Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of the evolving political system in post-Mao China. In bureaucratic sectors dealing with social policy issues, the policy dynamics bear little relationship to those regarding major economic decision making. The bureaucratic model fails to address an important aspect of institutional change, namely how the policy process can be affected by broader institutional context. The end of the Cultural Revolution paved the way for the reassertion of specialized actors in policy making, characterized by a rapid growth of the number of departments and personnel within existing line ministries. The impact of a buck-passing polity can be mitigated by three institutional variables: an authoritarian regime, state-society relations, and preexisting policy structure. As far as the state-society relationship is concerned, the fragmented authoritarianism model and its institutional descendent run the risk of lacking variation and encounter difficulties in presenting a complete picture of the policy dynamics.