Understanding China’s Policy Processes-A Review of the Advocacy Coalition Framework’s Applications in the China Context

One of the most pressing problems in the study of politics and public policy is the development of portable theories that are applicable across different types of governing systems. This paper provides a review of the Advocacy Coalition Framework, a theoretical approach mostly developed in liberal democracies, as applied in the China context. We code 51 Chinese journal articles published in the CNKI data base from year 2006 to year 2017. The findings of the review conclude that ACF is applicable to China’s policy processes. Despite being a one party authoritarian regime, China’s policy processes have provided some room for competing coalitions and non-state actors’ participation to challenge the policy status quo. However, half of policy change cases are minor policy changes. Most learning brokers are governmental and academic elites. The level of conflicts between competing coalitions are relatively low and mainly occur among elite members of coalitions. Contentious social movement is rarely mentioned as a factor for policy change. Advocacy NGOs deliberately avoid confrontational approaches. In many studies, the Party-state leaders play an important role in initiating the policy change, which is largely a top-down process. We are cautious about the findings of these studies because of difficulties to assess their validity and reliability. Methodological approaches in most applications are not documented in details and hypothesis testing is rarely implemented. We confirm our findings by comparing ACF applications published in western journals, and by referring to the previous reviews of ACF applications in non-Chinese contexts.