Measuring the Goals and Incentives of Local Chinese Officials

Measuring the Goals and Incentives of Local
Chinese Officials ∗
Jennifer Pan †
August 13, 2013
Abstract
Understanding the goals and incentives of those who have political power is a precursor
for comprehending political behavior, choices, and ultimately outcomes. However,
there are few measures of the actual goals and incentives of political office
holders, especially those within authoritarian regimes. This paper presents a measure
of the goals and incentives of China’s county-level elites through textual analysis of
over 80,000 county government web pages. This data is the presentation of self that
county mayors choose and provide a unique measurement opportunity to reveal incentives
and goals in a way that surveys and interviews cannot. This data is part
of an on-going effect to collect the political communications of local Chinese elites,
and will be made publicly available. I find that the goals of local officials vary with
the political tenure cycle—when first taking office, cadres emphasize their attentiveness
and concern toward the masses by highlighting distribution of public and private
goods. At the end of their political term, cadres focus on showcasing their economic
and fiscal achievements.
∗ My thanks to Chris Adolph, Emily Beaulieu, Sheena Chestnut-Greitens, Jared Chung, Jorge
Domingeuz, Adam Glynn, Shelby Grossman, Kyle Jaros, Gary King, Burt Monroe, Elizabeth Perry,
Amanda Pinkston, Molly Roberts, Arthur Spirling for many helpful comments and suggestions, as well
as my research associates Qi Fangfang and Liu Shuman for their work on this project. For help with data
and technical issues, I am grateful to the team and for the infrastructure at the Institute for Quantitative
Social Science at Harvard University.
† Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Government, 1737 Cambridge Street, Harvard University, Cambridge
MA 02138; http://people.fas.harvard.edu/∼jjpan/, (917) 740-5726.

