pollution, and foreign affairs now came into the spotlight, too. Most importantly, while
the big think tanks were still concentrated in Beijing and the more affluent provincial capitals,
academic reporting and consultancy conducted via new research institutes as well as non-
profit social associations and for-profit enterprises spread across the country.
When Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao took over the top political leadership in 2002, they continued
the institutionalization of the technocratic ideal as well as the claim of the knowledge-based
nature of Chinese politics. Among other political campaigns and programmatic slogans of the
time such as the “Harmonious Society” (和谐社会), the Hu and Wen administration adopted
the “Scientific Outlook on Development” ( 科学发展观 ) (Fewsmith, 2004). As an apparent
reference to Engel’s earlier notion of “scientific socialism” and its claim that Marxist theory
was equivalent to some sort of scientific law (Thomas, 2008) and a Communist Party thereby
a rational implementor of advanced insights, this new initiative mostly addressed Party and

8
government cadres. 6 The concept itself remained very vague and even the accompanying
explanations in Party booklets and media coverage did not elaborate much on what exactly
was supposed to be “scientific” in this new outlook. Yet, empirical research shows that cadres
across the country often responded to this initiative by stating that it calls upon them to
consider a complexity of requirements and demands when making policy decisions on the
ground (Ahlers, 2014). A natural way of answering this call for them was to state that officials
across all tiers of the Chinese state were well-educated and competent, and thereby able to
consider advanced and innovative knowledge, and to transfer that into evidence-based,
locally well-adjusted political solutions.
Consequently, educational achievements continued to be an important requirement for
candidates for governmental offices. The CCP’s Central Organization Department made an
effort to further increase the cadre force’s educational qualifications in the 2001-2005
Education and Training Plan for All Cadres (Brødsgaard, 2017: 415). Statistical analysis of
accessible biographical data of local officials in China corroborates Joel Andreas quote on p.8:
“About 80 percent of leading cadres (defined as cadres at the county level and above) have
some kind of college education, and as for ju-level cadres [meaning departmental leaders],
the proportion is 88 percent” (Brødsgaard, 2017: 420; explanation added). Part-time master’s
programs, especially the Master in Public Administration (MPA, 公 共 管 理 硕 士 ), became
popular among civil servants and Party cadres all over China (Nankai University, 2016).
Moreover, Party Schools in China at all levels since the early 2000s have increasingly moved
toward matching ideology classes with more courses on practical governance skills, such as
managing public finance, environmental protection, and media relations (Ahlers, 2014;
Marinaccio, 2021; Pieke, 2009; Shambaugh, 2008, 2022).7 Delegations of Chinese cadres also
frequently went abroad to receive further training and inspirations of theoretical and practical
nature; one key destination was Harvard University’s Kennedy School.8
The central leadership saw comprehensive capacity building among Party and government
cadres as critical to implementing evidence-based policy-making at all levels. Picking up on
this, Chinese local state agents increasingly sought out government-external professional
expertise and especially scientific analysis for both smaller and larger scale policy-making. It
comprised the inclusion of (often locally-based) experts, scientists and scholars in the form of
hearings, contracted surveys and assessments, and much more, as will be described in more
detail in the second half of this chapter. This also facilitated the creation of smaller and
localized non-governmental think tanks and research institutes across the country and

6
It also seems possible that the slogan is a reference to Bertrand Russell, especially to his book The Scientific
Outlook (1931), and, in general, to his thoughts on the scientific method, which would require willingness and
courage to experiment and innovate, and to overcome any types of local opposition and constraints for the
sake of greater societal progress – an attitude that the CCP certainly wanted to instill in its cadres.
7
David Shambaugh (2008) claims that especially the Central Party Schools (CPS) developed some traits of a
policy reform and governance think tank. He notes that leading CPS theorists are even thought to be the
creators and elaborators of the “scientific development” concept and refers, for instance, to works by CPS
professors about implementing a “control of cadres in a scientific manner (党管干部的科学方法)” (p. 840-844).
8
See e.g. the program’s current website: https://ash.harvard.edu/china-programs-executive-education
(accessed 1 June 2022).

