Information for Autocrats: Representation in Chinese Local Congress by Melanie Manion (review)

In her new book, Melanie Manion unpacks the role of Chinese local congress in the resilient rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). While the notion of legislature is no stranger to a Western audience, Chinese local congress, particularly that at the county and township levels, is a somewhat odd institution. On paper, China’ s legislative branch is tasked with two major functions, appointing officials and making laws. In reality, congress serves merely as a rubber stamp to the personnel decisions made by the party committee at various levels, and lawmaking is a ceremonial prerogative enjoyed only by congress at the national (and provincial, to a lesser extent) level. This begs the question of what meaningful role the local congress — an institution that is seemingly irrelevant — could perform.

Manion offers a fresh and cogent explanation that representation in local congresses facilitates “upward flows of local knowledge from the grassroots” (p. 4) to the autocrats at the upper levels of government. Her explanation plays out in two steps. First, the local CCP committees purposefully permit a certain number of voter-nominated delegates — who have better knowledge of local priorities — to be elected to the local congresses. Second, these delegates advocate on behalf of the localities, to which local government responds in selective provision of public goods in delegates’ constituencies (the author conceptualizes this exchange as “political pork” in the book). In this way, local congresses feed local governments with information about local problems, allowing the latter to take measures that preempt escalation of these problems that might cause social unrest.

Manion goes to great depths through the chapters on how this particular function of local congress comes into play and becomes self-sustaining in the Chinese context. She argues that the electoral reform in the late 1970s that mandated secret ballots and contestation at local congress elections, along with the personnel management system that places its top priority on social stability, propels the local governments — which hold veto power in candidate selection — to tolerate voter-nominated candidates in local congress. Rejecting voter-nominated candidates would not only shut down a valuable information channel to detect potential local problems, but also possibly risk election accidents such as the election of write-in candidates or voter protest, which would signal local government failure to the autocrats in Beijing.

Using a survey of 5,130 local congressional delegates across three Chinese provinces (Anhui, Hunan, and Zhejiang), Manion further shows that voter-nominated delegates (the “good types”) are quantitatively different from party-picked delegates (the “governing types”) in multiple dimensions. Voter-nominated delegates on average have lived longer in their voting districts, are more likely to put the interest of their voting district before the interest of their town or county, have a higher sense of constituency monitoring (only for those at the county level), and believe that they have made greater impact in addressing problems in their voting district, compared with the party-nominated delegates. These qualities suggest that the voter-nominated delegates are more reliable representatives of their community than the party-backed delegates. Her subsequent analysis of constituent contacting also reveals that delegates who are associated with these qualities tend to receive more communications from their constituents. In explaining what commits voter-nominated delegates to advocate for their constituents, she finds that a higher percentage of voter-nominated delegates than party-nominated delegates believe that they embrace the “mandate view of congressional representation” (p. 86) — that delegates should always side with the majority of their constituents (instead of CCP organizations or others).

The book makes important contributions to both the Chinese and comparative politics literatures. Moving beyond the conventional wisdom that Chinese local congress is politically irrelevant, which is also substantiated by some of the findings in the book, the author importantly identifies the information utility of local representation, and relates it to the politics of authoritarian resilience in China. The core argument of the book echoes an influential yet...