1 Introduction
Much of social science research on authoritarian regimes starts from the premise that
political office holders aim to stay in power while maximizing rents. In Chinese politics,
the pursuit of political advancement and the rents associated with political power are
often seen as fundamental motivations of elites. However, there are very few measures
of the actual goals and incentives of elites within autocratic regimes. The assumption
that autocrats pursue power and rents is a general axiom that is unlikely to be false but
likely obscures in its generality. Without actual measures of goals and incentives, our
understanding of what shapes the behaviors and actions of autocratic elites as well as how
institutionalized autocratic regimes function remains incomplete.
This paper provides a measure of the goals and incentives of county mayors within
the People’s Republic of China. In contrast to previous work, I find that the goals and
incentives of local cadres change in specific but consistent ways at different points in
their political tenure. In other words, local cadres are not motivated by goals such as
increasing economic performance at the exclusion of other goals such as maintaining
social stability, but rather, cadres pursue varied goals in response to differing incentives
during their political tenure. Specifically, I find that at the beginning of their tenure,
mayors focus on presenting themselves as attentive toward the masses by highlighting
distribution of public and private goods, while at the end of their tenure when evaluations
for promotion are likely taking place, mayors focus on highlighting economic and fiscal
achievements.
My measure of goals and incentives comes from textual analysis of an original dataset
of over 80,000 government web pages from 100 randomly selected counties across China.
Because the content of county websites is under the ultimate control of county mayors
and serves as a highly effective venue for mayors to present themselves to superiors and
subordinates, these data are the presentation of self that local elites choose, providing a
unique measurement opportunity to reveal incentives and goals in a way that surveys and
interviews cannot. This dataset is part of an on-going effort to collect the online political
communications of local Chinese officials. These data will be made publicly available.
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The durability of the Chinese regime has been attributed to its strong party institutions,
specifically the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) control of access to political office and
positions of power. The goals and incentives identified in this paper are no doubt shaped
by institutions of the CCP, but just as important, these goals and incentives in turn shape
the behaviors and actions of cadres, what it means to be a cadre within the Chinese regime,
and what it means to live as an ordinary citizen under this regime. The key to unpacking
and ultimately understanding how China works is understanding the actual incentives and
goals of leaders who comprise the regime.
Section 2 begins by describing what is currently known and assumed about the incentives
and goals of autocrats in general and Chinese cadres in particular. Section 3 describes
why government websites provide a measure of the goals and incentives of China’s local
elites. Section 4 presents the results, and Section 5 concludes.
2 Goals and Incentives of Autocrats
The Study of Goals and Incentives In rational choice approaches to the study of political
science, assumptions about the first-order preferences—in other words, goals—-of
actors are crucial because they establish the foundation for behaviors and choices (Geddes,
2003). Even outside of rational choice approaches, understanding goals and incentives is
often a precursor for comprehending political behavior, choices, and ultimately outcomes.
However, there are few actual measures of goals and incentives of political office holders.
What measures exist typically come from observing politicians’ presentation of self,
via their communications and actions toward constituents. To secure reelection, politicians
in democracies have incentives to engage in advertising, credit claiming, and position
taking (Fiorina, 1989; Mayhew, 1974). While these three categories of political
communication have been identified in repeated analysis (Eulau and Karps, 1977; Fiorina,
1989; Grimmer and King, 2011; Yiannakis, 1982), their relative cadence varies with
the rhythm of the electoral cycle. For example, retrospective voting and recency bias create
incentives for politicians to step up credit claiming with reelection campaigns (Fiorina,
1981; Patty and Weber, 2006; Weingast, Shepsle and Johnsen, 1981).
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Observing and analyzing how politicians present themselves in their communication
with constituents is one of the ways observers of democratic regimes have been able to
measure the goals and incentives of politicians. In the study of autocracies, close analysis
of how elites present themselves through speeches and in photographs was once the
primary methodological strategy of Western researchers (Chang, 1983; Charles, 1966;
Hinton, 1955; MacFarquhar, 1974, 1983; Schurmann, 1966; Teiwes, 1979), but in the
past decades, scholars have shifted their focus away from measuring the goals of elites to
areas of study where data was more plentiful.
Goals and Incentives of Autocrats To achieve the objective of maintaining office while
maximizing rents, autocrats have incentives to repress in order to smother opposition or to
redistribute in order to co-opt opposition (Bueno de Mesquita et al., 2003; Haber, 2007;
Olson, 1993; Wintrobe, 1998). Although repression has been used extensively by authoritarian
regimes, incentives for repression may be decreasing as external pressures for
regime liberalization increase (Gandhi and Przeworski, 2007), and repression has always
carried the risk of agency and moral-hazard problems as autocrats become dependent
on their security apparatus (Magaloni and Kricheli, 2010; Wintrobe, 1998). As a result,
autocrats may have greater incentives for co-optation through redistribution. Both the distribution
of spoils and the distribution of policy concessions have been associated with
political survival of autocrats (Bates, 1981; Collier, 1982; Magaloni, 2008).
Among institutionalized autocracies, leaders in the USSR and Communist Eastern
Europe used redistribution primarily at the beginning of their political tenure, as measured
by disproportionately higher spending in citizen-oriented areas such as housing, wages,
and pensions (Bunce, 1980). Indeed, politicians across communist regimes have a history
of catering to the masses immediately after taking power (Esherick and Perry, 1983).
This behavior of communist officials immediately after taking power is similar to that of
democratic politicians during election campaigns. U.S. Senators who up for re-election in
the next cycle are more likely to give speeches that demonstrate care toward constituents
than counterparts who are approaching retirement (Quinn et al., 2010).
Overall, existing research suggests that autocrats can pursue of variety of goals ranging
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from terror to redistribution as they attempt to maintain power. Evidence from Communist
regimes suggest that redistribution or promises of redistribution are often found early in
the tenure of leaders.
Goals and Incentives of Chinese Cadres In the study of Chinese politics, evidence
suggests that a primary goal of cadres is to seek political advancement, which brings with
it extensive opportunities for personal enrichment (Landry, 2008). Levy (2007) finds that
becoming a cadre can open up lucrative business opportunities. Frazier (2010) describes
how local official control of pension funds allows opportunities for rent-seeking.
In the pursuit of political advancement, research has identified incentives for Chinese
elites to maintain social stability, achieve economic and fiscal performance, and cultivate
factional ties and sponsors. Work by Edin (2003) identify the pivotal role of social stability
and economic performance to cadre evaluation and political advancement. Many
China researchers have noted the central emphasis placed by the Chinese state on maintaining
stability, and its use of both repression and redistribution to tamp down protest
(O’Brien and Li, 2006; Perry, 2002, 2008, 2010; Shirk, 2007; Whyte, 2010; Zhang et al.,
2002). Similarly, a great deal of research has focused on the economic and fiscal performance
incentives facing China’s local elites, as either a result of decentralization and
rent-seeking (Oi, 1992; Shirk, 1993; Whiting, 2004), or as a means of obtaining political
advancement. Shih, Adolph and Liu (2012) find that fiscal revenue has a positive
impact on ranking within the CCP Central Committee. Several studies have found that
the likelihood of promotion of provincial leaders increases with GDP growth rates (Chen,
Li and Zhou, 2005; Li and Zhou, 2005; Tao, Lu and Zhu, 2010). At the county level,
promotions have been linked to land revenues and to fiscal revenues more broadly (Guo,
2007; Kung and Chen, 2013; Landry, 2008). Finally, building on the established literature
on the importance of factional networks in Chinese politics (Dittmer, 1995; Nathan,
1973; Nathan and Tsai, 1995; Pye, 1980; Shih, 2008), Shih, Adolph and Liu (2012) find
that CCP Central Committee advancement is linked to factional ties, and Kung and Chen
(2013) identify correlates between relationship with prefecture leaders and promotion for
county party secretaries.
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Outline of Results
Research on autocracies and Chinese politics have put forth many
plausible theories of goals and incentives that motivate autocrats, and existing evidence
lend support to multiple goals. However, research to date does not reveal whether all
incentives are relevant for all elites at the same time, whether some incentives are relevant
for some subset of elites, or whether incentives vary over time. Using presentation of
self by county-level cadres as a measure of their goals and intentions, this data shows
that the goals of local level autocrats in China vary at different points in their political
tenure—early in their political tenure, cadres highlight their attentiveness and concern
toward the masses by emphasizing the distribution of public and private goods. At the
end of their tenure, cadres put central emphasis on showcasing their economic and fiscal
achievements.
3 Government Websites as a Measure of Goals and Incentives
In this section, I explain why county level government websites are the presentation of
self by the county mayor and allow us to measure his goals and incentives. 1 Central
government regulations require counties to have websites and require certain categories
of information to be made available. Websites have been described as a means for upper
levels of the state as well as citizens to monitor the behavior and actions of local officials.
However, county mayors have ultimate control over website content, which changes as
mayors change. As such, websites are a highly effective venue for mayors to present
themselves in the manner which best serves their objectives, and by analyzing website
content, we can measure the goals and incentives that motivate mayors’ presentation of
self.
3.1 The Mandated Adoption of Government Websites
In April 2007, the State Council, China’s chief administrative organ, promulgated the
“Open Government Information Ordinance” (OGI), which required county and higher
1 Mayors in this paper are referred to in the masculine because the majority of mayors in China are male.
In my sample, 95% of mayors are male.
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levels of government to make information available to the general public (Anonymous,
2007). According to this ordinance, the internet should be a primary platform for information
disclosure.
Using an automated search where search terms include the name of the county, the
name of the prefecture to which the county belongs, as well as the words “government
website” in Chinese, I identify county government websites for 2,796 (97%) of China’s
2,876 county-level (xian) administrative units. 2 Figure 1 is a map of Chinese provinces
Figure 1: County Government Website Availability by Province
Heilongjiang
Jilin
Xinjiang
Qinghai
Tibet
>10% of counties without websites
2-10% of counties without websites
0.5-2% of counties without websites
0% of counties without websites
Yunnan
Gansu
Sichuan
Inner
Mongolia
Ningxia
Shaanxi
Chong
qing
Guizhou
Guangxi
Hebei
Shanxi
Henan
Hubei
Hunan
Beijing
Tianjin
Shan
dong
Anhui
Jiangxi
Guangdong
Fujian
Liaoning
Jiangsu
Zhejiang
Shanghai
Hainan
based on county website availability.
Western and northern provinces tend to have a
greater number of counties without government websites. The 80 counties without websites
appeared in 20 provinces, but were primarily concentrated in Tibet, where 31 of its 74
counties did not have websites. In most cases where the county website was unavailable,
2 The top ten search results were evaluated, and the top search result whose URL contained gov.cn,
xinhuanet.com, or xinhua.com was retained since a large number of government websites in Qinghai
and Guangxi provinces are hosted by Xinhua. URLs containing the names of other government bureaucracies,
such as mofcom for bureaus of commerce, are excluded. The 3% of counties where websites were not
found via automated serach were hand checked using Google.com and Baidu.com, China’s largest search
engine, to verify that websites did not exist.
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the higher-level prefecture government did host a publicly available website.
OGI requires that governmental units make available administrative rules and regulations,
economic development plans, statistical information, budgets and financial accounts,
procurement standards, administrative licensing, major construction projects, land
acquisition and housing demolition, poverty alleviation, education, health, and social security
measures, emergency contingency plans, and product quality supervision online.
Table 1: LDA Topics and OGI Requirements
OGI requirement
Administrative rules and
regulations
Economic development
plans
Statistical information
Budgets and financial
accounts
Procurement standards
Administrative licensing
Major construction
projects
Land acquisition and
housing demolition
Poverty alleviation,
education, health care,
social security,
employment
Emergency management
plans
Environment, product
quality and supervision
Other topics
LDA topic
Business taxation, Regulations and forms
Agriculture, Development, Economic development,
New socialist countryside, Regional development
Statistics
Fiscal administration
Public procurement and tenders
Government approval process
Construction, development projects and construction
Land rights and housing
Education, Health and nutrition, Health and social
security, Public employment
Emergency response
Controls on food and drug production
CCP members and committees, Building civilized
publics, Community government organizations, Cultural
activities and channels, Family planning, Government
committees and leaders, Government openness,
Government oversight, Government services,
Information openness, Investment information, Local
government office, Media, Prosperous government,
Student sports competitions, Surnames, Traffic and
transportation, Workplace safety, Xinhua news
Using a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model to analyze the web content
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of 100 randomly selected counties, I find that county websites contain all topics which
are required by OGI (See Section 3 and Appendix A for details on the 100 counties,
Appendix C for data cleaning procedures, and Appendix D for technical information on
the LDA analysis).
Table 1 lists the 39 topics that were easily discernible from the LDA topic model. I
find that all of the topics required by OGI regulations are reflected in the LDA topics,
though many other topics not explicitly mandated by OGI also appear.
3.2 Government Websites as Intended Tools for Supervision
Foreign observers, especially international development organizations, have highlighted
the role of Chinese government websites in providing information and services to citizens
(Horsley, 2007; Jiang and Xu, 2007; United Nations, 2012). In 2009, 43% of respondents
from a national survey of internet usage in China reported visiting government web sites
multiple times a month (CCNIC, 2010).
Aside from providing transparency and services for citizens, one of the explicit goals
of China’s e-government effort, of which government websites is one facet, is to increase
oversight on subordinate levels of government by upper levels of government (Ma, Chung
and Thorson, 2005; Seifert and Chung, 2009). In 2002, then premier Zhu Rongji said of
e-government, which he refers to as “information means,” that:
“Emphasis should be laid on the use of information means...so that government’s
supervisory work will be more meticulous and efficient” (People’s Daily, 2002).
In a speech to leaders of business and government, the executive vice minister of the
State Council leading group for inter-ministry coordination on issues of information and
communication technology, Qu Weizhi, said in 2002:
“The construction of e-government is an objective need for accelerating the transformation
of government functions; is also helpful to...raise the level of a hardworking
and honest government and to strengthen the macro control” (Seifert
and Chung, 2009).
In short, counties put content onto government websites because they are required to
do so by central regulations. However, it is general knowledge that websites are intended
to help upper levels of government monitor lower level officials, and presumably sanction
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or reward based on the results of monitoring since upper levels control access to political
office and advancement. As well, websites are visited by citizens, and thus provide a way
for citizens to assist upper levels of the state in monitoring lower level officials, similar
to how general media openness is used at times to minimize local corruption (Lorentzen,
2010).
3.3 Mayor Control and Websites as Venues of Display
While government websites may have been intended as tools of supervision, this tool is
blunted because website content is wholly controlled by the county mayor, and because
there are multiple ways of meeting the information requirements laid out in OGI regulations.
For example, county websites are supposed to contain economic development
plans, but counties can either publish economic development plans with technical details
and procedures or it can publish economic plans full of positive rhetoric and self-praise.
Similarly, counties can publish financial budgets and accounts with detailed breakdowns
by line item or they can publish high-level, aggregated financial information that casts the
county’s performance in a positive light. This control over website content means county
government websites are not an objective means for monitoring local officials but rather
a public stage for PR displays by county cadres to both upper levels of the state as well as
subordinates and citizens.
The party secretary and mayor are the two top leaders in any Chinese county. The
party secretary exerts political leadership, while the mayor leads day-to-day government
functions and operations (Guo, 2009). Websites, which are part of e-government, are a
government administrative function rather than CCP function. This means that while the
party secretary no doubt can exert control over the content of local websites, the mayor
holds primary responsibility for determining the content of county government websites. 3
Based on interviews with county-level and provincial-level officials, I find that the mayor
is ultimately responsible for determining the overall strategy of website content as well as
making all critical decisions related to content. Day to day maintenance of the website,
3 Analysis of websites reveals no clear relationship between the tenure of county Party Secretaries and
website content.
9