9
increased chances of access to policy makers for advisors sent or commissioned by social
organizations, such as NGOs, and other stakeholders.
Scholarly literature has summarized the expansion of general public participation in this
period more broadly as “authoritarian deliberation” (see e.g. He & Warren, 2011),
“consultative Leninism” (Tsang, 2009), “enlightened authoritarianism” (Cabestan, 2004), and
“consultative authoritarianism” (He & Thøgersen, 2010; Teets 2013; Truex, 2017). Jessica
Teets, for instance, looked at the inclusion of professional advisors, often representatives of
NGOs, as a form of consultative authoritarianism. Her studies do not explicitly focus on the
scholarly types of this input, or the nature of science arbitration involved, however, and are
mainly interested in the Party state’s overall ambition to gather information and coopt social
groups and policy stakeholders. Yoel Kornreich views autocratic deliberation and consultation
as a continuum and he distinguishes between grassroots and expert consultation in China
(2019: 12-17). Expert forms of consultation, he writes, “prefigured in high-profile policy
discussions and have set the public discourses over healthcare, property law, labor contract
law, detention of migrants, restructure of state-owned enterprises, countering human
trafficking and low-carbon economy” and shaped central level policy makers’ understanding
of and approaches to the issues (2019: 13). For Kornreich the developments over the past two
decades still imply an explicit distinction between “elite and non-elite consultation” and
“professional and local knowledges” in China (2019: 275-276).
Altogether, with a view to strengthen policy-making and safeguard performance legitimacy,
over the course of the 1990s and the 2000s, the Party state shifted the way it localized and
accessed professional knowledge and expert analysis. This resource was no longer only sought
within the Party or among skilled political office holders. Government-external competence
and judgement was increasingly acknowledged and valued for adjusting policies and solving
governance problems in China, and the means for tapping into it intensified. In tune with local
policy processes becoming more diversified, complex, and to a certain extent more
participatory (see also Ergenc in this volume), gradually, local state actors worked toward
making non-governmental expertise and research part of them. Together with the
continuously high emphasis on cadre education and further training, non-governmental
expert and scientific advice was finally built into one the core pillars of the CCP’s claim to
legitimacy: exclusive possession of and access to avant-garde knowledge needed for solving
the nation’s pressing problems.

Top-Level (policy) design and the revival of redness over expertise under Xi Jinping?
When Party leader Xi Jinping came into office in 2012/13, there did not seem to be any change
on the surface to the governance pattern previously described. There seemed to be hints for
the continuation of the Reform era notion of technocracy, among other things, in the
composition of the Standing Committee of the CCP’s Politburo, the leadership’s inner circle.
Of its currently seven members, all are university graduates and two hold PhD degrees,
including Xi himself, who is the first CCP General Secretary to hold a PhD (Law – although his
thesis subject was in the field of sociology and Marxist studies) from Tsinghua University.

10
Interestingly, there is just one trained engineer present (Wang Yang). Instead, disciplinary
backgrounds include law, (political) economy and banking, public and business administration,
international relations, and philosophy.9 For some observers, this is a signal of a shift toward
a more contemporary notion of technocracy in Chinese politics today. Gang Chen also notices
these shifts among leading cadres at the subnational level and writes:

“In transitioning from industrial (mass production) to post-industrial (service-

oriented) society, China’s technocracy has shifted its centrality towards new
science-based industries like artificial intelligence, aerospace technology and
telecommunications, as well as economic expertise on technical issues related to
finance, taxation, foreign trade and infrastructure-building. … In Hu Jintao’s and
Xi’s tenure, an increasing number of technocrats were actually ‘econocrats’ with
social science backgrounds” (2020: 125).
Furthermore, although early on Xi introduced wide-ranging shifts toward extreme disciplinary
control and a substantial re-centralization of power and decision-making structures under the
motto “top-level design” ( 顶层设计 ) (Ahlers, 2018), these trends did not alter the basic
configurations of the Chinese policy process (Ahlers & Schubert, 2022). The leadership
signaled that the CCP was still committed to include expert advice and scholarly analyses in its
decision-making. Xi’s remarks are commonly interpreted as still endorsing “notions of
‘scientific’ policymaking and the integration of science and technology into governance,
seemingly hoping to imbue political decisions with a sense of objectivity” (Coplin, 2020).
Two new political credos by the central leadership that address the role of professional
competence and science and scholarship for policy making are worth mentioning: they call for
“Advancing the Modernization of the National Governance System and Governance Capacity”
(推进国家治理体系和治理能力现代化) (2013, 2019) and for “Strengthening the Construction
of New Types of Think Tanks with Chinese Characteristics” (加强中国特色新型智库) (2015).
These credos are not as high-profile as the related ones created by the previous administration,
or as other initiatives promulgated over the past decade (like the “China Dream” 中国梦 or
the “Core Socialist Values” 社 会 主 义 核 心 价 值 ), but they clearly call upon Party and
government officials and their potential advisors to strengthen the “Governance of China” (治
国理政) through more efficient and effective policy making and cadre management. Although
it is hard to trace the concrete effects of these initiatives, they are connected to some general
trends that already became visible and are especially relevant at the local level.
One aspect related to the “modernization of governance,” for example, is the application of
advanced technologies for the goal of increased digitalization and the usage of big data
analysis in governance (see the chapter(s) by X in this volume). In recent years, information
and communication technologies (ICT) have come to play a major role in almost all sectors of

9
Debates emerged, however, about the authenticity of all these degrees, as it is doubtful that one can
complete a PhD degree while in a full-time and high-level leadership position. There were also some
documented instances of plagiarism, but they do usually not yield any consequences for politicians. Political
scientist Pei Minxin is quoted saying that the increasing academic “arms-race” among high-ranking party
members fuels copying (Hancock & Liu, 2019).

