Measuring the Goals and Incentives of Local Chinese Officials

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.
13