The 22nd Asia Pacific Research Prize winner: Dr. Hsi-chia Huang

- Summary -

   What initiatives has the central government of the People’s Republic of China implemented to solve the challenge of vitalizing local areas while continuing to pursue its own policies under the fundamental premise that the Communist Party of China rules and leads the nation? To address this challenge, the Chinese Communist government made frequent system changes from 1949, the year of the state’s founding, to 1966, when the Cultural Revolution commenced. This dissertation focuses on regional administrative institutions each of which exercises jurisdiction over multiple provinces, going across borders between provinces as traditional administrative divisions under the rule of the central government. This kind of institution has survived various system changes throughout the history of communist China. However, previous studies on central-local relations have regarded the survival of these regional administrative institutions as a mere incidental result of a mixture of centralization and decentralization.
   By contrast, this dissertation assigns two tasks to itself: revealing the details of the actual effects of the system of regional administrative institutions and identifying the causes of the long lasting and recurrent emergence of such institutions. To fulfill these tasks, each chapter is dedicated to in-depth consideration of specific regional administrative institutions, that is, greater administrative regions and economic cooperation regions, as well as the realities of the operation of the six Regional Party Bureaus (Northeast, North, Eastern, Middlesouth, Southwest, Northwest) in the 1960s.
   The dissertation concludes that the central government developed a policy of administering the nation through regional administrative institutions to maintain the eclectic national political situation and ensure the operation of an effective administrative system. The conclusion also shows that the structure of power in the Mao Zedong era was not heavily centralized but, in a sense, relied on regional administrative institutions to constantly ensure coordination within the system and seek cooperation from local areas.
   As mentioned above, during the period of the establishment of the modern Chinese state, the country succeeded in systematically unifying local areas and maintaining their vitality at the same time through regional administrative institutions, instead of adopting a rigorous centralized regime. This fact can be thought to have provided a foundation for local party committees to play an important role in the era of Reform and Opening-up. In other words, the findings of this dissertation will not only force a reconsideration of the conventional theoretical framework of central-local confrontation but also provide new suggestions for central-local relations in modern China.