11
government activity in China (varying across different regions), be it public health,
transportation, environmental protection, policing, or also for the general provision of public
goods and services. Close cooperation with technology developers and providers, but also
advice from sometimes a whole and interdisciplinary array of scientists and scholars in the
continuous adaptation of ICT in contemporary governance has become a common practice in
the Chinese local state (Gao & Yu, 2020; Große-Bley & Kostka, 2021; Shen et al., 2022).
The consequences of the “new think tanks with Chinese characteristics” initiative are also not
yet foreseeable. At the very least, this call reiterated the acknowledgement of government-
external expertise and analytical competence and the importance the political leadership
assigned to it for the solution of governance problems. It does not seem as if many new
institutes were founded in recent years, however. Rather, it is more realistic to assume that
existing ones read this as a push to change their mode of operation or the topics the engage
with. Observers describe that many of the long-established institutions for scientific policy
advice at the central level, such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and its subdivisions
and associated institutes, retained an outstanding status and became more and more involved
in the evaluation of government work, as well (Li et al., 2016). At the subnational level, among
the so-called non-governmental organizations in this field, especially think tanks and
academics affiliated with universities and other public research institutes got more involved
in contracted consultancy and policy evaluation work (Shen et al., 2021). So-called privately-
run think tanks or those representing social organizations can probably be expected to lose
status. In all this, the Party leadership’s focus currently is on engaging all societal stakeholders,
and especially representatives of knowledge and technology elites, to embark on the its vision
for a fast and comprehensive modernization of the country on the basis of up-to-date but also
heavily streamlined governance (Heberer, 2020). As Tsai and Lin (2021) also describe in their
pioneering empirical study, the “new think tank” campaign, together with dependencies on
funding and the overall strengthening of political monitoring in recent years, could
disproportionally favor local advisory institutes already very close to the government and to
the central policy agenda. They expect that overall diversity in the think tank sector – as was
described by Zhu Xuefeng (2013) and other authors for the period between the start of the
Reform and Openness era until the early 2000s – will be on the decline under Xi Jinping’s rule
(see also Liu, 2021).
Lastly, when it comes to the management of government-internal expertise or the expected
competence of cadres, there is the question as to whether the current leadership’s re-
centralization and re-ideologization drive has already affected the primacy of technocracy in
Chinese (local) governance. So far, the research literature has not described that selection
criteria have significantly changed or that requirements for educational backgrounds and
professional skills for candidates for public offices have been weakened. Quite the contrary,
under the new administration the practice to parachute college graduates directly into leading
and leadership position at the grassroots and local level (e.g. “university students to be village
officials” 大学生村官 and “selected graduates (as leaders)” 选调生), which is overseen by the
CCP’s Organizational Department and was already revived during the Party’s turn to rural

12
development since 2006, was further strengthened (Perry, 2021; Tsai & Liao, 2022; Xinhua,
2011). Yet, it is obvious that those officials already in Party and government service are
expected more than ever to coordinate their actions towards policy guidelines set top-down
and to spend a higher amount of time and energy than was previously common on taking
ideology classes and demonstrating political loyalty in words and deeds (Chen, 2018;
Fitzgerald, 2020). Julia Marinaccio also documents that support for cadre training abroad was
cut at the central and at subnational levels, with the budget per person and the overall number
of delegation trips being reduced significantly as part of the overall anti-corruption drive (2021:
61). Some observers even go as far as to claim that Chinese politics is currently seeing a return
to the “red and expert” motto of the Mao years. In fact, Xi Jinping himself has used this
formula in recent speeches before university students as well as cadres at different levels
(Xinhua, 2018, 2021). Concurrently, the principle of encouraging policy makers down to
communal cadres to be “scientific” and to make use of external expertise, still holds. Perhaps,
betting on technology and on outsourcing analysis and evaluation to a large extent to
technologies and external specialists could in the long run be a way for the political leadership
to again require rather core political loyalty (or “redness”) than comprehensive expertise and
researcher-like skills from its cadres. Right now, it is still too early to tell what will eventually
best characterize this period of rule and the CCP’s current interpretation of cadre competence.

