In 2010, China was riveted by something called the “cake debate.” To simplify, the charismatic populist party secretary of the directly administered city of Chongqing, Bo Xilai, called for redistributionist economic policies (dividing the cake) after three decades of “letting some get rich first,” while the liberal party secretary of Guangdong Province, Wang Yang, called for speeding up market reforms and raising the overall standard of living, even if the country’s staggering inequality went unaddressed for a while longer (growing the cake).

As the current general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, consolidates his power, public debates between regional leaders along these lines have become a thing of the past. “Colorful” politicians like Bo and Wang seem to belong to a different era; in fact, Bo is now languishing in prison following a corruption conviction, and Wang recently retired early from the Politburo Standing Committee. Meanwhile, editorials in People’s Daily relentlessly exhort unity.

Nonetheless, policies in China continue to be implemented in different ways in different places and at different times. This is not, of course, surprising in the world’s second-largest country by population and third largest by geographic area. Understanding the drivers of Chinese policy variation has the potential to offer fresh insights into how authoritarian systems evolve. It can also provide fresh ideas about the legacies and incentives that shape institutions more generally.

This topic has already produced a rich body of scholarship. For instance, Kenneth Lieberthal (“The ‘Fragmented Authoritarianism’ Model and Its Limitations,” in Kenneth G. Lieberthal and David M. Lampton, eds., Bureaucracy, Politics, and Decision Making in Post-Mao China, 1987) has developed and Andrew Mertha (“‘Fragmented Authoritarianism 2.0’: Political Pluralization in the Chinese Policy Process,” China Quarterly 200, 2009) has extended a compelling model of “fragmented authoritarianism” to describe how the Chinese system functions. Pierre Landry (Decentralized Authoritarianism in China: The Communist Party’s Control of Local Elites in the Post-Mao Era, 2008) has shown how the country’s fiscal decentralization is checked by the centralizing effect of the Communist Party’s promotion process for officials. Productive competition between these officials is central to Susan Shirk’s analysis of China’s early reform era (The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China, 1993) and to the “federalism, Chinese style” framework of Gabriella Montinola, Yingyi Qian, and Barry Weingast (“Federalism, Chinese Style: The Political Basis for Economic Success in China,” World Politics 48 [1], 1995). Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth Perry (“Embracing Uncertainty: Guerrilla Policy Style and Adaptive Governance in China,” in Heilmann and Perry, eds., Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China, 2011) have highlighted the party’s tradition of “guerilla policy making.”

Two excellent new books by Kerry E. Ratigan and Shiran Victoria Shen build on this work. In Local Politics and Social Policy in China: Let Some Get Healthy First, Ratigan attributes variation in Chinese social policy, especially health care provision, to contrasting “policy styles”; she argues that these styles stem from when exactly provinces began marketization and, relatedly, their level of dependence on the central government. Leaders in what Ratigan dubs “pragmatist” provinces seek to move up the value-added ladder by developing human capital, which consequently leads to the prioritization of education and health spending. Officials in such places also tend to encourage experimentation, delegate decisions to lower levels of government, and include NGOs in programming. In contrast, late-reforming “paternalist” provinces are most concerned with maintaining social stability and are reliant on fiscal transfers from Beijing, which ties their hands spending-wise. Here, targeted poverty alleviation is the priority, and consistency in service delivery is emphasized over innovation. Finally, “mixed” provinces provide broad but thin benefits while focusing on housing and social security. Although these in-between places also “tend to take a top-down approach to policymaking … they may not micromanage like a paternalist province” (p. 144).

If Ratigan’s analysis is “lumpy,” focusing on distinct groups of provinces, each with its own pattern of governance, Shen, in her new book, The Political Regulation Wave: A Case of How Local Incentives Systematically Shape Air Quality in China, uses a uniform model of bureaucratic incentives to explain temporal “waves” with respect to environmental policy implementation. She posits that, in the absence of hard green targets, local leaders in China are “incentivized to gradually order laxer regulation of pollution to promote employment, social stability, and (reported) economic growth” (p. 3). Shen calls this phenomenon a “political pollution wave.” If there are instead binding targets for reducing particular pollutants and the measures needed to meet those targets are clear enough, then a “political environmental protection wave” ensues. The book illustrates these dynamics with China’s efforts to reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO₂) and fine particulate matter (PM_2.5). Because SO₂ is generated mainly by industrial activity and the process for cleaning it up is fairly straightforward (installing scrubbers), Beijing’s promulgation of hard goals in this area has led to consistent improvements in air quality. In contrast, new targets for PM_2.5 reduction have had little practical effect—resulting in reported reductions but not real reductions—because PM_2.5 stems from a variety of sources and has no single solution.

