From Current Digest of the Chinese Press, June 8, 2026. Complete text:
EXPERT OPINION
Editors’ Note. – Vivian Zhan is a Professor in the School of Governance and Policy Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her B.A. in English and International Studies from Foreign Affairs College of China, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests span comparative political economy, contemporary Chinese politics, and research methodology, with a focus on post-Mao reforms, intergovernmental relations, local governance, and development studies. She is the author of the book, China’s Contained Resource Curse: How Minerals Shape State-Capital-Labor Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
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Q. – Across your work on poverty alleviation, environmental governance, anticorruption, and social stability, a common thread seems to be that policies often serve political purposes beyond their stated goals. How would you define “policy instrumentalization” in authoritarian governance, and why is it a useful lens for understanding contemporary China?
A. – While my research spans seemingly diverse topics in the realm of Chinese politics and political economy, a unifying analytical thread is how authoritarian regimes strategically deploy policies as instruments to achieve broader governance objectives. Policy instrumentalization can be conceptualized as the process by which authoritarian rulers design, implement, and adapt substantive policies not only to solve the problems officially identified by those policies, but also to advance broader objectives, such as economic development, political control, and bureaucratic discipline. In this sense, policies are not merely technocratic responses to specific, isolated issues, such as poverty, social instability, corruption, or environmental degradation, but are coordinated instruments through which the party-state manages power, allocates resources, disciplines agents, and shapes state–society relations.
This idea has been a common theme unifying many of my research projects. For instance, my work on China’s antipoverty campaign shows that poverty alleviation was not only a redistributive or developmental program but also an opportunity for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to repenetrate the rural periphery through intensified party building, deployment of personnel to the countryside, and grassroots organizational consolidation. Similarly, my research on anticorruption reveals how selective corruption control can support national reform agendas. In my work on resource conflicts and social stability, I find that social welfare provision can function as a tool of appeasement and conflict management rather than simply being driven by developmental or social justice concerns.
What makes policy instrumentalization particularly salient in the Chinese case is the institutional context: a political system characterized by centralized authority but decentralized implementation, strong organizational capacity but weak rule of law, and high developmental ambitions confronting significant governance deficits. These features create both daunting challenges and wide latitude for maneuvering. Policies become flexible tools rather than rigid mandates – repurposed, layered, and selectively enforced to meet shifting political imperatives.
Therefore, policy instrumentalization is a powerful analytical lens. It shows how the CCP uses developmental, environmental, anticorruption, and welfare policies to pursue a wider repertoire of regime goals. It helps us see governance not as problem-solving alone, but as statecraft: the calculated deployment of policy tools to manage complex political economies and sustain regime durability.
Q. – Many observers interpret uneven enforcement or selective implementation in China as evidence of weak institutions or policy failure. Your research suggests a different interpretation. Why should we see selectivity not as a failure of governance, but as a deliberate political strategy?
A. – Selective policy implementation is often treated as a symptom of institutional weakness. That interpretation is sometimes correct. But my research suggests that selectivity should not be equated with policy failure. In many authoritarian settings, China in particular, selectivity can be a deliberate strategy for the party-state to manage competing priorities, allocate limited resources, and preserve flexibility in a vast and heterogeneous polity.
I define selectivity as the strategic differentiation of policy implementation or rule enforcement across sectors, regions, firms, officials, or social groups. Selective implementation is especially useful in a system where the leadership faces multiple, sometimes contradictory objectives: promoting economic growth while tightening environmental regulation; controlling corruption while maintaining bureaucratic initiative; preserving social stability while extracting resources; and centralizing authority while relying on local governments for implementation.
My multiple projects illustrate this logic. For example, corruption control is often understood as a legal effort to discipline misconduct or a political move to purge rivals. My research shows that anticorruption can be selectively coordinated with the center’s broader policy agenda. Enforcement will be stronger in sectors prioritized in national reforms. Similarly, my work on environmental clientelism shows that local governments selectively enforce environmental regulations across firms of different sizes and ownership types to signal regulatory seriousness without necessarily imposing uniform costs that could undermine the local economy, fiscal revenue, or employment. In this sense, selectivity is not simply evidence that the state lacks the capacity to punish all equally, but can be a mechanism through which the state induces compliance without fully institutionalizing rule-based regulation.