In a nutshell: The evolution of approaches to policy-relevant expertise in China

The chronological summary demonstrates that, although it is certainly possible to point to a
tradition of valuing knowledge elites, educational meritocracy, and evidence-based advice
over the course of China’s political history, it is difficult to speak simply of continuity. Two
main shifts stand out in the self-conceptualizations and legitimation strategies of the
respective ruling regimes over time. The first shift is one of professionalization and
specialization. Historically, local officials were expected to be well-educated generalists.
Today, in what is implied by the dominant descriptive term technocracy, Party and
government cadres – besides all leadership skills that are required – have to sport certified
specialized competence, ideally by university degrees. The preference for what is deemed
policy-relevant education seem to also have changed and diversified over the past few
decades: from the almost exclusive focus on engineering, or later economics, finance, public
administration, and law, it now appears that any certified expertise can be of political value.
This also implies a shift from a preference for technical expertise to academic or analytical
expertise. Whereas educational and otherwise professional requirements rose in importance,
they still do not rule out continuously frequent instances of nepotism, clientelism and the
prioritization of a candidate’s various other qualities when decisions about recruitment for or
promotion in political office are taken (Doyon & Keller, 2020). Importantly however, no longer
merely having generally merited or revolutionary cadres, but the best educated and most
proficient ones has become a main self-defense of the CCP’s avant-garde-ness in the 21st
century (Sagild & Ahlers, 2019b), a logic that even the recent re-politicization dynamic under
Xi Jinping has not yet altered.

13
The second related shift has to do with separation and the subsequent development of
selective interfaces of (scientific) expertise and politics. While technocracy is a type of
conflation, a merger of specialized expertise and office, we can also observe a form of
differentiation: the government increasingly seeks external advice from professional experts,
scientists, and scholars on specific questions on a more regular and more formalized basis. It
seems acceptable for the Party now that not all knowledge and expertise is necessarily present
within its ranks, and that there is even a value in scientifically innovating and developing it
elsewhere.10 More institutionalized, frequent and wide-spread than in previous decades, new
forms of the inclusion of applied scholarship, or in other words scientific policy advice, have
emerged in Chinese governance.
As mentioned before, both trends are of special significance for and in local governance, as
this is the context in which the central leaderships’ grand initiatives are interpreted and
concretized, actual implementation patterns and strategies are tried, and further policy
innovation is sought by representatives of the Chinese state. Given the diversity of conditions
across the country’s many regions and the lack of democratic forms of agenda-setting and
decision-making, China’s modern technocracy on the ground requires both skilled officials and
the access to accurate analyses and creative advice. While Party- and government-internal
cadre management and local officials biographical background are topics that are already
quite systematically treated in the research literature, the remainder of this chapter will focus
on briefly summarizing what is known about how scientific policy advice is realized in the
Chinese local state and offers some glimpses on the variety of this phenomenon.

Grasping Recent Forms of Scientific Advice in Contemporary China’s Local Governance

As the historical overview has shown, scientific knowledge, expert input and scholarly advice
have become an ever-stronger part of governance in China. Government-external scientific
expertise is nowadays sought for smaller and larger-scale policy-making purposes, and
comprises, for instance, the participation of scientists and scholars in the form of hearings and
forums, contracted surveys and assessments, campaigns and task forces, and much more.
Scientific advice is not confined to selected policy issues anymore (as it was to, for example,
in economics, family planning, or foreign policy in the past), but can occur in any area, ranging
from environmental protection and pollution control, to social security, health, urban
planning, public safety, transportation and labor relations, to name just a few.

Delineating scientific policy advice in China

In the general literature, scientific policy advice, or scientific advice to policy-making and the
scientization of politics are usually discussed in close connection to the structures of
democratic political systems and democratization. Technocracy, i.e. rule by specialists, is

10
See also Julian Gewirtz’ intriguing study on how economic expertise was – mostly clandestinely – searched
for among foreign economists by Chinese leaders in the early reform era (2017).

