![]() ![]() Leaders with more room for promotion differentiate their language from the boilerplate used by their upwardly immobile counterparts elsewhere.Įxtra effort, more spending and atypical prosperity can all skew the results of a policy experiment. They compare the language employed by local governments in describing the experiment. To measure this extra effort, Messrs Wang and Yang devise an ingenious proxy. This is particularly true of ambitious young cadres who have more scope for promotion, because they are still far from retirement age. Some local officials, for example, simply put more effort into these pilot exercises than others. When local authorities experiment with an area of policy, such as education or agriculture, they tend to spend 5% more money on that area than otherwise similar counties that are not taking part in the experiment.Įxperiments can also be skewed by less measurable factors. According to China’s planning agency, “sites should be fairly representative.” But contrary to this sound advice, 80% of experiments since the 1980s have taken place in localities that are richer than average, according to Messrs Wang and Yang. Its trials are not as clean as they could be, skewing the conclusions its leaders draw. This long and celebrated history notwithstanding, China is surprisingly bad at policy experiments. ![]() In China’s case, he argues, red seems the more appropriate colour. Such unexpected outcomes are sometimes described as “black swans”. The point-to-surface technique is one reason why communist China has survived and advanced even as other socialist regimes have stagnated or collapsed, according to Mr Heilmann. ![]() It is a “huge improvement” on a “counterfactual world” in which all central policies are implemented without any experimentation, Mr Wang argues. Failure, as Mao once put it, is the mother of success: “a fall into the pit” can yield “a gain in your wit”.Ĭhina has indeed gained a lot from using this method. An unsuccessful trial can nonetheless yield useful lessons for future reforms. About 46% of experimental policies are never rolled out nationwide, according to Messrs Wang and Yang. ![]()
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