The Red Queen at the Grassroots: The Co-Evolution of Cadre Resistance and Regime Control

Why do Chinese grassroots cadres sometimes voluntarily report their own disciplinary violations, triggering investigations that suspend their impossible policy tasks? And what happens when the disciplinary system learns to strike back? Drawing on 32 in-depth interviews with current and former cadres in S City, H Province, combined with official statistics and policy documents (2020–2026), this paper documents an emerging phenomenon:"cadre self-informing",and traces its evolution from a rational risk-avoidance strategy to a failing one. Self-informing becomes rational under a triple condition: fiscal depletion (local self-sufficiency rate below 35%), incentive inversion (the penalty for "incompetence" outweighs that for "corruption"), and the collapse of social trust. Facing zero-budget demolition tasks and catastrophic sanctions for failure, cadres strategically exploit a procedural rigidity,that every disciplinary report must be investigated,to pause the implementation clock and seek refuge in a bounded, predictable investigation rather than an unbounded, career-ending charge of incompetence. Yet the system does not remain inert. Through longitudinal tracking of a key case,a cadre whose self-informing strategy survived a traditional investigation but unraveled spectacularly under an AI-enhanced one,this paper reveals that the disciplinary apparatus is itself a learning entity. AI-driven tools compressed investigation timelines, shattered the informational opacity "battle-tested" cadres had relied upon, and fundamentally recalibrated the risk calculus of self-informing. Drawing on the Red Queen effect, this paper reconceptualizes the "execution limit" of China's pressure-based system not as a static boundary, but as a moving front in an ongoing arms race between agents and the institutions that discipline them. The findings advance institutional gap theory beyond state-society contention into internal regime-agent dynamics, and identify a "high-pressure trap" in adaptive authoritarianism: over-mobilization drains the very resources and trust that adaptability requires, generating the evasion it seeks to extinguish.