Abstract: “Govern by official documents” is a basic administrative form of the Chinese national bureaucracy.Compliance of the central government policies in various regions has been a core research topic onstate governance. In an attempt to break through the limitation of existing research that only focuses the diffusion process of specific central policies,this study takes on a large sample of central government rural policy documents of a ten-year period from 2008 to 2018 and conducts an empirical analysis of the policy diffusion process and its mechanism. Specifically, the study investigates how the top-down administrative pressure and economic incentives interact with local level implementation capacity and internal motivation, and how this interaction impacts policy compliance.The finding indicates that the greater the administrative pressure and economic incentives from the central government, and the greater local implementation capacity, the significantly higher the implementation of the central rural policies.Under different administrative pressures, the impact of local capacity and economic incentives on policy implementation seems to vary. When the central government attaches great importance to rural issues, the difference between high capacity and low capacity local governments in policy compliance is significantly smaller. Asimilar decreased difference in implementation is also observed between policies with strong economic incentives and policies with weak incentives.

Key words: document governance, policy adoption, rural policy, policy text data