In the context of cross-Strait integrated development, agricultural cooperation policies between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan are intended to serve as key instruments for integration. However, these policies frequently encounter an implementation dilemma in which higher-level authorities actively promote policy goals while grassroots governments respond primarily through symbolic actions. Existing studies have largely explained this phenomenon from static perspectives, such as resource constraints or individual motivation, but have paid insufficient attention to how defensive compliance and distorted feedback interact to sustain systemic implementation failure. To address this gap, this study adopts political systems theory and conceptualizes policy implementation as a dynamic process involving input, conversion, output, and feedback. Using a comparative case study of two counties, supported by semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, the study examines how local governments process politically sensitive policy mandates under conditions of high political pressure and resource mismatch. The findings show that contradictory inputs create strong risk-avoidance incentives, leading local governments to adopt defensive compliance strategies during the conversion stage. Through symbolic implementation, resource diversion, and responsibility shifting, policies are translated into formally compliant but substantively hollow outputs. These symbolic outputs generate distorted feedback that conceals implementation failures and prevents higher-level authorities from making corrective adjustments, thereby trapping the policy system in a state of suspended implementation and apparent stability. Theoretically, this study extends political systems theory by revealing how defensive compliance and feedback distortion function as adaptive mechanisms that sustain system persistence while undermining substantive policy performance. Practically, it provides important insights for enhancing governance effectiveness and preventing systemic implementation failure in politically sensitive policy domains.
Li et al. (Sun,) studied this question.