Conditional Autonomy, Discursive Gatekeeping, and Patterns of Action: How Experts Influence Policy in China's One‐Party System
2026-08-28
This paper examines how experts exert influence within China's one‐party system, where policymaking is ideologically disciplined and knowledge‐intensive. It combines the Functional Theory of Agency, which identifies patterns of action including accumulation of knowledge, brokerage, entrepreneurship, and leadership, with a typology of four expert configurations—near‐power, academic, market‐oriented, and Societal experts—to explain differences in institutional embeddedness and resource base. The paper argues that these configurations operate under conditions of conditional autonomy; expert influence becomes possible through alignment with the dominant discursive, temporal and institutional order of the Party‐state. Discursive gatekeeping determines which forms of expert agency become feasible and consequential under specific political conditions. This argument is illustrated using Caoyang New Village renewal project in Shanghai, a high‐salience planning case where discursive framing, safety and stability boundaries, and political timing activate and constrain expert roles. Near‐power experts perform leadership and intra‐bureau brokerage, while academic experts broker and selectively pursue entrepreneurship. Market‐oriented experts advance entrepreneurship and project‐level leadership, while Societal experts engage in brokerage and collective leadership, pursuing micro‐entrepreneurship within tacitly tolerated boundaries. The paper's contribution is to demonstrate that political control does not merely suppress expertise but differentiates and organizes expert agency into distinct, policy‐relevant forms.