including upkeep of servers, management of the codebase, and updating of web pages is
done by an information office (xinxi wangluo zhongxin, xinxi zhongxin, or dianzi zhengwu
guanli zhongxin) within the county government. In some counties, the county propaganda
department will be involved, determining what news content is posted; however, if any
content falls outside of the normal content parameters defined by the mayor, both the
information office as well as the propaganda department will escalate the decision of
whether to publish content to the mayor. When new mayors take office, the content of
websites are reviewed and refreshed.
Given mayoral control of website content and an audience that includes political superiors
as well as the masses, websites are a prime venue for presentation of self by the
county mayor. By examining what content mayors put forth on these public forums for
their political superiors as well as the ordinary people in their jurisdiction, I am able to
obtain a measure of the goals and incentives of these local elites.
3.4 Limitations
The goals and incentives revealed through these public websites are unlikely to represent
the full spectrum of goals and incentives that motivate county mayors. Indeed, there are
certain goals such as the pursuit of rents through illegal means that cadres would have
strong incentives to keep private. In addition, there are other goals, such as building deep
relationships with factional sponsors or superiors, that public communications are not
particularly conducive for. Thus, the measure provided by these data is not intended to
encompass the whole range of goals and incentives that motivate local elites.
4 Results
4.1 County Websites and County Characteristics
From the 2,796 counties websites that were identified, a random sample of 100 counties
was selected for additional analysis. This set of 100 counties are located in 29 of
China’s 31 provinces. 4 Sixty-one of these counties are county-level cities (xianji shi) or
4 The two provinces not represented in the 100 counties are Hainan and Qinghai.
10

