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China's economic reform since 1978 has turned a shortage economy into an economy of overcapacity. To curb the capacity surplus, the government put forward a sweeping proposal of “supply-side structural reform,” although without any specifics of implementation. This vagueness has resulted in fragmentation between China's central leadership and local agents. Based on two rail delivery services – China Railway Express Delivery (Zhongtie kuaiyun 中铁快运, CRED) and China–Europe Rail Freight (Zhong–Ou banlie 中欧班列, CERF) – this article argues that fragmentation in authority has allowed and even encouraged local actors to carve profit-making opportunities out of the excess capacities (including idle assets). In so doing, they give substance to what would otherwise be hollow policy rhetoric. Such subnational entrepreneurialism and the resulting tacit dynamics between state and local-level actors add another layer to the fine-grained theorization of fragmented authoritarianism in China: despite fragmentation, China's authoritarian governance endures, but with outcomes now shaped by a cyclical process of decentralization and re-centralization as well as continuous central–local interplay.
This article investigates the implementation effects of China's recent reforms to centralize its court system and offers an explanation of why such centralization efforts largely failed. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with judicial personnel from four localities, the study shows that local courts’ structural dependence upon same-level party-states is perpetuated or, in some cases, is even exacerbated, despite the unprecedented reform plans to centralize the budgetary and personnel management of the judicial system. Further investigation finds that, contrary to what existing assessments suggest, implementation failure is less a result of regional disparities in resources than of the party-state's own reliance on its horizontal line of power concentration and hierarchy, which is a core feature of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) one-party rule and hinders the party-state's own attempts to strengthen both judicial autonomy and centralization. The article thus challenges two extant notions on recent political-legal developments in China – that the CCP regime has substantially centralized its judiciary along the vertical line, and that judicial autonomy can continue to increase and manifest both under the conditions of, and serving the purpose of, deepening one-party authoritarianism.