Political Machinations in a Rural County

A long-running discourse both within China and abroad castigates local leaders for corruption and a related tendency to implement central government policy selectively. 1 The interesting question is how and why this takes place. 2 What are the mechanisms and internal logic of corruption and selective implementation for local Party lites and the bureaucracy, and why does such behavior persist? 3 A previous debate on the origins of "selective policy implementation" involves questions of the central government's failure to reduce the "peasant burden" during the 1990s, and whether that indicated a loss of control over its local agents. 4 This article examines corruption and selective policy implementation as Unger notes that "the performance of officialdom varies significantly across regions, dividing China into 'poor marginal agricultural regions', 'prosperous industrializing districts', and the 'agricultural heartlands'". Benghai, despite being a "national-level impoverished county", largely exhibits the characteristics of the latter two categories. See