About
86
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Introduction
I work on digital governance, government innovation and performance management. I use both quantitative and qualitative methods.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
August 2019 - present
Position
- Professor
Description
- I'm a Professor at the School of Public Administration and Policy, and a Research Fellow at the National Academy of Development and Strategy, Renmin University of China.
August 2019 - present
August 2015 - August 2019
Education
September 2008 - June 2012
September 2006 - June 2008
September 2002 - June 2006
Publications
Publications (86)
Policies are often mandated to be implemented by multiple agencies, and it is meaningful to explore the mechanisms and dynamics of interagency coordination. By employing structurally oriented theory from organization theory to analyze archival data, this study examines the structure and dynamics of mandated interagency coordination arrangements in...
Policy diffusion based on learning mechanisms has fascinated political science and public administration scholars for a long time. A robust and growing body of studies have identified the existence and importance of learning mechanisms in policy diffusion. However, there are still some gaps that need to be further improved. First, scholars identify...
This study synthesizes insights from collaborative network and agency termination theories to investigate how agencies' positions in designed networks impact their survival probability. Using longitudinal data for the central apparatus in China from 2005 to 2020, along with the designed networks derived from 1243 joint tasks arranged by the State C...
Why do citizens prefer to utilize personal connections (e.g. guanxi) with government officials to access public services? Conventional wisdom suggests that improvements in formal institutions can reduce the popularity of informal behaviors; however, limited research has explored the relevant roles of e-government and anti-corruption endeavors. Thus...
Numerous studies have delved into the intricate dynamics of representative bureaucracy in public service provision, yet a significant gap exists in our understanding of the distinctions between top leaders and members of the top management team (TMT). Using the panel data of 317 subdistricts in Beijing, this research revealed that top female leader...
In China, government at all levels relies on the specially selected graduates (SSG) scheme to recruit elite university students as future political leaders. This article examines the mechanism of the SSG scheme and the relationship between elite university education and political selection in China. We show that elite education is increasingly stra...
Unlabelled:
Data sharing is an important part of open science (OS), and more and more institutions and journals have been enforcing open data (OD) policies. OD is advocated to help increase academic influences and promote scientific discovery and development, but such a proposition has not been elaborated on well. This study explores the nuanced e...
Government Technological Capacity and Public-Private Partnerships regarding Digital Service Delivery: Evidence from Chinese Cities
Governments have increased their collaboration with the private sector regarding public service delivery, and their propensities to do so are largely shaped by their own in-house capacities. In this article, we theorize...
Self-organizing networks and designed networks are important subjects of network research, but the extant literature explores them in isolation, with limited attention paid to their relationship. And many studies on self-organizing and designed networks are based on Western contexts. This article expands the network literature through analyzing the...
Thanks to the development of digital technologies and their applications in public service delivery, ratings by citizens of service quality have been transforming from paper/phone surveys to digital interfaces, similar to what has happened in e-commerce. How does digitalization drive the change in ratings by citizens? Are citizens more satisfied wh...
We use the case of the long-term care insurance (LTCI) in China to examine the mechanisms of transnational policy learning in a complicated multi-level regime. The 15 pilot cities learned from either German or Japan model, and they also learned from each other. We reveal the first-, second-, and third-order learning processes, which suggest a hybri...
Studies on public organization reform have convincingly demonstrated the relevance of media salience for administrative reorganization. However, an understanding of how different media reputation dimensions influence government decisions to terminate administrative agencies is required. This study combined insights from bureaucratic reputation and...
We explore the nuanced role of policy attention in the adoption of public sector innovation by differentiating it between the issue and dimension levels. Using the case of Chinese online service platforms (OSPs), we find that provinces are more likely to adopt OSPs if they pay more attention to e-government issues or define e-government more as eco...
COVID-19 has given rise to a surge in the number of policy instruments used to deal with the pandemic at different levels of governments globally. While much attention has been placed on travel bans, lockdown, social distancing, and economic stimulus packages, government disclosure of epidemic information as a policy instrument has received less at...
