Professor Zhou Xueguang (Stanford University)

Spatial mobility among officials has been an important mechanism of political control in China’s governance. Zhou and collaborators (2016; Zhou et. al 2018) proposed a model of stratified spatial mobility across administrative jurisdictions and presented a series of empirical evidence. This talk advances this line of research by the further exploration of stratified mobility patterns on two fronts: (1) We develop theoretical arguments on mechanisms of political control and centralization, and present related empirical evidence; (2) We contrast patterns of spatial vs. local mobility and examine their implications for governance in China. Our empirical study examines the mobility patterns of chief officials in bureaus and offices in a large bureaucracy—local governments in Jiangsu Province of China, from 1990 to 2012.