UC San Diego

My dissertation explores the political logic of ambiguity in Chinese national statutes. Departing from the prevailing view of the delegation literature that treats the amount of statutory ambiguity as essentially a control problem, my dissertation offers an alternative account by considering bureaucratic struggle over policy. The core argument is that ambiguity in law allows Chinese top leaders to navigate and satisfy competing interests of bureaucratic stakeholders. For the regime leader, ambiguity helps facilitate compromise among conflicting actors and overcome legislative gridlock. For the competing stakeholders, ambiguity avoids locking in hostile rules and creates bargaining and interpretative space in the post-legislative stage. I further argue that statute ambiguity is a double-edged sword. It helps facilitate timely bill passage and maintain elite loyalty but runs the risk of reinforcing bureaucratic fragmentation and undermining regulatory coherence. I evaluate these ideas through a combination of qualitative case study of the Anti-Monopoly Law and statistical analyses of large collections of laws, implementing regulations and rules between 1993 to 2021 in China. Using process-tracing and novel measures of statute ambiguity, I find that bureaucratic division over policy encourages both jurisdictional and substantive ambiguities in final law. I also find that jurisdictional ambiguity in law is associated with delay of administrative regulations (executive decree) and fragmentation of departmental rules (ministerial decree). My dissertation contributes to advancing our knowledge of how elite conflict is managed in an authoritarian legislature and how policy power is shared among regime insiders holding divergent preferences. It also reveals the legal source of China’s bureaucratically fragmented system.