In this chapter, we introduce an innovative pedagogy to teach comparative public policy courses. The course instructor can match her class with other classes in different policy contexts, here, in this case, Taiwan and mainland China. The students can voluntarily form groups to video chat with their peers in the other country or region, and they ar...
In an era of digitalization, governments often turn to digital solutions for pressing policy issues, and the use of digital contact tracing and quarantine enforcement for COVID-19 is no exception. The long-term impacts of the digital solutions, however, cannot be taken for granted. The development and use of data tools for pandemic control, for exa...
Governance capacity and legitimacy as two important dimensions in crisis management are crucial for preparing for, making sense of, handling, and learning from crises like epidemics/pandemics. We compare governance capacity and legitimacy of the government in China in response to the SARS and COVID-19 pandemics. Our comparison of the handling proce...
In the process of urban expansion and development, “asset-heavy and invisible” infrastructure construction is playing an increasingly important role, which also makes people realize the importance of the diffusion of policies that need collective institutional action among Chinese cities. We examine what drives the diffusion of the new underground...
Governments are required to be fair in regulating market players, but their behaviors are often distorted by political connections with firms. In this study, we use the natural experiment of overcapacity reduction in China's industrial firms to examine to what extent their ownership matters in regulatory stringency. State-owned enterprises (SOEs) w...
Citizen participation is advocated as an effective instrument to retain and promote government legitimacy, but to what extent and through what mechanisms participation affects government trust have not been fully elaborated. In this study, we examine the mediating role played by perceived government performance in the link between citizen participa...
Governments have increased their collaboration with the private sector regarding public service delivery, and their propensities to do so are largely shaped by their own in-house capacities. In this article, we theorize and analyze whether governments with an extremely low or extremely high technological capacity are more likely to collaborate with...
Top-down and bottom-up approaches have been widely used in the development of smart city initiatives, but each entails serious shortfalls. An unprecedented pandemic such as COVID-19 paves the way for the development of innovative approaches and measures in accelerating smart city initiatives. We present a new mode of governance for smart city initi...
Subjective career success of civil servants is a major focus of both scholars and public managers, but few studies have explored its antecedents from the perspective of the expression of a special positive emotion. To narrow the gap regarding the antecedents of civil servants’ subjective career success, we use the broaden-and-build theory of positi...
Mobile government applications have been increasingly adopted by governments around the world, but their use by targeted clients is lower than expected and under-examined in the literature. We conceptualize citizen adoption of m-government as a dynamic process composed of three interrelated stages—awareness, current use, and future use. However, we...
To encourage research transparency and replication, more and more journals have been requiring authors to share original datasets and analytic procedures supporting their publications. Does open data boost journal impact? In this article, we report one of the first empirical studies to assess the effects of open data on journal impact. China Indust...
In this article, we examine the units of the central administrations of Chinese universities to ascertain to what extent they reflect Chinese structural and cultural characteristics or global templates, seen through certain administrative units in the US model of excellence for universities. We describe and analyze the main features of the Chinese...
In this study, we analyze data from 176 Chinese universities to examine the use of reputation symbols in official websites. We find that Chinese universities prefer professional and performative symbols more than moral symbols. Reputation symbols are mainly observed in teaching, research, history, and strategy categories, whereas their use in inter...
When responding to crises, a joint approach is often used, which requires coordination among government agencies and other institutions. In this article we combine the vertical and horizontal dimensions to develop a theoretical framework to explain the patterns and performance of coordination. By drawing on structural-instrumental and institutional...