14
conceptualized as one of the opposites of democracy, i.e. rule by the people. Therefore,
related research literature is usually occupied with exploring democratic ways of proliferating
scientific knowledge and findings into politics (Collins & Evans, 2007; Maasen & Weingart,
2005; Weingart & Lentsch, 2009). Empirical studies in Europe and North-America explore
complicating aspects and variables such as dependence and autonomy, representation and
advocacy, complexity and uncertainty, competition and cooptation, public understanding of
science and civic epistemologies, and many more (Jasanoff, 2005; Radaelli, 1995; Spruijt et al.,
2014). Zhu Xuefeng has noted the limitation of existing concepts, theories, and causalities to
the specific contexts of political systems in the Western world, and cautions that the
understanding, types, and mechanisms of scientific policy advice in China might diverge (2019).
Others also warn about the differences in the scope and effect that advice from and political
inclusion of scientists and scholars may yield in an authoritarian setting like the PRC (Mason,
2020; Shen et al., 2021). Studies on technocratic traits and the scientization of politics in
democratic settings often muse on the (functional) imperative to clearly separate science and
politics and this usually involves the ideal of scientific advice as independent and disinterested
(Stichweh, 2021). In the PRC, in turn, full independence or autonomy of the consulted
academics can hardly be expected, and neither does this appear as a prerequisite for
“scientific” advice within the Chinese context. Another common observation is that scientists
and scholars in China compared to cases in democratic systems have less agency and are not
proactive in advocacy but rather the government and policy makers ask them to give “advice
by invitation only”.
Despite these differences, it is nevertheless possible to identify forms of scientific policy
advice that can be distinguished from other types of public participation in order to
understand the evolution of governance in China over the past decades. While this is still an
understudied area of local governance, there are some insights in the research literature that
can serve as a basis for a preliminary typology. The remainder of this chapter will look at this
specific element of local governance and defines scientific advice as that given by academic
professionals, who are scientists and scholars with a main position in a scientific institution
(university or research institute) or in another organization, such as an NGO, while still actively
engaged in research and the publication of results. This theoretically implies that what they
provide is scientific knowledge and scientifically informed analysis, instead of any other
knowledge, experience, information, demand or petition that can occur in other participatory
mechanisms in China’s local governance. The focus will be on institutionalized and formalized
types of such involvement and consultation. While informal types of advice exist, often at the
individual level, these types are much harder to trace empirically and to find in the existing
literature. However, the lines are blurred in the context of local governance, and instead of a
formal/informal distinction, it is probably more adequate to speak of formalized and
mandatory vs. spontaneous and ad-hoc advice that is sought. Indeed, it is primarily the context
and timing of scientific advice that likely distinguishes local governance from statewide
governance in the PRC.

15
Scientific advice in the local policy cycle
A rough typology of scientific advice in China’s local governance can be constructed by
identifying categories of such involvement according to the stages of the local policy
processes 11 and the governance situations where they most usually occur. Other types of
categorization would, for instance, be an identification of types based primarily on the
characteristics (such as, public intellectual, NGO professionals, or contracted researcher) or
motivation (for example, policy entrepreneurship, advocacy, or career networking) of the
science arbiters, or the reasons why and when local government representatives seek
scientific advice e.g. in order to gather and process as much information as possible, boost the
legitimacy of a local policy, or raise their profile as innovators. Such categories have their value
as well, but they would not necessarily be suitable for research on the specifics of local
governance in China today, as they can (and do) occur at any level of the political hierarchy.
Based on existing literature on and general insights into local governance in contemporary
China, these situations can be grouped into the following: a) the input stage that is, the
problem definition, policy formulation and decision-making stage, b) the output phase that is,
the implementation phase, when policy concretization and adjustments are made, and c) the
outcome situation, which includes the evaluation and assessment and potentially modification
of a policy, as well as d) the crisis and campaign mode of China’s local governance. It should
also be added that there is, of course, the possibility of e) the complete absence of any
scientific input – a situation which would in itself be worth studying, given the contemporary
emphasis on “scientific” policy-making and legitimation.

Figure 1: Schematic overview of types of scientific advice at different stages of the local policy cycle

a) Input
The biggest overlap with scientific policy advice observable at the national level is found at
the input stage of policy-making. In the local state, where governments are usually the
recipients of policy guidelines from above, new policies are not designed from scratch. The
possibility for policy adjustment and local agency as well as the explicit mandate to innovate
(Göbel & Heberer, 2017) require complex competencies that leaders and departmental
officials do not always possess. Local officials need to concretize regulations and to collect and

