New Approaches to the Study of Political Order in China

Both Xueguang Zhou and Jiang Shigong are interested in the way in which China's political order actually functions, but for different reasons. Zhou takes how things are—in this case, the way central-local relations work—more or less as a given and seeks to provide an explanation. Jiang, on the other hand, writes precisely because he believes that how China's political order actually operates has received far too little attention in constitutional scholarship. Zhou focuses on the narrow issue of collusion between different levels of lower-level government when faced with demands from a higher-level authority. His focus is useful in drawing attention to this ill-understood feature of central-local relations. Yet many of the problems he discusses seem to be less those of collusion as such and more those of ordinary principal-agent conflicts. Jiang calls for less formalism and more realism when analyzing China's constitutional order. While fully acknowledging the merits of Jiang's proposed methodology, the comment finds that Jiang's own approach retains some formalist elements.