Western studies of China have offered sometimes dramatically different images of the way the political system works and how policy decisions are made. In recent years, studies of China's political system have drawn on Western understandings of bureaucratic processes to develop a picture of a highly institutionalized, albeit fragmented, administrative system. In particular, Lieberthal and Oksenberg's monumental study of the energy bureaucracy depicts a system in which there is an elaborate division of labor and institutionalized operating procedures that direct the paper flow and greatly influence the decision-making process. Their work, as well as that of others, has highlighted the fragmentation of power and consequent bargaining that takes place in the system. The richness of this work suggests the intellectual mileage that can be gained by looking carefully at the formal, institutional structure of the system. Yet as Lieberthal and Oksenberg clearly recognize, China's political system is far less institutionalized at the highest levels of the party, and there are policy arenas in which bargaining models are far less useful. As Jonathan Pollack remarked in a recent article on the People's Liberation Army, “The closer to the acme of the system, the less command derives from specified rules and norms. …” Lieberthal has similarly noted that the “fragmented authoritarianism” model was largely constructed around studies of investment projects and does not necessarily have the same utility in other areas.