1. The Question
When a political transition begins on the Mainland, who keeps the lights on, the water running, the hospitals staffed, and the payroll paid — and under what authority? This paper answers one of the blueprint’s named open questions: the design of lawful temporary continuity authority. It proposes a four-layer structure for the transition period that keeps essential services assigned to accountable institutions at all times, avoiding the blueprint’s two rejected failure modes: a power vacuum in which no one is responsible, and instant administrative centralization in which a distant center seizes functions it cannot operate (WP4150).
2. Wp4150’S Position
WP4150 (Local Government, Civil Service & Public Administration) is explicitly a “working blueprint (forward design)”: current design direction, not a final constitutional settlement, and exact constitutional allocations of national and local powers remain subject to constitutional and legal research and future lawful representative decision (WP4150). Its roadmap “rejects both a power vacuum and immediate administrative centralization” and proposes four distinguishable layers: (a) local continuity of essential services; (b) cross-regional coordination for infrastructure and logistics; (c) a national layer for genuinely nationwide functions; and (d) a constitutional/representative layer that supplies durable authorization. The load-bearing principle: “Coordination does not automatically create command authority” (WP4150).
On continuity, WP4150 names the minimum: health care, education, water, electricity, transportation, public safety, local fiscal operations, records, and citizen-facing administration “should remain continuously assigned to accountable institutions,” so that a change of political office never creates an interval in which every actor assumes someone else is responsible. Its handover design “links authority, receipt, custody, execution, disposition and review, with explicit fallback responsibility for critical services” (WP4150). It further requires transition bodies to derive legitimacy from verifiable local procedures, with published mandates, transparency rules, sunsets, and timetables for free local elections (WP4150). This paper accepts that position and supplies the missing mechanism: the four layers, their remits, how authority moves between them, and when each ends.
3. Evidence And Comparative Options
Continuity with oversight — South Africa. The 1993 Interim Constitution, an “historic bridge” while an elected assembly drafted a final constitution, kept officeholders in place — section 235 had the State President, ministers, and provincial administrators “continue in office,” still administering their departments (South African History Online; O’Malley Archives). A Transitional Executive Council could disapprove acts of the old executive (Constitutional Court text). Lesson: keep the machinery running under transitional oversight.
Granular transfer — Germany. Reunification in 1990 proceeded by accession: the GDR re-established five Länder and acceded to the Federal Republic under Article 23 of the Basic Law, extending the existing constitutional framework rather than drafting a new one (deutschland.de). The Unification Treaty then settled the transfer in roughly 900 pages, sector by sector from the judiciary to telecommunications (deutschland.de; treaty text). Lesson: answer “who does what on day one” sector by sector.
Residual local competence — Germany and the United States. Basic Law Article 30 makes state powers “a matter for the Länder” except as otherwise provided; Article 70 gives the Länder legislative power where the Federation is not empowered; exclusive federal powers are enumerated in Article 73 (EU e-Justice Portal; Forum of Federations). The U.S. Tenth Amendment: powers not delegated to the United States, nor prohibited to the states, “are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people” (Wikipedia; Cornell LII). Lesson: presume local competence; enumerate only what must move upward.
A decision rule — the EU. Article 5(3) TEU: outside exclusive competence, the Union acts only where Member States “cannot sufficiently achieve” the objectives and Union action achieves them “better… by reason of the scale or effects” (EUR-Lex). Adapted: a function sits at the lowest capable layer and moves up only when scale or effects demand it.
The ROC reference point. The ROC’s 1999 Local Government Act: provinces and special municipalities; provinces divide into counties and cities, counties into townships and county-administered cities, municipalities and cities into districts, villages and neighborhoods below (Articles 3–4) (ROC Laws Database). Today: 6 special municipalities, 13 counties, 3 cities under the central government, each with an elected executive and council (Wikipedia) — a tested, elected multi-tier vocabulary for the transition design.
The PRC reference point. Article 3 of the PRC Constitution states that “the division of functions and powers between the central and local state institutions shall honor the principle of giving full play to the initiative and motivation of local authorities under the unified leadership of the central authorities” (PRC Ministry of Justice). In practice “unified leadership” has swallowed “initiative”; the design should keep local initiative’s vocabulary while replacing unified Party leadership with lawful, reviewable authorization.
Staged decentralization — post-1989 Eastern Europe. Poland’s 1990 reforms restored local self-government after 40 years of non-existence, adding a second tier in 1998 (IGI Global). Across the region the post-1989 reforms shared democratization, decentralization, central-government autonomy, independent local budgets, and democratic elections (CEEOL). Lesson: keep administration running locally, then democratize and re-fund it in stages.
The cautionary case — Iraq 2003. CPA Order 1 (May 2003) removed senior Ba’ath members from the public sector; it “effectively crippled the Iraqi civil service,” removing those who ran power plants, water systems, and ministries (Vectree). Ministry head offices emptied, “the Iraqi government largely stalled” — funding, revenue, and services halted (Cornell CIAR); 12,000 education staff and 176 of 860 judges and prosecutors were removed (Wikipedia). Lesson — the negative of South Africa’s: wholesale purges trade political symbolism for service collapse. WP4150 already draws this conclusion — routine officials must not be collectively punished for institutional membership (WP4150).