county-level counties (xian), and 39 are county-level districts (qu). Thirty-four counties
are located in West China, 34 in Central China, and 35 in East China (see Appendix A for
names of selected counties). 5
Web pages for the 100 counties were identified by starting at the home page URL
and following all internal links. 6 This yielded a total of 1,927,412 links for the 100 sites,
with 1,469,715 internal web pages. The number of links per website ranged from 116
to 333,321, and the number of internal html web pages ranged from 18 to 129,646 for
each website (see Table 2). Only links with html, xml, or plain text were included in the
Figure 2: Summary of Links Retrieved per Root URL
Distribution of Links Retrieved from Root URLs
HTML links (median = 5,015)
Density
Internal links (median = 6,989)
All links (median = 8,652)
0 100000 200000 300000
Number of links
analysis. 7 For sites with more than 1,000 text links, 1,000 links were randomly selected
for web scraping. For websites with 1,000 or fewer text links, all internal text links were
scraped. Data from a total of 80,161 web pages were collected. For all textual analysis
conducted in this paper, only counties with more than 100 web pages containing Chinese
content are included, resulting in 71 counties.
For these 71 counties, I collect data on county characteristics as well as the data on
the province to which the county belongs. County characteristics include whether the
5 Regional designations based on official Chinese government definition.
6 Internal web pages are web pages with the same root URL as the home page of website. Links were
obtained used Python and Scrapy
7 Links to pdf’s, Microsoft Office documents such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, images, flash,
javascript, and audio were excluded because of the difficulty of parsing these variable formats in an automated
fashion.
11