11
For the local policy process in China, see Ahlers and Schubert (2022).

16
analyze data which creates several avenues for scientific policy advice at the local policy
guideline drafting stage. Scientific experts are, for example, invited to public and internal
hearings, asked to comment on policy and law drafts and to write general policy
recommendations, hired (by freelancing contracts or via temporary recruitment in a
department) for contracted research, and tasked to analyze and potentially emulate
innovations in other localities together with governmental officials e.g. by organizing
excursions and conferences (Ahlers, 2014; Balla & Xie, 2020; Ergenc, 2014; Froissart, 2019;
Maags & Holbig, 2016; Tsai & Lin, 2021). Several of these consultative activities during the
preparatory phase of local policies, such as including a drafting and commentary period for
new regulations, or of conducting feasibility studies, are now also formally required by law or
decree in China (Shen et al., 2021). Among the more spontaneous and less formalized types
of scientific input that are encouraged, many emerge bottom-up as a type of policy advocacy
or as “non-directive policy advice” (Maags & Holbig, 2016). Rebekka Sagild (2019) studied how
academics as part of local Political Consultative Conferences are tasked with “reflecting
popular opinions and social issues” and to make policy proposals specifically for their
constituencies on this basis. There are also accounts of policy activism by scientists and
scholars, who, for example, lobby for what they consider to be suitable types of agricultural
cooperatives in a specific rural region (Thøgersen, 2011) or the best way to preserve local
heritage (Maags & Holbig, 2016).
b) Output
Once a policy has been introduced, there are several ways in which further scientific advice
can be integrated at this stage. Participating in environmental impact assessments for
construction projects and other endeavors in the locality (Bondes & Johnson, 2017),
academics are often made part and parcel of planning, organizing, and overseeing
implementation processes. This has resulted in an array of regular and close contacts between
local scientist from universities, research institutes, think tanks and NGOs and the government,
especially in urban and affluent coastal and Eastern provinces of China. Scientific advisors have
reportedly been essential facilitators of government-citizen interaction in that they provided
“residents with professional knowledge, performed multiple roles as both experts and
communicators, and promoted capacity building” (Zhang & Liao, 2022: 372). What’s more
they help mobilize the local population to actively participate in policy projects. Varying with
each case and circumstance, their loyalty in this triangular relationship can either be with the
government (Maags & Holbig, 2016), or with the concerns of (groups of) locals (Meng, 2010),
or they can try to stay ‘neutral’ (Shen & Ahlers, 2018). Not least, in case local discontent and
protest erupts around policy measures, scholars are also often called upon to act as mediators.
c) Outcome
A largely overlooked and rarely documented but nonetheless important variant of scientific
advice and assessment in China happens during the stage when a policy is somewhat
considered implemented and in place, when its results become visible and effects can be felt.
Increasingly, as mentioned in the previous section, government-external scholars and
agencies are asked to evaluate the outcomes of a policy and/or whether the local government

17
has reached the intended targets. They might also be asked to come on board for the analysis
and improvement of a local measure that has not undergone extensive drafting beforehand
and was decided and implemented rather spontaneously. Such was in the case of driving
restrictions in several cities, which were implemented on an ad-hoc basis (Shen et al., 2021).
Especially when problems occur, scientists and scholars are often tasked with fixing faults and
flaws and legitimizing the government’s decision. What’s more, scientific advisors play a key
part during policy innovation and for the promotion and diffusion of governance models and
best practices. Legions of social science scholars in China are busy conducting case studies,
compiling statistics, and publishing reports (often in the form of scientific journal articles) on
“local governance and policy innovations” and, more recently, the so-called “China story”
(Göbel & Chen, 2016; Chen & Yang, 2009; Lim & Bergin, 2018). For many years the core
repository of knowledge about local innovations was the Chinese Center for Comparative
Politics and Economics (CCCPE), a sub-division of the recently abolished Central Translation
and Compilation of the CCP (中央编译局), under the leadership of political scientist Yu Keping.
The center was always in close cooperation with local scholars on the ground and was actively
forging global networks of local governance research.
d) Crisis and campaigns
Finally, one more situation in which scientific experts are a crucial player is in irregular
“campaign-style” policy implementation and sometimes in types of local “crisis modes”
(Heilmann, 2018). “Campaign-style” governance is a form of “highly centralized
(administrative) resource mobilization under political sponsorship for the purpose of
achieving specific policy goals within and for a defined period of time” (Shen & Ahlers, 2019:
136). Campaigns, a political tool dominant in the Mao era, have seen a revival under the
leadership of Xi Jinping and are applied in a range of policy areas; recently, they are often
observed in the field of environmental governance. Crisis mode governance in turn usually
pertains to national crisis, for example economic downturns, but it can also take place in a
locality that is ridden by a devastating natural hazard, e.g. a large-scale accident or protest
incident. Similar to a campaign, it entails a concentration of power and resources and usually
restricts types of public participation, while the government switches to stability maintenance
( 维 稳 ) as the main goal of its actions. Nowadays, as noted in the literature, especially
campaign-style governance has come to involve increasing degrees of scientific advice. In their
study of “blue sky fabrication” and ad-hoc air pollution control for the G20 summit in
Hangzhou, Shen and Ahlers (2019) write that (externally contracted) scientific expertise
becomes particularly crucial due to the urgency of the issue and the pressure on the local
government to achieve results. In such a situation, there is a particularly intense demand for
competence and expertise that might not be found within the government – when officials
cannot refer to standard implementation protocols, a reservoir of previous experiences, or
lessons learned from comparable operations in other localities. In line with this kind of
governance style, scientific advisors are no longer just gathered for hearings or suggestions,
but are, with ceremonial pomp, made part of designated “task forces” (e.g. 专案小组) on the
ground. A most recent example of crisis-mode-turned-campaign-style-governance can be
observed in the fight against the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic since 2019/2020. Governments at all

18
levels have been enlisting scientists and medical professionals to act as consultants on how to
face the virus and to contain its spread, as transmitters of information for the public, as crisis
managers, and as cheerleaders of all sorts of pandemic-related local activities (Mao & Ahlers,
preprint). This is, no doubt, a case that will be a treasure trove of data and observations for
scholars interested in science-policy interactions under particular circumstances in Chinese
local and national governance for years to come.

