In a 2025 article in Management and Organization Review, Xueguang Zhou and Stanford PhD student Yuze Sui show that officials and bureaucrats in China resort to a bevy of pernicious tactics – including “target substitution” and “signal jamming” – because they are implicitly incentivized to do so.

The core underlying problem is that incentives are misaligned. For example, target substitution occurs when officials pursue policies or strategies that move the proximate measures on which their performance is evaluated, even when these measures are not actually improving organizational performance.  Likewise, officials resort to “signal jamming” to interfere with the transmission of clear and reliable information (perhaps because it suggests poor performance on their part), using various types of noise – like irrelevant updates or performative activities – to drown out or obscure the true signal.

The key meta-theoretical point here is that research on Chinese bureaucracy not only illuminates the Chinese case (as is typically assumed) but also illuminates broader organizational dynamics. Drawing on decades of empirical work on cadre evaluation, promotion systems, and the dynamics of central–local bargaining, the authors urge scholars to recognize China as a vital context for theory-building about how complex organizations function when incentives and information are imperfect—an issue at the heart of governance everywhere.