county is urban or rural, 8 2009 county GDP, 2009 county population, as well as the name,
year of birth, ethnicity, gender, term start date, and term end date of the county mayor.
Provincial characteristics include the region, macro region, and 2010 provincial GDP per
capita. County statistical data were obtained from the Chinese County 2009 Yearbook, as
well as the China Statistical Information Web (http://www.tjcn.org). Information
on county mayors were obtained from the Baidu Encyclopedia (http://www.baike.
baidu.com), and augmented with Baidu searches.
The term of office for the county mayor is typically around five years. In an analysis
of nearly 9,000 county majors from 1998 to 2002, Guo (2009) finds that nearly 25% of
mayors were promoted to county party secretary in year four or five of their tenure, 20-
30% retired or moved to another position such as a mayor of a different county, and the
remaining stayed on as county mayor. County web pages were collected in July 2011,
and I define mayors as being in the beginning of their tenure if they took office between
January and June of 2011. I define mayors as being in the end of their tenure if they left
office between August and December of 2011. 9 All other mayors are defined as being in
the middle of their tenure.
Among the counties in my analysis, 21 had mayors who were new to office, 12 had
mayors who left office, and in the remaining 38 counties, county mayors were in the
middle of their tenure. As can be seen from Table 2, counties where mayors were at
Table 2: Comparison of Counties by Tenure
Beginning of term Middle of term End of term
East 57% 24% 42%
Central 19% 29% 33%
West 24% 47% 25%
Urban 57% 26% 33%
Average county population 459,932 633,484 497,900
Average county GDP per capita $4,704 $3,085 $4,392
Average number of internal links 14,987 24,882 17,458
the beginning of their term are more likely to be urban counties from eastern China with
8 Counties are considered urban if they are county-level districts and rural if they are county-level counties
or county-level cities.
9 There were no changes in office in July among the 71 counties in my sample.
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higher per capita GDP. In contrast, counties where mayors were in the middle of their
tenure tend to be more populous counties from central and western China. Region, urbanization,
county population, and county GDP are all potential confounders that need to be
taken into account when analyzing counties by tenure.
4.2 Types of Political Communication
Possible goals of China’s local autocrats include maintaining social stability, which could
be through repression or co-optation, improving economic performance, and cultivating
factional ties. Therefore, content of county websites reflecting these goals and incentives
could include: 1) threats against citizen misbehavior (repression), 2) demonstrations of
care for citizens through distribution (co-optation), 3) claims of economic competence to
demonstrate economic performance, and 4) displays of loyalty to reinforce factional ties.
Through close reading of over 300 randomly selected web pages from the 80,161 collected,
I find evidence for two of the above four categories of content. I did not find
any web pages which contained threats or warnings for citizen misbehavior. Web pages
with the sternest wording and content were the text of rules and regulations, but these
are simply the text of government-issued notices and ordinances, and hence bears closer
resemblance to objective information than attempts at terror and repression. This finding
resonates with research in Chinese politics that identifies increasing emphasis on persuasion
instead of repression (Brady, 2008).
I also find very little evidence of displays of loyalty. Per the work of Shih (2008) on
public displays of adulation toward factions, I looked for mentions of campaigns including
Jiang Zemin’s “Three Represents” as well as Hu Jintao’s “Scientific Development,” and
found very few (less than 1 in 100) mentions of campaigns among county web pages. It
may be the case that county level officials do display loyalty on county websites but not
in the form of national level ideological campaigns. 10
What emerged clearly from this analysis were web pages demonstrating care toward
citizens by emphasizing distribution of resources as well as web pages containing claims
10 Future research may examine whether names of provincial or prefecture officials, as well as provincial
or prefectural initiatives could represent displays of loyalty.
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of economic competence. Other web pages contained objective information, feedback
from citizens, as well as empty pages with header and footer links. I provide examples of
web pages from each of these categories in turn.
Web pages fall into the Demonstrations of Care category if they show cadre attentiveness
toward and care for citizens in areas such as health, poverty alleviation, social
welfare, education, public security, and culture either through actions of local elites or
through policy concessions. The following snippets are examples:
“With the concern and support of the county Party and government, the township
citizen service center was recently constructed and opened. This center will
have service windows for forestry, family planning, civil affairs, and social security...this
service center will be a one-stop shop for our farmer friends.”
“On the afternoon of the 15th, county mayor Cao Xinping visited Lianhua neighborhood
to check on the renovation...Mayor Cao spoke on the side of the road to
people who were cooling in the shade, inquiring whether they had any suggestions
for renovation work, and where they were not yet satisfied. The people all
commended the work...giving thanks from the bottom of their hearts.”
Web pages are categorized as Claims of Economic Competence if they laud the good
behavior, actions, and achievements of the county or county officials on economic issues
such as economic growth, investment, construction, government finance, innovation, and
agriculture. Below are two examples:
“Especially in recent years, the people of the county have unified under the leadership
of the county government, which has unswervingly persisted in putting
priority on economic construction...county GDP has increased 47-fold since
1978, fiscal income 30-fold, per capita farmer income 31-fold, and resident savings
deposits 8720-fold. In provincial lists, the county has moved from 127th
place to 81st place in economic strength rankings in the past 2 years.”
“Since 2008, industry in our district has not only withstood the huge impact of
the global financial crisis, but also maintained fast paced overall growth. Total
GDP reached 19 billion in 2010, an increase of 96.9% over the 11th Five Year
Plan period...our district has vigorously implemented a strong industrial base
development strategy, has optimized industrial structure, and has transformed
the mode of economic growth.”
Other web pages contain Objective Information, Citizen Feedback, and Links. Pages
of Objective Information contain the text of laws, regulations, and rules; they contain information
about the government and its officials such as addresses, phone numbers, and
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iographies, and they also contain information that make government processes transparent.
The following quotes provide a flavor for this category:
“Since the county government has studied and decided to form a committee to
lead reconstruction to provide relief following disasters related to animal husbandry,
the committee members are as follows: committee lead: Chen Ligui
(vice county mayor), vice committee lead: He Ping (vice chair of the county
political consultative conference)...”
“Village government building renovation tenders: the winner is Wenzhou Central
Sea Contruction Co. Ltd. at 153,003 CNY. Second place candidate is Zhejiang
Quanli Construction Co. Ltd. at 153,518 CNY. There will be a probationary
period of three days. If you have any concerns or issues, please call
0577-XXXXXXXX”
Pages of Citizen Feedback contain materials written by citizens directed toward the county
government. For example:
“My cousin lives in Shuian Yihe. A few days ago his electric scooter was stolen.
Public security sucks!”
“Most honorable county mayor: On the afternoon of March 8, I took my 9 year
old niece to the maternal and child health station for her hepatitis B vaccination.
I was informed that it was 15 yuan, but I heard the government is now covering
the cost of hep B vaccines....then I took her to Wucheng hospital, where they
showed me a 17 yuan invoice for the vaccine...afterwards, I called the disease
prevention center, and they said it is 13 yuan...My question is: is the hepatitis B
vaccine supposed to be free? If not, how much should it cost? You have to give
people a reasonable explanation.”
Finally, some pages only contain the Chinese text of header and footer links with no
substantive content; these are categorized as Links.
4.3 Political Cycle of Goals and Incentives
I use the Hopkins and King (2010) method of content analysis to estimate the proportion
of web pages that fall into the above categories. Coders read a random sample of web
pages for counties where the mayor is at the beginning and end of his tenure, and assigned
web pages to one of the five categories described above. Coders achieve 82% agreement
in placing web pages into the categories, and based on this hand-coded training set, I
estimate the proportion of all web pages in each category for those web pages which
belong to counties with mayors at the beginning and end of their terms.
15

Figure 3: Content of Websites by Mayor Tenure for all Counties
Proportion of Posts in Each Category
0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6
Beginning of term
End of term
Demonstrations
of Care
Objective
Information
Citizen
Feedback
Links
Claims of
Economic
Competence
Figure 3 shows the categorization results for all counties with 95% confidence intervals.
Among county websites where the mayor is just beginning his term, the greatest
proportion of content relates to Demonstrations of Care (mean of 41%), and very little
content relates to Claims of Economic Competence (mean of 17%). In contrast, Claims
of Economic Competence represent the greatest proportion of website content (mean of
47%) when the mayor is at the end of his tenure, while Demonstrations of Care represent
a very small proportion of content (mean of 11%) at the end of tenure.
Among the other categories of content, there is a greater proportion of Objective Information
at the beginning (mean 25%) than end (mean 15%) of tenure. There is slightly
more content related to Citizen Feedback at the beginning (mean 13%) than end (mean
8%) of tenure. There are more pages with no content, Links, at the end of tenure (mean
20%) than beginning of tenure (mean 4%).
4.4 Robustness of Results
I conduct robustness checks of these results by taking into account the structural characteristics
of counties under consideration, as well as the the technology of the website. As
described in Section 4.1, I find that counties where mayors are at the beginning of their
tenure are more likely to be urban counties from eastern China with higher per capita
GDP. To account for region, whether a county is urban or rural, as well as the actual level
of economic in the county, I repeat the Hopkins-King algorithm on a set of counties that
16

