Ahead of this year’s Two Sessions, the weeklong meeting of China’s largely rubber-stamp parliament that started on March 4, President Xi Jinping released another volume of his speeches—this time on what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) calls the “correct view of political performance,” a concept that has become the centerpiece of an ongoing campaign to redefine how officials are judged.

The timing is highly suggestive. For months, Beijing has been urging cadres across the country to rethink the meaning of bureaucratic success. Yet even a leader as powerful as Xi sometimes struggles to persuade China’s vast administrative machinery to move in the direction he prefers.

Ahead of this year’s Two Sessions, the weeklong meeting of China’s largely rubber-stamp parliament that started on March 4, President Xi Jinping released another volume of his speeches—this time on what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) calls the “correct view of political performance,” a concept that has become the centerpiece of an ongoing campaign to redefine how officials are judged.

The timing is highly suggestive. For months, Beijing has been urging cadres across the country to rethink the meaning of bureaucratic success. Yet even a leader as powerful as Xi sometimes struggles to persuade China’s vast administrative machinery to move in the direction he prefers.

Xi and China’s bureaucracy face a classic principal-agent dilemma. The center sets priorities. Local officials implement them. Their incentives do not always align.

Why now? What makes the current moment unusual is the urgency. For most of the reform era, the system relied on a brutally simple organizing principle: GDP growth. Local officials understood the rules: Deliver rapid expansion, and promotion would follow. As long as growth targets were met, other problems could be deferred or absorbed. Debt accumulation, environmental degradation, speculative construction, and even bouts of social unrest could be tolerated so long as the growth machine kept running.

The model produced immense distortions. It also produced results. China’s economy surged forward, lifting hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty and transforming the country into a global industrial powerhouse. But that formula has reached its limits. High-speed growth has become harder to sustain and less desirable to pursue.

Beijing now frames its economic strategy around structural transformation and, critically, a pivot toward domestic demand as China confronts a post-property market fiscal and tax restructuring, macroeconomic recovery, and heightened external tensions all at once. Meanwhile, the old industrial machine continues to churn out excessive capacity, eroding profits through deflationary price wars and further intensifying external trade tensions.

The difficulty lies in translating those ambitions into bureaucratic incentives. GDP once offered a clear metric to evaluate performance. The new agenda revolves around longer horizons and softer objectives. “Investment in people” and “high-quality development” resist simple measurement. Officials still need something tangible to........

© Foreign Policy