Both books deploy data effectively. Ratigan dives deep into China’s statistical yearbooks. In a particularly strong section, she uses partition cluster analysis to group provinces based on provincial indices of political openness and economic development strategy, which rely on yearbook-derived figures on, for instance, patent filings and registered civil society groups. The resulting clusters are eminently believable. Shen pairs the same sorts of official sources with satellite-derived readings of pollutants and nighttime light. The resulting convergence and divergence of yearbook data with these more high-tech indicators enable Shen to clearly show when local leaders are actually better protecting the environment or growing the economy and when they are just faking it.

In addition to statistics, the volumes rely heavily on fieldwork. Interviews with hospital personnel provide Ratigan with useful details on health care profits and billing, whereas her conversations with villagers reveal, among other things, that people are sometimes completely unaware of the health subsidies available to them (p. 101). Shen’s interviewees meanwhile explain to her that, when officials’ performances are reviewed, the ends of their tenures count for more, because results from the beginnings are affected by these officials’ predecessors and change over time shows “more control” (p. 41). Therefore, the key measures are the difference between an individual’s first and last years in office and the difference between the last two years (p. 42). Fieldwork-derived insights like these do not just serve illustrative functions but also fill in crucial details. And they are sometimes essential to formulating the very models that Ratigan and Shen test.

One difficulty with subnational analysis in China—or anywhere else—is anchoring individual case studies in average trends. Of the two authors, Ratigan uses cases in the more conscious manner. Her example of a “mixed” case, Hubei Province, is especially well chosen. It illustrates nicely the dilemma of places that have neither benefited from the easy access to foreign markets enjoyed by wealthy coastal areas nor from the largesse from the national government enjoyed by struggling inland areas. But Ratigan’s main example of paternalism, Yunnan, feels like an awkward fit. Although she emphasizes how the province has clamped down on civil society in recent years, the fact that Yunnan experienced something of an NGO boom for a time speaks to how any given place’s openness can be hard to categorize. Shen compares average pollution levels in prefectures in regions of the country that were made priority areas for SO₂ and PM_2.5 reduction versus prefectures in other regions (with various controls). But drilling down to particular provinces and cities within these regions would likely introduce some of the same complexities with which Ratigan must grapple.

Given the tightening political climate in China and heightened Sino-American tensions, fieldwork of the sort carried out by Ratigan and Shen will probably become more difficult for non-China-based academics for a while. If researchers lose the nuances that can only be acquired through direct interactions with policy makers, one alternative will be going wide rather than deep; that is, placing China in a broader context. Here, too, Ratigan and Shen are exemplars. Ratigan situates her book in a body of literature that has extended the study of the welfare state to newly industrializing countries. She argues, however, that the absence of powerful civil society groups pushing for service expansion in China also sets it apart from the developing world. Shen, meanwhile, devotes much of her final chapter to a shadow case study of Mexico, where she finds similar “political pollution waves” around gubernatorial election years and concludes that “democracies and autocracies may not be that different in providing that specific public good” (p. 105). Both books helpfully specify when China’s authoritarianism does and does not matter.

An important benefit of examining subnational variation in a place like China is that, by holding a country’s system constant, we shift our focus to routine politics, thereby normalizing the country. Future research, however, should bring the less “normal” periphery of the area under Chinese Communist Party rule more into the discussion of local politics. Ratigan deserves credit for making the security anxieties of officials appointed to restive regions like Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia an explicit part of her analysis: paternalist governments, she says, do not just behave the way they do because of the transfers they receive but also because of their fears of “ethnic unrest” (or what many people in these regions might frame instead as struggles of national self-determination). Given the extreme police state now being maintained in Xinjiang, in particular, we can no longer afford to restrict our attention only to “typical” areas of China. The same goes for other countries with similar dynamics, such as India and its policies in Kashmir.

More broadly, there is a tendency for studies of bureaucratic politics to hive the bureaucracy off from contentious politics. The two books reviewed here do not fully fit this pattern. As noted, Ratigan sees concerns about ethnic unrest as factoring into the calculations of paternalist provinces. She also notes how anger over uneven health care provision can cause unrest in poor places. According to Shen, local leaders “loosen their regulatory grip on highly polluting factories… to not only keep the economy growing but also maintain workers’ jobs in order to prevent workers’ protests that threaten social stability” (p. 47). Indeed, to preserve the peace, environmental protection bureaus may ease up particularly on “large factories that hire predominantly male workers” (p. 47). Insights such as these ought to inspire more robust theories connecting street politics to the politics of dusty ministries and party headquarters.

Scholars of China and other nondemocracies have been preoccupied for more than two decades with the question of authoritarian resilience. Refreshingly, neither Ratigan nor Shen are interested in turning every seeming challenge for autocrats into a secret source of strength. Instead, even as they lay out the logic of variation in local policy implementation across space and time, they highlight instances of profound dysfunction. Other scholars should extend the findings of these books by returning to a messier understanding of politics in settings like China, even in the face of rulers’ attempts to project consensus and control. Although they are not always the subject of open debate, within-country differences in governance can have profound implications for the health of citizens and the health of the planet.