Figure 4: Content of Websites by Mayor Tenure for Matched Counties
Proportion of Posts in Each Category
0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6
Beginning of term
End of term
Demonstrations
of Care
Objective
Information
Citizen
Feedback
Links
Claims of
Economic
Competence
are matched on these structural and geographic characteristics.
Figure 4 contains the results for the matched counties and shows that the pattern of
mayors at the beginning of their tenure focusing on Demonstrations of Care and mayors
at the end of their tenure focusing on Claims of Economic Competence holds. At the
beginning of tenure, on average 38% of content relates to Demonstrations of Care, while
only 19% of content relates to Claims of Economic Competence. At the end of tenure, this
relationship is reversed with an average of 38% of content relating to Claims of Economic
Competence and an average of 16% of content relating to Demonstrations of Care.
Another consideration relates to the technology of these county websites. Figure 2
shows that some county websites are incredibly large. We may believe that extremely
large web pages are no longer generated by hand, and thus not subject to the will of the
mayor. However, my analysis focuses exclusively on html pages, and there are very few
“mega-sites” in the analysis. Specifically, only two websites have more than 100,000
internal web pages, and only four sites have more than 50,000 web pages. When these
large sites are excluded from the analysis, the substantive finding remains unchanged.
4.5 Discussion
The changes in website content at different points in a mayor’s tenure reveal that the goals
and incentives of mayors change across time. When the mayor is just beginning his term,
he is focused on showcasing distribution of services and benefits to citizens as well as
17

expressions of good will and attentiveness toward citizens. It appears that cadres may
be trying to signal to citizens that they are of a benevolent type, highlighting distributive
actions to co-opt the masses and prevent social instability. This finding echos the conclusions
of scholars who find that communist leaders—from Khrushchev to Ubricht—are
more oriented toward the masses right after succession (Bunce, 1980; Esherick and Perry,
1983). The emphasis on public welfare at the beginning of leaders’ reign may be motivated
by a desire to build a basis of support and placate the deluge of demands and
dissatisfaction that built up over the predecessor’s tenure.
When the mayor is at the end of his tenure, his focus shifts to demonstrating achievements
and praiseworthy results related to economic and fiscal issues. This focus on economic
credit claiming resonates with the extensive literature in Chinese policies of the
importance of economic growth and fiscal revenues for career advancement.
While the set of goals and intentions observed in these data are unlikely to encompass
all of the goals that drive local cadres, they do represent a predictable and consistent set
of motivations. However, they are by no means the only set of motivations that could
have been observed. For example, it could have been the case that web pages only contain
claims of economic competence and no demonstrations of care. It could also have been
the case that the proportion of web pages belonging to each categories did not change
with mayor tenure. In other words, these data show a clear change in goals and incentives
at different points in a mayor’s tenure, but the observed pattern is by no means the only
pattern that could have been detected.
5 Conclusion
By using county government website content as a measure of the goals and incentives of
local cadres, I find that local elites are motivated to use co-optation instead of repression,
and to showcase economic achievements presumably to superiors who are evaluating the
cadres for promotion though perhaps also to citizens. These data show that a variety of
goals motivate China’s local autocratic elites, but that these goals change in accordance
with the political cycle of the cadre’s term in office.
18

This dataset and these findings suggest several avenues for future research. Future
analysis could examine how presentation of self relates to county policies—is talk a substitute
for action or does it correspond to action? These data can also be used to examine
the effect of political communications on citizens—for example, among counties that engage
extensively in demonstrations of care for the masses, are there fewer petitions and
protests? Future work may further disaggregate these categories of political communication
to answer questions such as whether counties differ in demonstrations of care in
human-capital building areas such as education versus welfare areas such as social security.
Finally, future research could look at the effect of these strategic communications on
actual promotion outcomes—if county websites contain more claims of economic competence,
are mayors more likely to be promoted?
These results have implication for research in Chinese politics on the provision of
public goods, on accountability and responsiveness, as well as on the study of career
advancement. That county cadres highlight distribution of public goods and welfare at
the beginning of their tenure reinforces findings that suggest distributive politics in China
are aimed at co-optation of the masses and ensuring social stability (Frazier, 2010; Hurst,
2009), rather than a response to leftist ideology or claims of social justice. For research on
accountability and responsiveness, this finding suggests that cadres’ level of receptivity to
mass demands may be higher at certain times than others. Finally, related to research on
career advancement, the finding that county mayors use a widely available, public forum
to demonstrate their economic success at a time when they are likely being evaluated for
promotion augment prevailing theories of political advancement in China, which focus
on economic achievement and factional ties. This strategic communication suggests that
advancement for county-level officials is not as straight-forward as a simple evaluation of
economic metrics such as GDP growth, government spending, or land revenues, nor is it
a deterministic result of factional ties and relationships.
For the study of comparative politics, this work sheds light on the durability of institutionalized
autocracies. It shows that just like in democracies where election cycles
shape the incentives of politicians, cycles of political advancement in institutionalized
19

autocracies mold the incentives of cadres. Cadres, like elected politicians, face different
incentives over the course of their political tenure. Furthermore, it suggests how an
institutionalized autocracy such as China can appease simultaneous threats from elites
and masses (Magaloni and Kricheli, 2010). Party control of access to power positions
is said to facilitate cadre support for the regime through guarantees of promotion into
rent-paying positions (Magaloni, 2008). However, promotion is far from unconditionally
guaranteed in China, especially for low level elites who have the most direct interaction
with masses. 11 This paper, echoing decades old results from former single-party Communist
regimes, shows that elites are actively trying to appease the masses when they first
come into power. Thus, institutions of promotion conditional on elites’ ability to placate
the masses can simultaneously address elite and mass threats.
Finally, the findings of this paper have practical implications for the benefits and limitations
of e-government in China. E-government often carries with it a seed of hope for
democracy or democratization because of its power to redistribute information. However,
e-government cannot be divorced from the political system in which it resides, whose
incentives shape its contents. While county government websites do at times provide a
great deal of information and also allow citizens to provide feedback on government services,
communications and transparency is contingent upon the political goals that county
officials are pursuing.
11 Kung and Chen (2013) find that fewer than 10% of county party secretaries are promoted each year.
20

