Forestry Policy in China.

Foresty in China has attracted worldwide attention due to its contrast with the pattern of deforestation both in pre-1949 China and elsewhere in the Third World. Whereas most of the world's less developed countries have been depleting their forests at alarming rates, China has worked since 1949 to exp and its forest resources. These afforestation programs, in conjunction with timber harvest practices based on the principle of sustained yield, promise enhanced soil and water conservation and other environmental benefits in the future. To what can we attribute China's accomplishments in forestry? Many studies would lead us to expect that policy outcomes in comm and type polities, China more so than others, are due to the mobilization of a compliant bureaucracy and populace by a powerful, determined central leadership. Other studies reject the premise of a unified leadership, but still explain policy outcomes in terms of a circulation of factions in the elite. Although this study acknowledges the higher leadership's predisposition to favor forest conservation and notes various consequences of changing factional alignments in Beijing, the principal thesis is that the professionalizing bureaucracies and even the general rural populace have been more important in determining policy outcomes. It is shown, for example, that the cenral leadership's original support for afforestation was unaccompanied by an appreciation for the organizational and material inputs needed to ensure high survival rates. Instead, the central leadership showed a general preference for the unspecialized, campaign style of implementation. Consequently, results were disappointing for many years. Not until the 1960's was the Ministry of Forestry able to impose a more effective implementation format. This essentially bureaucratic implementation style is contrasted with the campaign style of implementation in terms of goals, incentives, personnel, and sources of authority. The change in implementation styles because of variations in performance has had major reciprocal influences on the Chinese polity. It is shown that the Communist Party hierarchy has come to favor greater regularity and differentiation in society in order to enhance policy performance, at the expense of a number of social change goals which had been prominently embraced in past years, such as deemphasis on material incentives and personal career advancement. Reliance on bureaucratic implementation has also served to dampen policy fluctuations which had been so marked in the 1950's. It appears, for example, that even such a momentous event as the Cultural Revolution may not have had much influence upon the volume of afforestation acreage. As the Communist Party's unique social change perspective has receded, policy issues have come to be decided on the basis of sometimes conflicting institutional interests. Middle level Party officials act as advocates of their particular functional sectors, rather than as spokesmen for a unique ideological perspective. For example, sustained yield in timber production policy is shown to have been implemented by the forest management sector's regulation of the timber industry, rather than as a result of Party preferences independent of the institutional interests concerned. Although necessarily limited to this particular case, the findings with regard to implementation and the interplay of institutional interests have general utility for the study of public policy in comm and type countries and for the Third World as a whole.Ph.D.Public administrationUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/157821/1/8017354.pd