Institutional Ambiguity and Curbing Statistical Manipulation in China & Vietnam

• In Event: Central-Local and State-Society Relations in China and Vietnam

Abstract

In authoritarian regimes, information distortion occurs when regime agents at lower levels of government who are tasked with extracting information from society manipulate that information before reporting it to regime leaders. Authoritarian regimes may attempt to centralize their information apparatus to minimize the influence of lower-level officials, but centralizing reforms may fail if these officials still maintain a monopoly of authority at the grassroots. Institutional ambiguity, characterized by the possibility that semi-formal accountability institutions can be created, withdrawn, or changed quickly and unpredictably, enables centralization success by weakening this monopoly of authority. In China, institutional ambiguity allowed a reform to centralize statistical calculation responsibilities to minimize the manipulation of Gross Regional Domestic Product (GRDP). Similar reform in Vietnam failed to achieve similar effects because rigid institutional structures preserve the authority of provincial officials over grassroots actors. From a comparative historical perspective, this research explores the exact institutional foundations that led to China’s reform success and why such institutional features are not readily replicable in Vietnam.

Authors

• Wenzhi LU, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

• Minh Duc Trinh, Purdue University