基于政策量化打分方法和社会网络分析方法，从政策属性、政策目标、政策工具以及政策制定府际合作网络等方面对我国1978至2016年制定的219条科技领域环境规制政策进行文献量化研究，进而有效梳理科技领域环境规制政策变迁和府际合作的演进逻辑。研究表明，我国科技领域环境规制政策的演进逻辑主要表现在政策机制不断完善、颁布政策的短期应急效应、累积政策的长期叠加效应以及部门合作不断强化等四个方面。最后，从制度层面的系统性顶层设计、政策属性力度的完善、政策目标与政策工具的持续优化以及政策制定府际合作的强化角度提出了政策建议。
With the increasing complexities of public administration and the challenges of financial cutback, government has been increasingly coproducing public services with citizens and other stakeholders. In this study, we use the case of ‘I find mistakes for government websites’ initiated by the central government in China in 2015 to explore what drives...
Ridesharing or ride-hailing services have received substantial attention from scholars and practitioners around the world, and it has become an urgent issue for the government to find solutions to mitigate their negative externalities and to provide room for their development. Since the Chinese central government legalized ridesharing in 2016, citi...
The private nature of corporate actors does not necessarily preclude them from contributing to public interest. When business strategies and genuine public motivation are favorably aligned, corporate actors from the private sector can also drive public sector innovations. For a private corporation, policy entrepreneurship inherently entails crossin...
Les citoyens sont-ils davantage satisfaits de l’administration électronique lorsque celle-ci figure en haut des classements ? Dans le présent article, nous examinons de façon empirique le lien entre la performance objective de l’administration électronique, du côté de l’offre, et les perceptions des citoyens, du côté de la demande. Une analyse mult...
Policy labs have been increasingly used to generate scientific evidence and political momentum to boost policy experiments, but our understanding of the conditions for knowledge creation and transfer through policy experiments in the labs is scarce. This paper compares the UK’s Cabinet Office’s Behavioral Insights Team (BIT), Denmark’s the Danish M...
Notwithstanding voluminous studies probing the relationship between publicness and performance, few of them examine the extent to which key organizational and managerial variables moderate publicness effects. This study conceptualizes the role of organizations’ administrative affiliation with different levels of government, which are sources of mul...
It is well known that public agencies are nearly immortal, but what explains their termination? This article argues that apart from conventional antecedents, political salience defined by top leaders largely shapes government agencies' life cycle. In one of the first large‐N analyses of agency termination in a non‐Western authoritarian regime, we u...
There has been a lingering debate on the relationship between public managers’ professional socialization and their acceptance of citizen participation. In this paper, it is empirically confirmed that association participation strengthens municipal managers’ predispositions toward engaging citizens. It is found that municipal managers that are acti...
Reputation management varies across contexts, and it is of theoretical importance to compare reputation symbols in different countries. In this chapter we examine reputation management profiles of universities in China, and compare their strategies with other countries. A content analysis of 146 universities reveals that performative and profession...
Citizens’ trust in government and other people is crucial to their perceptions of social risks. In this study, we examine the effects of institutional and social trust on citizens’ risk perceptions. Our analysis of a 2013 national survey conducted in 30 provincial capitals in China reveals that risk perceptions focus on two factors: public emergenc...
The reorganization of government agencies can be studied as a pre-reform process in terms of the structural changes made, or as a post-reform process in terms of the effects of the reorganization. In this study of two mergers of agencies in China’s central administration, we focus on structural features and the post-merger process, paying special a...
Lots of government agencies have adopted social media to enhance transparency, improve services, and facilitate interaction, but the implementation and impacts after their adoptions are not well documented in the existing literature. In this chapter, we use the case of China to examine the post-adoption behaviors of government social media. We reve...
For many years, it was believed that higher-performing e-government features would boost citizen use of e-services. However, this straightforward proposition had never been tested. Using a survey of over 28,000 citizens across 32 European countries, we examined the effect of e-government performance on citizen use. Theoretically, a better-designed...
The structure of political and administrative institutions is important for achieving public goals. It is not fixed, however, but may change as a result of environmental and cultural processes or because of changes in leadership. Structural changes in the central government apparatus feature prominently in the recent strand of reform and change lit...
