Documentary Politics And Policy Implementation In The Northeast Revitalization Strategy

As the main carrier of “political will”,“document” has always played an irreplaceable role in the process of policy implementation in China.Document reproduction marks the implementation of public policy step into the initiating stage formally.In a manner of speaking,“document” provides a “starting point” for the “topdown” implementation process of Chinese public policy.However,unfortunately,as vital records of “political output” and an important link of “political communication”,“document” is often simply understood as a rational communication tool that conveys instructions vertically and transmits information horizontally.It has never been a “keyword” in the field of Chinese policy implementation research.At the same time,generally,the current research on China's policy implementation focuses on the “deviation behavior” of the grassroots government.The excessive simplification of the “policy implementation chain” makes the provincial and municipal intermediate government seriously absent,which also leads to a lot of research fall into the “cat-andmouse” model.“Document” is the perspective of this study which focuses on provincial governments.From the basic logic of documental politics,the hypothesis is that the intermediate-level government,in its seemingly routine documents,has real attitudes and strategies towards the implementation of higher level policies.This study uses text analysis method,incorporates grounded theory,and uses NVivo 11 qualitative analysis software to analyze 41 policy texts of the L provincial government that aimed at implementing the “Northeast Revitalization” strategy of the central government from2014 to 2016,and get the sort of expressive “strength” and executive “intensity” of the provincial government on various policies.The author analyzes the sequence variation of the policies under the two sequence indicators of “strength sequence” and “intensity sequence”,and examines the policy implementation preferences of provincial government in two dimensions.Finally,the author quantifies the attention allocation and potential execution preferences of provincial government,and successfully completes the verification of the assumptions made at the beginning of the study.This study not only provides a new perspective on the research path,but also presents more new evidences for the study of China's policy implementation issues in research methods.It also provides a new imagination for understanding the “central-local relationship”.