Latitude and limitations of scientific advice to local governments in China

Little is known about the concrete interactions between scientists and government officials in
the processes of consultation as well as the black box of ensuing local government decision-
making. Zhu (2019: 27) and Shen et al. (2021: 64, who see two main motivations to include
scientific advisors in policy-making: demand for analysis and evidence to develop policies, and
for the legitimation of a preexisting policy decision) have analyzed the conditions under which
expert advice is sought by policy makers in the specific cases they studied. Overall, the
procedures by which the advice is handled and what factors decide about whether a policy
will be taken up, remain largely undocumented and they, arguably, also vary depending on
the policy area, regional conditions, dispositions of the involved persons, and many other
factors. There is not enough comparable empirical data that would allow for more systematic
hypotheses or typologies, that is, to establish a causal relationship between certain (local)
conditions and the occurrence of specific types of scientific advisory patterns. However, the
existing literature allows for some general observations.
In general, scholars seem to agree that scientific advice at the local level is different from that
at the national level; the scope of decision-making and the sphere of influence is smaller,
interactions between the academics and officials involved as well as with all possible third-
party actors (residents, business sector) are more intimate, and there is a certain leeway for
local experimentation and innovation. Sometimes, the more local and the lower the status of
the case, the bigger is the room for innovative maneuvering. Processes are opaque, but, as
Maags and Holbig write, “the local development of independent policies, especially in
municipalities that are not as strongly influenced by top-down decision making as provincial
capitals, suggests that scholarly recommendations do potentially influence local policy making”
(2016: 89). As in other cases of policy innovation or oppositional and protest practices (Bondes,
2019), localities that are eager to learn pick up measures and mechanisms that are considered
successful. Scholars are not only involved in spreading the message about these “best
practices”, they are sometimes the agents or media and arbiters of the knowledge and the
specific analytical or advisory methods it entails. This was the case, for instance, among the
anti-smog task forces that were deployed to other cities in need of blues skies for big events
(Shen & Ahlers, 2019). While protest leaders who travel around to teach others are in quite a
precarious position, as they are treated with suspicion and their activities can always be reined
in by the government, scholars commonly possess high social status and an advance of trust,
which usually increases their discretion and scope for action.

19
Furthermore, one cannot assume that the advising scientists are always “honest brokers” and
that they act purely on the basis of their scholarship or always have the common good in mind.
As in any other context where political advice is provided, there are structural as well as
individual factors that may affect what advice is given and how. Beyond personal motives, for
example, the desire for fame or material rewards, rent-seeking, or clientelism (Lord, 2020),
the literature points to systemic factors, such as the fact that scientific advisors struggle with
discrepancies in the type and degree of ‘objectivity’ required from them in either scientific or
advisory work and the with different ways of incentivizing and evaluating performance in both
worlds (Mason, 2020). As Tsai and Lin write, for instance:
“The research report submitted by a think tank must strike a balance between
endorsement of the policy in question and offering expert advice. Think tank scholars
must be familiar with the standards required for policy recommendations; they must
also be familiar with official terminology so they can submit suggestions that do not go
against the established policy framework. A lot of university and private think tank
scholars have a background in government service” (2021, 163).
Not least, especially in an authoritarian setting such as the PRC, there is always the possibility
that the expert advisors become too complicit in the Party and government’s cause and form
an alliance vis-à-vis the general public. As Li and Shapiro describe for the area of
environmental governance, scientific advice and assistance can over-empower the state with
supervision and monitoring capacity instead of, for instance, creating opportunities for making
data publicly available or otherwise working toward an open communication around the
encountered problem (2020).
The most obvious and frequent roadblocks for scientific advice to influence policy-making full
circle, however, is the structural constraints on Party and government representatives’
discretion. These officials do not answer to an electorate but ultimately to their superiors and
the disciplinary mechanisms of the CCP. And they decide to what extent scientific advice can
help them navigate these pressures. The guidelines for their actions and decisions are their
concrete performance targets and the more diffuse political signals they receive on what is
considered opportune behavior by their ultimate principals. If the suggestions they receive
from external experts diverge from that, even though it may most logically and rationally
mean improvement or other gains, they will usually be ignored. A typical example in
environmental governance is the detection of a problem (a pollution source, a looming hazard)
that is not yet on the government’s agenda and therefore non-existent for officials. When the
goal is to fight smog-producing particulate matter in a locality, other elements of air pollution
(such as ground level ozone) can be neglected as long as they do not appear in the cadres’
evaluation guidelines, no matter how much atmospheric chemists involved in the smog
control task force try to raise awareness (Shen & Ahlers, 2019; Shen et al., 2021).
It remains to be seen whether in the long run the conditions of Chinese governance under the
current leadership of Xi Jinping described in the previous section will further reduce the scope
and intensity of scientific advice in the local state. Areas to watch are the more disciplinary
and ideological control over cadres at every level, the shrinking corridor for experimental local

