Measuring the Goals and Incentives of Local Chinese Officials

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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. 12
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Page 5 and 6: from terror to redistribution as th
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Page 15 and 16: of economic competence. Other web p
Page 17 and 18: Figure 3: Content of Websites by Ma
Page 19 and 20: expressions of good will and attent
Page 21 and 22: autocracies mold the incentives of
Page 23 and 24: gang (Guizhou), Luchun (Yunnan), Zh
Page 25 and 26: white-spaces to delineate the bound
Page 27 and 28: etc. did not interfere with the aut
Page 29 and 30: References Anonymous. 2007. “Peop
Page 31 and 32: Li, Hongbin and Li-An Zhou. 2005.
Page 33: Papers. New York: Public Affairs. 3

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