Measuring the Goals and Incentives of Local Chinese
Officials
Supporting Information Appendix
A
Names of 100 Randomly Sampled Counties
East China: Pinggu (Beijing), Hedong (Tianjin), Mengcun (Hebei), Bazhou (Hebei),
Huailai (Hebei), Zhen’an (Liaoning), Taizihe (Liaoning), Gongchangling (Liaoning), Huimin
(Shandong), Mudan (Shandong), Tancheng (Shandong), Laixi (Shandong), Qingzhou
(Shandong), Penglai (Shandong), Nanchang (Jiangsu), Pei (Jiangsu), Yunlong (Jiangsu),Tongshan
(Jiangsu), Runzhou (Jiangsu), Jianggan (Zhejiang), Xiaoshan (Zhejiang), Jiashan (Zhejiang),
Huangyan (Zhejiang), Dongtou (Zhejiang), Huangpu (Shanghai), Putuo (Shanghai),
Taijiang (Fujian), Yongding (Fujian), Jianyang (Fujian), Sanyuan (Fujian), Xiangqiao
(Guangdong), Huicheng (Guangdong), Puning (Guangdong), Xuwen (Guangdong),
Central China: Bin (Heilongjiang),Wuchang (Heilongjiang), Jiaoqu (Heilongjiang),
Didao (Heilongjiang), Kedong (Heilongjiang), Youhao (Heilongjiang), Jiayin (Heilongjiang),
Badaojiang (Jilin) Chengqu (Shanxi), Xiaodian (Shanxi), Hequ (Shanxi), Laocheng (Henan),
Xichuan (Henan), Qingfeng (Henan), Shan (Henan), Luoshan (Henan), Erqi (Henan),
Yingjiang (Anhui), Wuwei (Anhui), Yingshang (Anhui), Taihe (Anhui), Si (Anhui), Jianshi
(Hubei), Hannan (Hubei), Xian’an (Hubei), Yunmeng (Hubei), Yuanling (Hunan),
Tianyuan (Hunan), Gan (Jiangxi), Dayu (Jiangxi), Wanli (Jiangxi),
West China: Arxan (Inner Mongolia), Dalad (Inner Mongolia), Haibowan (Inner Mongolia),
Uqturpan (Xinjiang), Aral (Xinjiang), Manas (Xinjiang), Jeminay (Xinjiang), Shawan
(Xinjiang), Taxkorgan (Xinjiang), Akqi (Xinjiang), Lintan (Gansu), Yongchang (Gansu),
Yuzhong (Gansu), Wudu (Gansu), Xixia (Ningxia), Mei (Shaanxi), Weicheng (Shaanxi),
Qushui (Tibet) Qianjiang (Chongqing), Zhongjiang (Sichuan), Dege (Sichuan), Mabian
(Sichuan), Naxi (Sichuan), Gulin (Sichuan), Longchang (Sichuan), Pingle (Guangxi),
Dahua (Guangxi), Zhijin (Guizhou), Weining (Guizhou), Rongjiang (Guizhou), Honghua-
21

gang (Guizhou), Luchun (Yunnan), Zhanyi (Yunnan), Weixin (Yunnan)
B
Data Collection Procedure
Finding County Website Addresses:
website addresses for all Chinese counties.
#!/usr/bin/python
import csv
from xgoogle.search import GoogleSearch, SearchError
file = csv.reader(open("counties.csv","rU"))
names = []
for data in file:
names.append(data[0])
url = {}
for name in names:
try:
gs = GoogleSearch(name)
gs.results_per_page = 10 #minimum is 10
results = gs.get_results()
listurl = []
for res in results:
listurl.append(res.url.encode("utf8"))
url[name] = listurl
except SearchError, e:
pass
Python code used to find county government
Identifying Website Links:
Python Scrapy used to identify all links for a website
Obtaining Website Content:
#!/usr/bin/python
Python code used to collect website content.
import mechanize
import cookielib
br = mechanize.Browser()
cj = cookielib.LWPCookieJar()
br.set_cookiejar(cj)
br.set_handle_equiv(True)
br.set_handle_redirect(True)
br.set_handle_referer(True)
br.set_handle_robots(False)
br.set_handle_refresh(mechanize._http.HTTPRefreshProcessor(), max_time=1)
br.addheaders = [(’User-agent’,
22

import BeautifulSoup
import re
import chardet
’Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1)
Gecko/2008071615 Fedora/3.0.1-1.fc9 Firefox/3.0.1’)]
Newlines = re.compile(r’[\r\n]\s+’)
def getPageText(url):
data = br.open(url).read()
dataD = data.decode(chardet.detect(data)[’encoding’], ’ignore’)
bs = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(dataD,
convertEntities=BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup.HTML_ENTITIES,
fromEncoding=chardet.detect(data)[’encoding’])
for s in bs.findAll(’script’):
s.replaceWith(’’)
txt = bs.find(’body’).getText(’|’)
txtD = txt.encode(’utf-8’)
return Newlines.sub(’|’, txtD)
link = raw_input()
import time
import random
sec = random.uniform(1,5000)
time.sleep(sec)
text = {}
try:
text[link] = getPageText(link)
except:
text[link] = "||||ERROR||||" + str(sys.exc_info()[0])
C
Data Cleaning Methods
The raw content of these web pages was prepared for text analysis by removing non-
Chinese characters, segmenting the Chinese characters to identify words, and removing
stopwords.
All non-Chinese characters and alphanumeric characters were removed from the raw
output of the web scraping to improve the ease of parsing and tokenization. Content
in languages such as Tibetan, Uyghur, a Turkic language used in Xinjiang, and Korean,
which is used in Jilin province near the border with Korea, were removed. 12
Chinese words can be composed of single or multiple characters, but there are no
12 Existing methods of multilingual processing remain limited, especially for languages that differ as
much as Chinese, Korean, Tibetan, and Uyghur.
23