4. Recommended Design
4.1 Layer One — Local Continuity (permanent). Existing local units keep operating WP4150’s essential services under a transition body with a published mandate, transparency rules, and sunset, replaced by free local elections as soon as minimum conditions exist. Competence is presumed: a function stays local unless assigned upward under 4.7 — the Article-30/Tenth-Amendment residual logic in transitional form.
4.2 Layer Two — Cross-Regional Coordination (temporary). For services crossing local boundaries — power grids, transport corridors, water basins, disaster logistics — a body of the affected units may set schedules, share information, pool equipment, and operate joint services. Coordination does not create command authority: no taxation, no overriding lawful local decisions outside the agreed mandate, no takeover of adequately performed functions.
4.3 Layer Three — National Functions (permanent, enumerated). Only genuinely nationwide functions: national defense, foreign affairs, currency, citizenship and immigration, interstate criminal-policing cooperation, and operation of the transition’s national layer. Closed, enumerated list; everything else defaults downward — the Basic Law Article 73 / U.S. enumerated-powers approach.
4.4 Layer Four — Constitutional/Representative Authorization (temporary, then durable). This layer administers nothing. It charters the bodies in Layers One through Three, sets mandates and sunsets, resolves competence disputes, and is bound by a timetable for replacement by durable representative institutions. All temporary continuity authority derives from this layer — the answer to WP4150’s open question.
4.5 Coordination ≠ command, operationalized. Every cross-layer or cross-regional mandate must be a written instrument stating members, scope, decision rules, finance, duration, withdrawal, and dispute resolution. A binding instruction to a local unit must cite its authorizing charter clause; otherwise it is a recommendation. Fiscal power follows lawful responsibility: no unfunded duties as a back door to centralization.
4.6 Temporary versus permanent layers. Layers One and Three are permanent in character (continuing, reformed and elected, into the settled order). Layers Two and Four are temporary: each body carries a sunset and a review gate; silence at a gate means dissolution. The scaffolding must not calcify into a permanent unelected administration.
4.7 Criteria for moving functions between layers. Upward only when the subsidiarity test fails: the lower layer cannot sufficiently achieve the objective, and the higher layer can do better by scale or effects — the EU Article 5(3) rule adapted (EUR-Lex). Downward as soon as the lower layer demonstrates capacity to published standards. Disputed moves are decided by Layer Four with published reasons, subject to independent review.
4.8 Fallback responsibility chains. For each critical service, name the chain in advance: accountable institution, designated receiver, custodian of records and assets during any gap, authority of last resort. On primary failure, responsibility passes automatically — no emergency decree needed. Public pending-matters registers, service clocks, and handover-exception reporting keep the chain auditable.
4.9 Sunset and review gates. No transition body without a dated mandate. Standard gates: 90-day operational review, one-year renewal, final sunset tied to seating elected successors. Each gate publishes the service-continuity record, the fiscal account, and the next timetable. A body missing its gate without a published extension loses lawful authority.
5. Open Questions And Risks
Who constitutes Layer Four? This design vests all temporary authority in the authorization layer but does not settle who constitutes it in the transition’s first hours — a negotiated transitional council (the South African TEC model) or authorization anchored in existing lawful institutions. The most consequential unresolved question; flagged for Gate 1.
Duration discipline. “Temporary” bodies tend to become permanent. Mitigation: dissolution on silence (4.6), public gates, no mandate renewed more than twice without representative approval.
Existing PRC local units. The design presumes local units keep operating but does not fix their future map. Default: freeze boundaries until elected bodies can decide, changing them only where service delivery demonstrably requires it.
Judicial review. WP4150 requires independent review of competence disputes; which court or tribunal does that during the transition, and under what standard, remains open. The German constitutional-court model is the reference — but standing up such a body early is itself a transition task.
Residual risk. The design fails if the authorization layer is captured or the fiscal chain breaks. The fallback chains (4.8) and the residual-competence presumption (4.1) are the circuit breakers, but they assume a minimum of good faith and functioning payments. Where neither exists, no paper design suffices — that boundary is stated, not hidden.
6. Cross-Links
Parent hub: WP4150 — Local Government, Civil Service & Public Administration. This paper supplies the four-layer mechanism for WP4150’s roadmap; exact constitutional allocations remain subject to future research and lawful representative decision, and nothing here pre-empts that.
LG-01 — Allocating Powers Between National and Local Government: Reserved, Enumerated and Shared Competences (canonical URL assigned at publication): the permanent-settlement companion; the 4.3 national list should be reconciled with LG-01’s reserved/enumerated/shared scheme at Gate 1.
LG-06 — The Handover Protocol: Authority, Receipt, Custody, Execution, Disposition and Review — With Fallback Responsibility (canonical URL assigned at publication): the detailed protocol 4.8’s fallback chains must implement; LG-06 owns handover mechanics, this paper owns the layer architecture.
LG-10 — Working Across Boundaries: Inter-Local and Cross-Regional Cooperation (canonical URL assigned at publication): the standing-cooperation companion to the temporary Layer Two bodies; as coordination mandates sunset, durable cross-boundary ties migrate to LG-10’s framework.