BY NIGHT the fires of Tangshan burn and the air stinks. In this city in the northern province of Hebei, more than 100,000 people work in factories making steel and many more in firms serving the industry. “Save energy and cut emissions,” reads a red slogan outside one plant, heavy machinery roaring within. Earlier this year China’s president, Xi Jinping, ordered the steel business to cut production. Small and inefficient mills like this one were supposed to close and larger ones to shut down some furnaces. Yet many still operate around the clock. Their city is close to Beijing, virtually on Mr Xi’s doorstep, but the steel bosses openly flout his orders.

Nearly four years into his rule, Mr Xi is commonly described as the most powerful Chinese leader in decades. He has taken charge of all the most important portfolios, cultivated a huge personal following and purged his opponents. Bypassing ministries, he rules through informal “leading small groups”, heading so many of them that foreign commentators have labelled him “chairman of everything”. Rumours fly (without evidence) that Mr Xi may even try to extend his powers beyond the normally allotted ten years. Given his seeming strength, it would be logical to suppose that he could do almost anything he pleases. The toiling mills of Tangshan, however, suggest how hard the president often finds it to persuade local officials to carry out his wishes. Mr Xi may be chairman of everything, and he may well be stronger than any leader since Deng Xiaoping. But in a country so vast, diverse and with so many entrenched interests, he often seems to be master of nothing.

Mr Xi spars with crusty generals, powerful bureaucracies and large state-owned enterprises controlled by the central government. But an even greater impediment to his power is an age-old one: local authority. This is reflected in a popular saying that refers to the compound in Beijing where China’s leaders live and work: “Policies do not go beyond Zhongnanhai.”

Xi’s out of control

As the Communist Party prepares to hold a five-yearly congress late next year at which sweeping leadership changes will be announced, Mr Xi is fighting on two broad fronts. One is with rivals in Beijing who want the reshuffle to favour their own cronies. The other is with footdraggers in the provinces who want to do their own thing, regardless of who wins in the capital. It is with the wider country in mind that Mr Xi is now focusing on what he calls “party building”, ie, instilling loyalty and discipline into the party’s myriad cells. This will be a theme at an annual four-day meeting of 350 or so of the party’s most senior members that is due to begin on October 24th. In July Mr Xi warned starkly what a slackening of discipline could mean: “Our party will sooner or later lose its qualifications to govern and will unavoidably be consigned to history.”

China is eminently capable of getting things done, even in the face of considerable NIMBYist resistance. Its thousands of miles of high-speed rail and its mushrooming cities testify to that. But because its leaders are afraid to delegate power, they can give their attention only to a limited range of priorities. Many government schemes, particularly ones that are tricky, pricey or unpalatable to local politicians, go largely unheeded.

Strikingly, Mr Xi even sometimes fails to implement policies that he has declared to be a priority. He reportedly said that he had the capacity to tackle only one big economic issue this year, and that was to trim the bloated steel and coal industries. As a result, in February, the government revealed plans to cut steel capacity by 100m-150m tonnes in the next five years and surplus capacity in coal production by 500m tonnes. To give his edict extra prominence, officials took the rare step of inviting foreign journalists to Zhongnanhai to quiz a deputy finance minister on it.

Yet, as the smoky streets of Tangshan show, the president’s stentorian words do not always translate into local deeds. Since February, steel output has risen nationwide every month year-on-year (see chart). By the end of July producers had cut less than half of the capacity they were supposed to. Custeel, an industry body, says this includes many facilities that had already been mothballed. The central government admits that only four provinces have made substantial progress out of the 22 for which it has published results. Only one of the four, Jiangsu, is among the big steel-producers.

Local businesses often pay more heed to the market than to mandates. Some larger mills relit their burners as global steel prices rose. Local governments have their eye on their revenues, too. Hebei produces nearly a quarter of China’s steel. In places like Tangshan the steel industry contributes substantially to tax revenues. Local banks risk writing off large loans if mills have to shut. At one, Tangshan Baotai, workers live on-site in low, grey housing. Those who lose their job lose their home as well. Local governments fear that lay-offs could fuel unrest. People desperate to get on China’s property ladder may wish that their plenipotentiary president could do better. Mr Xi was clearly behind measures announced this month aimed at holding down soaring house prices in the biggest cities. But this effort seems as doomed as previous ones, partly because local governments delight in the market’s surge. Selling land is a big source of their income; big cities control a very limited supply of it, because of tight restrictions on their expansion. The weakness of Mr Xi in the face of local power has been evident even in his efforts to curb tobacco use (his wife, Peng Liyuan, is an “anti-smoking ambassador”). In 2015 he backed a stringent ban on smoking in indoor public places in Beijing. Yet a recent draft of a law to enforce this nationwide offers a big loophole: smokers would still be able to use designated indoor areas. The interests of tobacco-producing areas may explain why. In Yunnan province in the south-west, tobacco accounts for over half the tax take, compared with 7.5% of government revenue in China overall.

