Leading groups: public sector reform with Chinese characteristics in a post-NPM era

Abstract

In recent decades, the emerging post-New Public Management (post-NPM) reform wave has introduced a variety of coordinative organizational forms, among them super-ministries and networks. In this study of Leading Groups (LGs), a form of network that characterizes China’s public sector reforms, an instrumental-structural and a cultural-value perspective are used to analyze the post-NPM features of the LG model, paying special attention to its Chinese characteristics. It reveals that LGs are in fact part of China’s public reform tradition and have been revived in the Xi era. They resemble post-NPM in that they are designed to strengthen integration and coordination, but they also show a great deal of cultural path-dependency. LG reform efforts are a central part of a broader Party-dominated network framework involving the recentralization of administrative power to the Party, which is typically Chinese.