Previous scholarship on bureaucratic promotion acknowledges that both political and meritocratic criteria play important roles in deciding who is promoted among candidates. However, how the preferences of decision makers’ superiors may shape promotion decision making receives less attention. To address this gap, we propose a three-tier hierarchical structure where middle-level bureaucrats employ three criteria to determine the promotion of subordinates: appreciation from middle-level bureaucrats’ superiors, merits of lower-level candidates, and candidates’ social ties to middle-level bureaucrats. Looking at middle-level bureaucrats offers a basis for the cross-layer role of upper-tier superiors in shaping middle-level bureaucrats’ decisions for lower-level candidates’ promotions. A conjoint survey experiment among a nationwide sample of Chinese bureaucrats reveals that bureaucrats not only prefer candidates with meritocratic attributes and social ties to themselves, but also prefer candidates appreciated by upper-tier superiors. Moreover, although political concerns are important determinants of promotion choices, merit of candidates (especially client evaluation) has the greatest influence.

Using a detailed case study of house eviction in peri-urban China as well as original data from an online survey experiment, this article explores the opportunistic bargaining phenomenon in China in which citizens leverage the policy priorities of authorities with tactics that are not approved by the state to bargain for goals beyond those promised by the state. We find that opportunistic bargaining is widely accepted by Chinese citizens and that such an inclination is encouraged by successful precedents and clear signals of an opening through which to leverage government policy priorities; however, it is dampened by unclear signals and failed precedents. We also find that opportunistic bargainers tend to hold more negative perceptions of the current regime and are less likely to abide by state rules or social norms. The characteristics of opportunistic bargaining appear to be the opposite of the dominant “rightful resistance” framework.

The previous literature suggests that citizens calculate the benefits of immigrants by assessing their impact on economic prospects. This paper argues that a type of social demand–the demand for marriage–also induces support for more liberal immigration policies. We conducted a survey experiment with 3,000 adults in China, where the population faces a shortage of women in the marriage market. The respondents were assigned to four groups, namely, a control group, a group with low-skilled worker shortage cues, a group with high-skilled worker shortage cues, and a group with marriage market crisis cues. We found that the marriage crisis treatment was effective to male respondents but not to female respondents. A supplementary examination of cross-national survey data showed that a gender imbalance at birth can elicit citizens’ higher support for immigration in 13 Asian countries/regions. The results show that, other than economic considerations, citizens’ concerns about marriage market competition can also stimulate immigration support.