Blame Game Politics in China: Central-Local Relations during Public Disputes

• In Event: Central-Local Relations in China

Abstract

This paper explores how the Chinese central government attributes the blame for public disputes to local governments and as the blame-taker, the way in which local governments respond to this attribution. Through studies on all the vaccine incidents that occurred from the end of 2012 to the end of 2019, this paper demonstrates that the Chinese central government’s blame avoidance principles mainly focus on agent strategy. To achieve this goal, the central government employs two tactics. First, the central government deliberately constructed narratives to explain that the fundamental cause of the public incident lies in the implementation process rather than the policy itself. Second, a joint investigation team was established as a temporary organization that transcends existing departmental interests, thereby increasing the credibility of blame attributed from the central to local governments.
This joint investigation is a temporary institution sitting above the existing government departments. The advantage of setting up such a team is to show the government’s determination to be responsive to social needs. Since the team is not supervised by any existing departments, it is likely to be regarded by the public as an “independent” organization detached from the vested existing departmental interests. As a result, establishing this team assists the central government in attributing the blame to others.
On the other hand, for local governments, the paper argues that as a blame taker, to alleviate their responsibility, local governments may reframe the cause of the incident as related not only to the implementation process but also to the policy itself. Since the existing study on central-local relations predominantly focuses on the performance of local governments and lacks a perspective on blame avoidance games, this paper fills the gap and enhances the theoretical understanding of central-local relations.
Moreover, the study contributes to our understanding of hierarchical government trust. Existing research on hierarchical trust shows that decentralization consolidates hierarchical trust. For the origin of hierarchical trust, the literature proposes the following factors: troublesome policy implementation and social actors deliberatively criticizing the local central government. However, the literature has not systematically examined the role of the central government in constructing this trust. My study demonstrates that the central government intentionally creates narratives backed up by an “independent” organization to blame the local governments.

Author

• Chelsea C. Chou, National Taiwan University