Attracting the remote emperor’s attention: local policy entrepreneurship in China’s policy experimentation under hierarchy

Scholars have paid little attention to the mechanisms of locally initiated national policy experiments. This article reveals why some lower-level governments in China can successfully promote bottom-up policy experimentation. With a historical case study of Kunshan, we find that local policy entrepreneurs effectively deploy the nexus of related strategies to attract the central attention. The persistent bottom-up policy experimentation is driven by the interaction between structure-level and actor-level factors through historical evolution, while local economic structure matters for sharping policy entrepreneurs’ innovative abilities. This study contributes to unpacking the mechanisms of bottom-up policy experimentation under hierarchy by connecting policy entrepreneurship with experimental governance.