This perspective helps explain why a weak rule of law does not necessarily mean weak governance. In liberal democratic systems, consistent and impartial enforcement is often treated as a core indicator of institutional strength. In authoritarian governance, however, discretionary enforcement can itself be a source of power. Selectivity enables the state to govern through uncertainty: Officials, firms, and citizens may not know when enforcement will be activated, but are nevertheless pressured to comply. Of course, selectivity can engender arbitrariness, reduce predictability, encourage rent-seeking, and weaken trust in formal institutions. So I would not romanticize selectivity as inherently effective or sustainable. Rather, the key point is analytical: Uneven implementation should not be read only as incapacity, but can be a deliberate strategy of authoritarian governance.
Q. – In your studies on anticorruption, you emphasize “attention” as a scarce but powerful governance resource. How does the allocation of political and bureaucratic attention shape which policy problems are addressed – and which ones are ignored – in a one-party system?
A. – In a one-party system, attention is a scarce governing resource that determines where the state’s coercive, bureaucratic, and organizational capacity will be concentrated. In China, the central leadership signals its priorities through major reform agendas, official reports, meetings, and policy directives, communicating to bureaucratic units which policy areas carry the most political weight. Governance is consequently shaped selectively: Problems placed on the central agenda receive increased resources, organizational support, and interagency coordination, while those that fall off are left underresourced, deferred, or tacitly tolerated – regardless of their objective severity. Ultimately, in a one-party system, the allocation of attention is not merely administrative but the mechanism through which political priorities are translated into actionable policies.
Q. – Several of your articles highlight how different state organs – party organizations, regulatory agencies, prosecutors, and local governments – coordinate around central priorities. How does cross-organizational coordination work in practice, and what does it reveal about power and control in the Chinese system?
A. – Cross-organizational coordination in China operates through political signaling from above and bureaucratic coordination at lower levels. My research demonstrates that when the center identifies a task as important, whether anticorruption, environmental protection, or poverty alleviation, different state organs are mobilized around that agenda to reallocate resources, form task forces, and coordinate information and action across institutional boundaries. For example, anticorruption campaigns targeting specific sectors trigger coordinated action between party discipline commissions, procuratorates, auditing agencies, and relevant functional departments – not because formal legal mandates change, but because political attention recalibrates bureaucratic incentives.
This reveals two key dynamics about power in China. First, control is exercised through agenda-setting. The center doesn’t dictate every action; it sets the priority, and bureaucracies compete to demonstrate responsiveness. Second, coordination is selective and temporary. Agencies collaborate intensively on prioritized issues but revert to fragmentation when attention shifts elsewhere. This creates a governance pattern where state capacity is impressive but episodic – highly concentrated where political attention is focused, yet weak in neglected areas. Power thus lies not in formal hierarchy alone, but in the ability to direct collective organizational attention across the bureaucracy.
Q. – Your research on China’s antipoverty campaign shows that what appeared to be an economic program also functioned as a massive party-building effort. How does this case illustrate the political logic of policy instrumentalization, especially in rural and peripheral areas?
A. – The Targeted Poverty Alleviation (TPA) campaign demonstrates how the CCP uses appealing policy goals as vehicles for political restructuring, particularly where state capacity has atrophied. Policy instrumentalization was achieved through several mechanisms, including legitimation through benevolent framing, resource injection as political leverage, and permanent structures from temporary campaigns.
First, by couching party-building in the morally compelling language of poverty elimination, the regime overcame resistance to institutional intervention. Villagers and local cadres who might resist direct assertions of party control welcomed “first secretaries” who brought resources and development opportunities. Second, the millions of dispatched cadres brought funding, connections, and bureaucratic authority to villages, which became tools to rebuild party organs, recruit party members, enforce discipline, and reassert control over village elections. Third, while framed as temporary poverty relief, the campaign installed enduring mechanisms, such as expanded CCP membership, synchronized party-village committee elections, and the practice known as “one shoulder pole” (yijiantiao, electing the village Party secretary as village head)” that consolidated party control.