white-spaces to delineate the boundaries between words. As a result, word segmentation
is often the first step in Chinese language processing. Although the Chinese character
corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, only around 10,000 are
commonly in use today. However, estimates of the total number of Chinese words range
from 50,000 to 500,000. The Hanyu Da Zidian, a compendium of Chinese characters, includes
54,678 entries for characters. The CC-CEDICT project contains 97,404 contemporary
entries including idioms, technology terms and names of political figures, businesses
and products. The 2006 SIGHAN Chinese Language Processing Bakeoff training data
contained 509,000 words (Chang, Galley and Manning, 2008). 13 This large range in the
number of Chinese words results from the difficulty of identifying words in Chinese text
because almost all characters can be uni-gram words that form multi-gram words when
joined to other characters, causing ambiguity in segmentation. Even for human readers
who are native speakers, agreement on segmentation is only 75% (Wu and Fung, 1994;
Sproat et al., 1996).
There are two general approaches to Chinese work segmentation: lexicon-based and
probabilistic, 14 though in recent years hybrids of the two approaches have been utilized
(Chang, Galley and Manning, 2008; Chen and Liu, 1992; Cheng, Young and Wong, 1999;
Lafferty, McCallum and Pereira, 2001; Peng, Feng and McCallum, 2004; Teahan et al.,
2000; Tseng et al., 2005). Comparison of lexicon-based and probabilistic segmentation
has found that the two methods yield similar results in terms of precision and invocabulary
word recall (Chang, Galley and Manning, 2008).
For this analysis, simple and complex maximum matching with pre-defined rules to
resolve ambiguities is used for segmentation. Let represent the white-space between
words and let C n , where n = 1, ..., 6 represent characters in a string. The unsegmented
text appears as:
C 1 C 2 C 3 C 4 C 5 C 6
Simple, forward maximum matching starts on the left of the string with C 1
and checks
13 SIGHAN is a Special Interest Group of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Annual Bakeoffs
engage in Chinese word segmentation evaluation.
14 Lexicon-based method can also be referred to as dictionary-based method.
24

this character against the lexicon to see if C 1 is a uni-gram word. Then, it checks to see
if C 1 C 2 is a bi-gram word, and continues to do so until the sequence of characters is
longer than the longest sequence containing that string of characters in the lexicon. The
most plausible word is the longest, or maximum, match. If this match were C 1 C 2 , the
algorithm would repeat the process starting with C 3 (Chen and Liu, 1992; Cheng, Young
and Wong, 1999).
Complex maximum matching finds all possible combinations of three-word sequence
starting with C 1 and takes the most plausible word as the one belonging to the three-word
sequence containing the most characters in total. For example, in the string given above,
let’s say there are three possible three-word chunks:
C 1 C 2 C 3 C 4
C 1 C 2 C 3 C 4 C 5
C 1 C 2 C 3 C 4 C 5 C 6
The three-word sequence with the longest length is third combination, and as a result,
C 1 C 2 will be considered the correct word. The algorithm will then move to C 3 and
restart this process.
Based on the segmentation, a dictionary of 77,855 unique words emerged, and a total
of 1,612 stopwords were identified. Stopwords included parts of speech that do not convey
substantive content, for example particles, prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, and noun
classifiers. This list is based on stopwords used by baidu.com, China’s largest internet
search engine. 15 Noun classifiers show the conceptual classification of the referent of
the noun. For example, in Chinese, the noun classifier for humans is “ge” such that “3
teachers” is “3-ge teachers,” the noun classifer for birds is “zhi” so that “3 birds” is “3-zhi
birds,” and the noun classifier for things that are large and thin such pieces of paper or a
table top is “zhang” such that “3 tables” is “3-zhang tables.” There are hundreds of noun
classifiers in Chinese. Words that appeared in more than 95% (49,641) of documents were
also removed. Perhaps removing these extremes is redundant with removing stopwords,
which are words that appear at high frequency, but I veered on the side of conservatism to
ensure that words appearing frequently on websites, such as “web,” “web page,” “back,”
15 Downloaded from http://wenku.baidu.com/view/982a25c608a1284ac85043fa.html.
25

etc. did not interfere with the automated content analysis (Hopkins and King, 2010). The
final dictionary contained 34,257 entries.
D
LDA Topic Model
A LDA topic model is appropriate for determining whether county websites contain corresponds
to topics required by OGI because online documents likely comprise a mixture of
topics, and all of the information counties make available online are in some way government
communications. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that all county government
web pages share the same set of topic, even though documents exhibit these topics in
different proportions.
Following the notation from Blei, Ng and Jordan (2003), there are K topics, where
each topic is assumed to have been drawn from a Dirichlet, β k ∼ Dirichlet(η) that defines
a distribution over the vocabulary. Given the topics, each document d is drawn from
a distribution over topics, θ d ∼ Dirichlet(α). For each word i in document d, a topic
index z di ∈ 1, ..., K is drawn from topic weights z di ∼ θ d and the observed word w id is
drawn from selected topics w di ∼ β zdi . The latent structure of the corpus is analyzed by
examining the posterior distribution of the topics, topic proportions, and topic assignments
conditioned on the documents:
p(z, θ, β|w, α, η) (1)
This posterior cannot be computed directly, and sampling and optimization are the two
general approaches used to approximate this posterior (Asuncion et al., 2009). Sampling
approaches are usually based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods and seek
to generate independent samples from the posterior. Optimization approaches are typically
based on variational inferences that minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence to
the posterior with a simplified parametric distribution. Variational Bayes (VB) optimization
methods have been shown to be as accurate as MCMC methods and are faster.
For speed of implementation and ability to handle Chinese text, a VB algorithm for
LDA is used to analyze the county government web pages (Hoffman, Blei and Bach,
2010), and 25 topic, 50 topic, 75 topic, and 100 topic models were fitted to the web pages.
26

The 50 topic model yielded more intuitive results and forms the focus of subsequent analysis
(Chang et al., 2009). A topic clearly emerged for 39 of the 50 topics, while a coherent
Figure 5: Words from sample topics
(a) Economic development (b) Health and social security (c) Land rights and housing
(d) Emergency response
(e) Government approval process (f) Public procurement and tenders
topic was not easily discernible for the remaining 11. Figure 5 shows the most prominent
50 words, sized by their frequency, for six example topics.
27

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