Book Project

I am currently turning my thesis into a book manuscript. The thesis passed without correction and was recommended to be published by a top university press. My thesis is entitled Supervising Local Cadres in China: The Quest for Authoritarian Accountability. Below is a brief summary of my research:

Authoritarianism appears to be an unlikely host for accountable governance. In China, however, the decade of the 2010s saw a rise in local activism that encouraged citizen supervision and oversight of local cadres. Under what conditions would authoritarian rulers be interested in having citizens supervising political power? Can meaningful political supervision by citizens find expression under authoritarianism? If yes, why and how? Supervising Local Cadres in China answers these questions through its ground-breaking research about a novel form of accountability politics that has been going on in China for a decade. Based on multi-sited political ethnography, this book develops an authoritarian accountability theory arguing that authoritarian rulers may encourage citizens to help restrain the exercise of power in the lower state echelons when the agency problem is considered a threat to local leaders’ career advancement. This opportunity structure often leads to the dynamic of state-backed supervision: citizen participants (often called citizen monitors) draw on the delegated and entitled authority of the state to claim non-existent supervisory rights and demand accountability from local state agents. Examining the origins, dynamics, limitations, outcomes, and variations of citizen supervision in China, this book identifies a novel pathway to accountability in an illiberal environment. This book sheds new light on existing conceptions of authoritarianism and accountability while offering a renewed understanding of the Chinese political system and its future. It also offers fresh perspectives on local governance, political citizenship, citizen participation, and state-society relations in China and beyond.