As China and other countries struggle to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, many observers see this crisis as highlighting a familiar pattern of failure in China’s governance system. First comes slow initial reporting and government coverups, followed by rigid bureaucratic responses.
This time, local government officials have been the target of much of the criticism — Wuhan’s mayor, for instance, offered to resign for failing to act on early reports of hospitalization for an unknown respiratory illness. Local government failures are just part of a broader problem, however.
The Wuhan coronavirus — and other recent nationwide crises such as the ongoing African swine fever epidemic, the “Airpocalypse” of severe smog in 2016, the 2008 infant formula scandal and SARS in 2003 — reflects a deeper governance challenge.
In my research, I identify what I call China’s “scale problem”: The difficulty of coordinating across multiple levels of a massive bureaucracy means local problems can quickly spiral into a national crisis. Here are the big issues:
1. Officials struggle to identify the scale of emerging developments
The nature of a fast-evolving outbreak like the Wuhan coronavirus makes problem identification a challenge in and of itself, but China’s large, multilevel governance system also encourages two bureaucratic processes: ignorance and minimizing.
Ignorance occurs when regulators are unaware of developments at other levels of government, deeming them irrelevant, beyond their purview or politically inconvenient. In Wuhan, for instance, journalists recount how hospitals reported the emergence of a mysterious disease to the Wuhan Health Commission in early December — to no avail.
Minimizing occurs when officials see a situation as affecting only a small group of individuals and then disregard it as unlikely to be serious. This worsens when local governments internalize and rationalize these problems as unimportant in relation to higher-level directives.
This means local officials often do not recognize how the problem they are observing at a smaller scale may be a part of a broader pattern. Government reports snake their way through China’s labyrinthine bureaucracy, with each level of government seeking approval from a higher authority to declare an emergency.
2. Which level of government should be in charge?
Determining who is best equipped to solve an emerging problem is far from straightforward in China’s fragmented system of governance. In some cases, local officials may insist that policies should be conceived and implemented based on the perspectives of regulators with on-the-ground knowledge. Or provincial government officials may seek to gain control of an emerging problem in a form of soft centralization, whereby higher levels of government take back control from problematic local officials. The central government often takes a wait-and-see approach, enabling it to develop a coherent response. This also creates political distance from the failings of local government.
3. Different levels of government fail to reconcile different governance processes
By the time China crafts a national response to a crisis like the coronavirus, regulators must then coordinate across multiple bureaucratic levels — each with different managerial workflows, time horizons, knowledge-generating processes and standard-setting mechanisms.
How do scientists and investigators operating across these levels agree on which types of data are useful? How will investigators aggregate critical information for higher-level officials to use to identify broader patterns? Experts have already criticized the lack of useful epidemiological data on how the current crisis has spread.
It’s inherently difficult to disaggregate a national strategy into the day-to-day managerial tasks to be implemented at lower levels of government. This is particularly challenging in China, with its stretched regulatory capacity, mismatched standards between political subunits and divergent central-local interests. Scholars note that higher-level government officials in China often set inflexible targets, make funding decisions and launch campaigns that provide little implementation guidance to local officials.
Reports from Wuhan highlight how local officials hastily implemented the central-government-mandated quarantine, but were unsure how to set up roadblocks and manage the inflow of supplies. And local officials have complained that they lack the test kits, protective gear and medical equipment to carry out central-government commands to control the spread of the virus.
Why can’t China resolve its scale problem?
Unlike the European Union and the United States, China lacks a federal or multilevel framework with a clearer template for regulatory integration. Instead, China goes through frequent cycles of centralization followed by decentralization to address regulatory problems
This central-local cycle is problematic for standardization, predictability and multilevel coordination in a large-scale political system like China’s. As a matter of standardization, central officials write directives in broad terms to permit local governments to implement laws in line with local conditions. But this can lead to uneven policy implementation throughout the system.
And the lack of predictability from these constant shifts in power between central and local governments can make local officials reluctant to take initiatives to address emerging problems, for fear of operating out of step with the central leadership. Before resigning, the mayor of Wuhan explained that his initial reluctance to release information was because of unclear signals from Beijing.
When the central government does take control, it’s often a unilateral top-down approach that largely disregards local-level capacities. As in past crises, the central government has removed local officials from office, added new administrative structures and channeled resources toward major projects.
The approach, however, can create poorly conceived policies or exacerbate problems. Experts have already begun to question the effectiveness of China’s massive quarantine, arguing that it may have led to increased panic. Others suggest that quickly building two new hospitals will do little to help without a local working system of family doctors who can act as gatekeepers.
Is there room for some optimism on China’s future regulatory responses? Aware of these problems, the Chinese government has instituted new governance structures to facilitate central-local information sharing, such as a national air pollution surveillance system. And macro-regional policies, such as “Revive the Northeast,” are designed to facilitate coordination between central, provincial and local activists in development.
While the emergence of a federal solution is unlikely, one can expect to see a flurry of new institutional reforms over the next decade, as China continues to search for a practicable solution to its intractable scale problem.
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John K. Yasuda is assistant professor of Chinese politics at the School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University. He is the author of “On Feeding the Masses: An Anatomy of Regulatory Failure in China” (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
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