County and township cadres as strategic actors in policy implementation have only recently become a topic of systematic study for China scholars, in most studies, they have been associated with clientelism and corruption, law-breaking, manipulation of the institutions set up to control them, suppression of local dissent and collective protest, and deficient policy implementation. Cai Yongshun, for example, claims that local cadres create an irresponsible state, “in which its politicians make decisions and allocate resources so as to serve personal political interests which take precedence over public concerns, thereby resulting in the waste of public resources”. Graeme Smith finds that informal cadre networks penetrate the institutional fabric of the county completely and build a “shadow state” which combines personalized rule and bureaucratism, is obsessed with quantitative output and engages in campaign-style,