Dr. Ran Ran: Is the Environmental Policies Implementation Failure in China Challenging Party-State Legitimacy?

China has become the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gasses in 2008. The seriously deteriorated environmental conditions have generated social and political problems in China, which are not only one of the biggest national issues but also a great international concern. But there is a paradoxical problem. On the one
hand, Chinese leaders show great awareness of environmental problems and provide a high-quality framework for pursuing sustainable development by constructing a comprehensive and modern set of environmental policies. However, on the other side, many of the environmental policies have produced outcomes with little concrete effect.
Scholars such as Elizabeth Economy and Kenneth Lieberthal have argued the role of "fragmented authoritarianism" in explaining failure of Chinese environmental policy implementation. My own approach accepts most of their conclusions and the main logic of the "FA" model, but moves beyond them by exploring the dynamics, implications and functions of what I call the "environmental policies implementation gap" at local levels of China. This thesis introduces the research question, hypotheses, conceptual framework, and methodology in the first section. The second section explores how the "fragmented authoritarianism" characteristics of policies implementation system negatively influenced the environmental policies implementation gap at local levels in China. The third section argued that the perverse incentive structure constructed by the contextual factors caused that environmental policies implementation gap at local levels of China. How the environmental policy implementation gap paradoxically strengthen the central government's legitimacy, even though others say it should undermine its legitimacy would be discussed in the last section.