This case shows the logic of policy instrumentalization: using policies with appealing goals to legitimize and facilitate broader political agendas. It is especially revealing in peripheral areas, because these are precisely where ordinary bureaucratic control is weakest. Campaign-style policy implementation allows the center to bypass inertia, send in loyal agents, and convert resource delivery into organizational consolidation.
Q. – Across environmental enforcement, anticorruption campaigns, and responses to resource-related protests, you show that policy tools often protect some groups while disadvantaging others. What determines who benefits and who bears the costs when policies are selectively enforced?
A. – Selective enforcement means policy benefits and costs are distributed unevenly across groups. The distribution is shaped less by formal policy mandates than by political priorities, bureaucratic incentives, and the relative bargaining power of affected groups.
The groups most likely to benefit are those whose interests align with the state’s dominant objectives at a given moment. In environmental enforcement, large and politically embedded firms or growth-generating industries may be shielded from regulatory pressure. In anticorruption campaigns, actors aligned with central priorities or useful to broader reform agendas may be spared from investigation. In resource-related conflicts, benefits may go to groups whose grievances threaten stability, attract higher-level attention, or can be accommodated without challenging core state interests.
By contrast, those who bear the brunt are usually actors with weaker political protection, lower bargaining capacity, or interests that conflict with state goals. They become convenient targets for demonstrating policy compliance precisely because disciplining them carries lower political risks.
Q. – If policy instrumentalization can enhance regime resilience and implementation capacity, what are its longer-term consequences for governance quality, fairness, and institutional trust? Are there risks that this strategy eventually undermines the very goals it seeks to achieve?
Policy instrumentalization is an expedient tool when regimes face contradictory goals, limited resources, and uncertainty. It enables the state to pursue multiple objectives simultaneously through a single policy vehicle. But this short-term utility comes with longer-term costs.
Governance quality suffers if implementation is driven by political logic rather than policy logic, directing resources where they are politically useful rather than where they are most needed. Fairness erodes if costs consistently fall on politically weak groups, embedding inequality into implementation practice. Institutional trust also faces a paradox: While effective policy delivery builds legitimacy in the short term, if citizens come to perceive enforcement as arbitrary or politically motivated, they lose trust in political institutions.
The greatest risk is circular. Instrumentalization compensates for weak institutions, but by compensating rather than reforming, it perpetuates the weaknesses that necessitate it. Ultimately, policy instrumentalization cannot replace institutional development and rule-based governance.
Q. – To what extent is the policy instrumentalization you observe unique to China? Do you see similar patterns in other authoritarian or hybrid regimes, and what can comparative politics scholars learn from the Chinese case?
A. – Policy instrumentalization is not unique to China, but the Chinese case shows it in an especially systematic and consequential form, making it analytically valuable for comparative politics.
Many authoritarian and hybrid regimes use popular policy goals – such as anticorruption, poverty reduction, environmental protection, or public security – to pursue additional political objectives, including rewarding loyalty, punishing opponents, maintaining regime stability, or signaling responsiveness while preserving political control. The logic is consistent with what’s observed in China: When states face weak institutions, resource constraints, and legitimacy pressures, instrumentalizing policy offers a low-cost way to pursue specific policy goals and broader political agendas at the same time.
What distinguishes China is the scale, organizational capacity, and institutionalized campaign mechanisms through which this occurs. The CCP’s meticulous cadre management system, detailed performance evaluation standards, and strong resource mobilization capability allow instrumentalization to operate with unusual precision and reach.
For comparative politics, the Chinese case offers several lessons. It challenges the assumption that implementation gaps reflect state incapacity, showing instead that selectivity can be strategically produced. It also complicates debates on democratization and governance by demonstrating that authoritarian regimes can generate genuine policy outputs and short-term legitimacy without rule-based institutions – while illustrating that this strategy carries inherent long-term limits.