The city-state of Singapore is proactive in harnessing policy experimentation to incubate innovations, transfer knowledge and facilitate collaborations across different public sectors. Given the country’s strong knack for pragmatism, international practices and lessons are usually first tested and adapted in policy experiments before scaling up to...
Are citizens more satisfied with e-government ranked higher in league tables? In this article, we empirically examine the relationship between objective e-government performance on the supply side and the perceptions of citizens on the demand side. A multilevel analysis of over 28,000 respondents across 32 European countries reveals that highly ran...
Do resources available to regulatory agencies matter for public perceptions of social risks? In this paper we use the case of food safety in China to empirically examine the relationship between regulatory resources and risk concerns. The multilevel model estimates suggest that neither regulatory revenue nor personnel is significantly related to pu...
Interjurisdictional learning is a key mechanism of policy mobility and diffusion, but the literature on this mechanism is scarce and its prominence is often underestimated. In this paper we use the case of public bicycle programs (PBPs) in China to examine the effect of intercity learning, specifically site visits, on policy diffusion. Hangzhou’s P...
Central government agencies play key roles in making and implementing public policies in China, but the empirical studies on these organisations are disproportionally scarce. Scholars in political science and public administration predominantly focus their researches on local governments at various levels, while paying little, if any, attention to...
Political scientists and economists argue that citizens decide to comply or not by weighting the benefits of compliance against possible costs from an instrumental perspective, while legal scholars focus on the procedures by which policy outcomes are generated from a procedural perspective, and sociologists emphasize people's motives to reciprocate...
Transparency, trust, and equity are all considered critical components of good governance. However, few studies have looked into the possible impacts of transparency and trust on public perceptions of social equity. This study empirically examines the relationship between government transparency and perceived public service equity, and the moderati...
In this chapter, the author aims to empirically examine the effect of social media use and e-government adoption on citizens' perceived corruption. It is hypothesized that the use of social media by citizens is positively related to their perceptions of corruption, while the use of government websites is negatively related to perceived corruption....
Social media applications (SMAs) have been increasingly used by the public sector to interactively communicate with citizens, businesses, and other stakeholders, but we know little about what drives their adoption and usage. In this paper we hypothesize that SMA adoption is jointly shaped by top management characteristics, organizational attributes...
It is both theoretically and socially imperative to understand what drives citizens’ concerns over food safety, as outbreaks of food related health hazards have become increasingly rampant in developing countries like China. In this paper we combine recent national survey data and media reports to quantitatively examine the effects of food scandals...
Despite the fact that performance management has been ubiquitously adopted in the public sector across the world today, there is limited and inconclusive evidence that it improves citizen satisfaction with the government. In this paper, we use survey data and multilevel modeling to analyze the effects of multiple performance management components o...
Does national e-government performance boost e-service users? This straightforward correlation is usually taken for granted but has not yet been empirically tested. In this paper we examine the effect of national e-government performance on citizen use, using a sampling survey of about 28,000 citizens across 32 European countries. Theoretically bet...
This article examines the rise of the field of Public Administration (PA) in China from 1978 to 2006. It first identifies several major driving forces behind the creation of the field in the country’s reform context for a preliminary analysis; then examines some problems that have emerged from the quick expansion of the field, especially Master of...
We use the number of finalists and winners recognized by the Innovations in American Government Awards (IAGA) programme to measure state government innovativeness from 1986 to 2013. The measure is moderately related to two existing state policy innovativeness indexes. The fifty states vary remarkably and persistently in government innovativeness, w...
Microblogging has been increasingly used in the public sector across the world, and it is pivotal to understand the drivers of their diffusion. This chapter adapts innovation adoption and diffusion theories and uses panel data of China’s 31 provinces (2010–2012) to empirically examine the diffusion of microblogging among government agencies and off...
