Beyond the headline findings, five additional themes emerged from our research. First, Chinese governance reforms must be understood on their own terms and in the context of the Chinese policymaking process. Second, Chinese reforms were only partially successful. Many were not fully implemented or failed to achieve the full extent of the outcomes envisioned for them. Third, there is no single Chinese model; approaches to governance varied widely over time and across Chinese provinces. Fourth, reforms were most successful when accompanied by other reform initiatives. Fifth, Chinese governance reforms were intentionally not embedded in permanent and self-reinforcing institutions. After reviewing these themes, we reflect on the implications of our research for the future of the Chinese regime. Our analysis draws from the burgeoning literatures on authoritarian institutions, regime transition, and democratization. We offer the provocative perspective that these reforms may pave the way for successful democratization in two respects. First, the legacy of a high-quality bureaucracy and strong governance has been shown to influence the success of democratic transitions. Second, enhanced legitimacy may enable the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), like other single-party regime, to concede from a position of strength – allowing multiparty competition because it believes it can win in a free and fair contest.

In this chapter, we explore the core theoretical hypothesis that transparency initiatives introduced in China over the past decade, including Open Governance Information (OGI) regulations, have led to reductions in macro-corruption among subnational officials. To test this theory, we take advantage of archived websites at China’s National Library and Internet Archive – recording the type, scale, and scope of information about government structure, processes, and outputs listed on each web page. Our dependent variable, macro-corruption, is operationalized by the amount of misused funds discovered by the China National Auditing Office as a share of provincial expenditures. We find evidence that increases in information about government power structure and decision-making processes are strongly associated with reductions in the misuse of public funds.

This initial chapter of the transparency section introduces readers to the major openness policies in China over the course of the reform era, paying special attention to the most prominent example – the Open Government Information (OGI) regulations, implemented nationwide in 2008, which mandated the publication of documents across Chinese agencies and also created a mechanism for citizens to request government information. The chapter describes the underlying factors that motivated transparency reforms and chronicles key debates at the national and local levels. A critical theme that emerges is that central officials, despite lofty rhetoric, had an instrumental incentive for supporting greater transparency; they saw it as a necessary tool for policing the misuse of public expenditures in far-flung localities.