20
policy-making, and the general suppression of opposition and deviation (Ahlers & Schubert,
2022; Wang & Hou, 2022) So far, scientific advice in Chinese governance has persisted in a
remarkable diversity. In fact, it would mark a significant qualitative shift in patterns of
governance if it was scaled down again.

Conclusions: From Local Technocracy to Scientocracy, and Back?

The CCP’s regime in the People’s Republic of China is often described as a technocratic type
of authoritarianism, but one with roots in pre-Communist times. Indeed, as the short overview
in the first part of this chapter has shown, claims of being uniquely able to mobilize experts
and expertise and to put advanced competence and knowledge into action through
authoritarian means has been one of the legitimation strategies of regimes throughout
Chinese history. Moreover, the tendency to involve experts and expertise came to increasingly
permeate the entire Chinese political system. In an empire and then a nation state as vast and
regionally diverse as China, this feature appears to have special relevance in local politics,
where signals from the political center have to be interpreted and adjusted to wildly different
conditions on the ground.
It is though too simple to only point to continuity. Principles and practices of cadre
competence, expert involvement, and scientific policy advice are specific traits in the
evolution of local governance that deserve attention not least since they are deeply entangled
with wider societal shifts in modern China. Shifts which include: the establishment of a system
of mass higher education, an increasing level of average education among the Chinese
populace, the emergence of specialist professions and certified expertise, the need for
qualified staff to support China’s economic take-off, the build-up of a comprehensive science
infrastructure and the intensifying integration of China in the global system of science and
education, and much more. Such historical contingency is reflected in the interrelations and
overlaps between knowledge, education, and science and scholarship with political power in
China.
There have been significant developments in the Chinese Party state’s approaches to policy-
relevant expertise and scholarship and where to locate it, over the course of the past half
century alone. With the start of the Reform Era in 1978, and especially under the leadership
of Jiang Zemin in the 1990s, the ideal of technocracy brought about structural and qualitative
changes down to local political bureaucracy. With the Hu and Wen administration after 2003,
observable science-policy interactions in the Chinese local state were then no longer only
reminiscent of technocracy in the classic sense, i.e. technical expertise in the office holder
themselves. In addition, the inclusion of government-external professional expertise and
scientific policy advice has become to a certain extent institutionalized, under the aegis of the
government’s call for more evidence-based and data-infused, or in the words of the Party:
“scientific” decision-making. With it, research institutes and thinks tanks have sprung up
across the country and contributed to a colorful marketplace of governance ideas with
Chinese characteristics.

21
The last section of this chapter has further identified typically local forms of scientific policy
advice which have become a special phenomenon in Chinese governance within the past
twenty years or so. An astonishing variety of scholar-official relations has emerged all over the
country and has further contributed to the variance of policy designs and outcomes in the
many different localities of China. Given the limitations of public input into authoritarian
policy-making in China and the co-existence of several forms of science-policy integration,
however, it is probably not possible to speak of a completely new mode of governance, which
would maybe lean more towards something like “scientocracy”. What is observable still rather
represents a kind of technocracy 2.0 or forms of selectively science-supported policy-making.
In any case, the understanding of this interesting phenomenon and its further development
would benefit tremendously from more both comparative quantitative as well as focused
qualitative studies. Overall, the currently available research literature lacks, for instance, some
systematic analyses of:
§ the origins, mechanisms, and structures of science-policy interactions and integration
in local governance;
§ their potential variation across different regions and levels of the political hierarchy;
§ the background and potential typology of the particular scholars or scientific expertise
involved;
§ the reasons that lead to their participation in policy-making;
§ the specific modes of communication between officials and the scientists/scholars;
§ and the actual decision-making and ultimate measures that result from it.
There have certainly been major changes in China’s politics under Xi’s so-called “top-level”
design since 2013, apparently in recent years denying agency and broad-scale policy
innovation to local state officials, which, as observers consider, might also affect how much
and for what reasons officials will seek out and involve scientific advice. While it is too early
to assess this comprehensively, it will definitively be worth generally encouraging more
specific studies of science-policy interfaces in China’s local governance in addition to all that
is known about the more general evolution of forms of public participation on the ground, in
order to further the characterization of the political system of contemporary China.

22
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