Organizational goals shape performance feedback and have salient influences on strategic behaviours and outcomes. I develop a model of goal-setting by combining performance gap and bureaucratic control theories. I predict that governments set goal levels historically in line with their past goal levels and attainment discrepancies, horizontally tar...
Do performance or personal ties (guanxi) matter more in the promotion of local public employees in China? In this paper, we examine public employees’ perceptions of the roles played by merit and guanxi in promotion. We adopt a configurational approach to classify public employees’ perceptions of the reasons for their promotion into four groups: mer...
Environmental Nonprofit Organizations (ENPOs) in China have been actively employing microblogging (e.g., Sina Weibo) and other social media. This chapter, with a case of Wuhan FON in a nationwide campaign of "I gauge air quality for my motherland," examines the key strategies and tactics Chinese ENPOs adopted in using social media to enhance their...
Since 2000s, as an important venue to enhance external government accountability, external government performance evaluation (EGPE) activities have been burgeoning in China. However, few studies have been conducted on the important phenomenon. To bridge the gap, in this article we examine the emergence and development of EGPE in China and evaluate...
Understanding the logic of fiscal decentralization is pivotal to the next steps of fiscal reform. The first step is a retrospection of the literature and evidence accumulated in the field. As a typical transition economy with rapid and extensive devolution reforms, China is the ideal context to examine the causes, processes, and effects of fiscal d...
External government evaluation activities initiated and carried out by nongovernmental entities such as nonprofit organizations, mass media, think tanks, citizen groups and academic institutions have emerged in China since the late 1990s. Although advocates believe that these activities can help Chinese governing bodies tackle problems caused by th...
Echoing the global public management reform movement, China’s authorities advocated ‘super-department’ reform (SDR) to curb interdepartmental conflict and administrative inefficiency. However, the related performance consequences have not been empirically investigated. We test the reform’s effects on citizen satisfaction with public services throug...
Abstract Governments across many countries are adopting new social media (e.g. twitter), and police departments are engaging in the bandwagon too. We empirically examine the spread of police microblogging in Chinese municipal police departments from the perspective of organizational innovation diffusion. The results show that government size, inter...
The article examines more than 80 winners and finalists in the Innovations and Excellence in Chinese Local Governance (IECLG) awards programme between 2001 and 2008. Our results show the main types of innovation in the Chinese public sector to be management, service and collaborative innovation, although instances of technological and governance in...
Internationally, the public sector is adopting social media applications (e.g. Twitter and social networking services) to harness cutting-edge information technology developments, but we know little about what drives the diffusion of these applications. In this paper, I adapt the Berry-Berry policy and innovation diffusion model to explain the diff...
Governments across many countries are adopting new social media (e.g. twitter), and police departments are engaging in the bandwagon too. We empirically examine the spread of police microblogging in Chinese municipal police departments from the perspective of organizational innovation diffusion. The results show that government size, internet penet...
Understanding the logic of fiscal decentralization is pivotal for the next steps of fiscal reform, and retrospection of the literature and evidences accumulated in the field is the first step. As a typical transition economy with rapid and extensive devolution reforms, China is the ideal context to examine the causes, processes, and effects of fisc...
What drives fiscal transparency? Using a unique dataset we empirically examine the determinants of fiscal transparency of provincial governments in China. We propose an integrated framework to explain the variation in fiscal transparency, in which external demand and pressure, fiscal performance, government resources and capacity, as well as top le...
This chapter looks into China's experiences with embracing new steering instruments to promote social stability, with particular reference to the protection of households involved in city regeneration projects. During the closing years of the twentieth century, China experienced a fundamental transition, from a planned mode of urban regeneration to...
What determine Chinese party and state cadres’ promotion? Does government performance matter? Using a unique data-set on the promotion and performance of provincial party secretaries and governors (N=303) in China (2000-2004), we apply event history analysis (EHA) methods to empirically analyze the relationships between distinctive dimensions of go...
