Join us on March 9 for a lunchtime talk with Professor Ben Hillman, Director of Australian National University’s Australian Centre on China in the World and Editor of The China Journal.
During the past decade China’s leaders have asserted more centralized control over the PRC’s vast bureaucracy through stricter discipline and accountability mechanisms, expanded administrative regulations, stringent reporting requirements, and elaborate performance evaluations. Local government leaders, particularly at the county and township levels often respond to the increased pressures with a variety of countermeasures, collectively known in the Chinese-language policy literature as ‘formalism’ (形式主义). The term ‘formalism’ refers to shirking, feigned compliance and falsification, and a long list of bureaucratic behaviours that emphasize form over substance (重形式轻实质), and process over outcome (重过程轻结果). Party leaders see formalism as a serious threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s policy agenda and combating it has become a top priority. This article draws on extensive recent field research across six provinces to examine the prevalence and drivers of formalism. Findings have critical implications for our understanding of centre-local relations and policy implementation in China as well as the challenges of civil service reform in authoritarian systems.
Registration required. Lunch will be served.
Ben Hillman is Director of Australian National University’s Australian Centre on China in the World and Editor of The China Journal, and non-resident Honorary Fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. He is the author or editor of eight books on China, including Patronage and Power (Stanford University Press, 2014), Conflict and Protest in Tibet and Xinjiang (with Gray Tuttle, Columbia University Press, 2016), Political and Social Control in China (with Chien-wen Kou, ANU Press 2024), and The Communist Party of China: Understanding the Durability of the World’s Most Powerful Political Organization (with Fengyuan Ji, Cambridge University Press, 2026).