Policies that lack the president’s personal endorsement are all the more likely to stall. For example, there has been little progress in reforming hospitals, despite widespread anger at doctors who boost their incomes by prescribing expensive drugs that patients have to pay for. Local officials reckon this gouging is preferable to paying doctors better wages from government funds. Despite outcries, too, over appalling lapses in food safety, and high-level promises to improve it, enforcement has not been markedly strengthened. Provincial agencies do not have the will, capacity or financial incentive to regulate the food chain. Officials in Beijing privately admit that localities cannot afford to carry through a nationwide plan for reducing soil pollution that was announced in May. The problem is partly one of the party’s own making. Since the late 1970s the central government has deliberately delegated much decision-making to lower levels of government, encouraging local officials to launch pilot projects and spread good practice. This has helped the economy become agile and adaptable. But it has also made top-down government more difficult, sometimes to the detriment of reform. China’s political system displays “fragmented authoritarianism”, as Kenneth Lieberthal of the Brookings Institution calls it.

Raising the red lanterns

Market forces, rather than political ones, increasingly dominate government decision-making beyond the capital—as long as social stability is not compromised. And with the flourishing of private enterprise, and the collapse of many state-owned firms, the party’s once omnipresent and all-powerful cells have atrophied and weakened. So Mr Xi wants to put politics back in command. In a private speech he gave only a month after taking power in 2012, he railed that the Soviet Union had collapsed because nobody in the party had been “man enough to stand up and resist”; he noted that Russia’s corrupt security services had “left the party disarmed”. He evidently saw signs of similar laxness taking hold in China.

Mr Xi’s fierce campaign against corruption has been aimed at tightening his grip and strengthening the party’s discipline (as well as settling scores with enemies). Hundreds of thousands of officials have been punished for graft. At the same time, Mr Xi has tried to instil a sense of accountability among local officials. The country’s latest five-year plan (a quaint reminder of the days when the central leadership pulled more levers) for the first time makes local officials personally liable for causing environmental damage, even if it is discovered only after they have left office. The government now threatens to punish civil servants who ignore court rulings or fail to observe party policies.

But it is hard to legislate for loyalty. The party’s discipline-enforcement agency said this month that party leadership had “weakened” in four provincial-level areas, implying that this had continued even after the agency had read them the riot act. The errant regions include the municipality of Tianjin near the capital. Jin Canrong of Renmin University in Beijing said in a recent lecture that Mr Xi was facing widespread “soft resistance” among local elites. Instead of openly opposing him they were practising “inaction” instead. Mr Jin concluded that all policies were “empty”.

The fight against corruption may have scared officials, but even fear is no match for bureaucratic inertia. Next week’s gathering of party leaders is unlikely to help much. Xinhua, a state news agency, says they will adopt measures to improve the party’s ability at “self-cleansing, self-consummating, self-innovating and self-enhancing”. That does not sound like much of a game-changer.

At least the meeting may help Mr Xi strengthen his position in Zhongnanhai. It will launch preparations for next year’s congress, after which five of the seven members of the Politburo’s Standing Committee are due to retire, along with one-third of the Politburo’s other 18 members. The Politburo’s current make-up was largely decided by Mr Xi’s predecessors. This will be his chance to stack it with his allies.

There will be much speculation about which one of them, if any, will succeed him. Some analysts believe he has no successor in mind, and interpret his willingness to flout party convention as a sign of Mr Xi’s self-confidence. Yet it may be that he does not want to start grooming an heir (in China, this tends to begin very early). If so, that could suggest something else: that neither at the centre nor in the provinces does Mr Xi feel strong enough. Therefore he cannot trust anyone else with what he calls his “Chinese dream” of the country’s “great revival”.