In May 2026, China launched the sixth batch of its third round of central environmental inspections. Seven teams entered seven provinces and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. By June 9, they had inspected entities for rectification. The scale is striking, but the recurrence matters even more: this was not a one-off crackdown but another wave in a structured, recurring form of governance.
Governments everywhere face a familiar implementation problem. National leaders set rules, but local agencies enforce them. Those agencies may lack capacity, pursue competing goals, or protect economically important firms. Formal institutions help, yet discretion and regulatory capture can still produce uneven enforcement. One-off crackdowns can shake up the system, but their effects often fade once inspectors leave.
Our PSJ article identifies a hybrid of campaign-style enforcement and routine regulation: “regularized campaigns.” These are periodic, structured enforcement waves embedded in the ongoing routines of governance. They retain the visibility and intensity of a campaign while using repetition to signal that a policy priority—and the risk of scrutiny—will endure.
We examine China’s central environmental inspections, introduced in 2016. Using an original firm-level dataset that combines environmental monitoring, industrial output, administrative penalties, and citizen complains, we find that before the inspections, economically influential firms polluted more yet were punished less. A one-standard-deviation increase in a firm’s share of local industrial output was associated with 19 percent more environmental violations, even as influential firms faced fewer penalties. After the inspections became institutionalized, the relationship between economic influence and violations was no longer statistically significant. Just as telling, the gap remained closed in 2018—between the first and second full inspection rounds.
Why might repetition matter? These inspections targeted not only regulated firms but also the local officials responsible for enforcement. Recurring waves tied environmental performance to officials’ career incentives, reinforced the credibility of central priorities, and reduced the space for selective enforcement.
The broader lesson is not that every governance problem needs a permanent crackdown. Regularized campaigns can disrupt production, strain administrative capacity, and erode trust if they become indiscriminate. Their design matters: enforcement should be periodic rather than improvised, directed at both implementing agencies and regulated entities, transparent to the public, and calibrated to local conditions.
The underlying logic travels beyond China. In the United States, for example, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration again launched its annual Click It or Ticket high-visibility seat belt enforcement campaign in May 2026. That campaign targets drivers rather than the agencies that police them, but its regularity is the point: motorists have learned to expect the scrutiny to return. The settings differ, but the common challenge is to combine episodic intensity with institutional safeguards. When that balance is struck, campaigns can change expectations between enforcement waves and make implementation more even over time.
Read the original article in Policy Studies Journal:
Shen, Shiran Victoria, Wing, Qi, and Zhang, Bing. 2026. “Regularized Campaigns as a New Institution for Effective Governance”. Policy Studies Journal 54(1): e70052. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.70052.
About the Article’s Author(s)
Shiran Victoria Shen is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. Previously, she was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution (2021-2022) and led the China Energy Program at the Standford Doerr School of Sustainability (2022-2025). Her Policy Studies Journal article, “Regularized Campaigns as a New Institution for Effective Governance,” contributed to her receiving the 2025 World Citizen Prize in Environmental Performance from the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. She holds a Ph.D. in political science and an M.S. in civil and environmental engineering from Stanford University.
Qi Wang is a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Business and the School of the Environment, Nanjing University. Her research focuses on environmental economics and regulation, drawing on a multidisciplinary background in economics and environmental policy.
Bing Zhang is a professor in the School of Economics at Nanjing University of Finance and Economics. His research focuses on environmental governance and policy, with an emphasis on their impacts on environmental performance and economic development.
Policy Studies Journal Blog 