Chinese
cadre responsibility systems are a core element of Chinese law and
governance. These top-down personnel systems set concrete target goals
linked to official salaries and career advancement. Judges and courts
face annual targets for permissible numbers of mediated, reversed, and
closed cases; Communist Party secretaries and government bureaus face
similar targets for allowable numbers of protests, traffic accidents,
and mine disasters. For many local Chinese officials, these targets
have a much more direct impact on their behavior than do formal legal
and regulatory norms.

This Article argues that Chinese
authorities are dependent on responsibility systems, particularly their
use of strict, vicarious, and collective liability principles, as an
institutional tool to address pervasive principal-agent problems they
face in governing a large authoritarian bureaucracy. But excessive
reliance on these methods to control local officials ironically fuels
governance problems that Chinese central leaders seek to address.
Central Chinese authorities do not want township officials colluding to
falsify tax records or engaging in ill-conceived development projects
that waste central funds. Nor do they want rural residents burning down
government buildings or staging mass petitions to Beijing to protest
the actions of local officials. But these are direct results of cadre
evaluation systems that Chinese authorities use to govern their local
agents.

Continued reliance on responsibility systems as a tool
of governance raises significant conflicts with the legal reforms that
Chinese authorities have pursued since 1978. And recent developments
suggest that central Chinese authorities may be backing away from their
efforts to govern China, and their local agents, through law and legal
institutions. At least some leaders appear to favor an alternative
strategy – strengthening the role of responsibility systems as a tool
for monitoring their local agents. This is a fundamental conflict over
the core question of how to govern China. How it is resolved will have
lasting implications for China’s domestic evolution and stability. 

[This article will appear in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law (2009)]