Performance-Based Authoritarianism Revisited: GDP Growth and the Political Fortunes of China’s Provincial Leaders

An influential performance-based authoritarianism thesis attributes China’s reform-era economic success to merit-based political selection whereby the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has persistently rewarded with career advancement local leaders overseeing fast GDP growth. Yet voluminous empirical research on whether boosting local economic growth has bestowed career advantages on provincial leaders remains inconclusive due to the assumption of static preferences of the national leadership for unbridled GDP growth and inconsistency in data measurement in studies with disparate time coverage. Employing annual individual-level data consistently coded with a general measure of career mobility and a rigorous measure of relative economic performance, I reexamine how provincial GDP growth affected the career outcomes of the governors and provincial party secretaries under different CCP national chiefs spanning the entire reform era. My findings challenge the sweeping, one-sided conventional wisdom and call for greater attention to shifting political and economic contexts in theoretical and empirical research on contemporary China.