In his writing Yang discusses how the Chinese Government has a hybrid system, where the government is still centralized, but there is still a certain amount of federalism that exists for local governments.  The local governments do this through what he calls fiscal federalism, where the local governments are able to maintain autonomy over local economies, laws, infrastructure, schooling, healthcare, and a variety of other areas.  I believe that this offers an explanation for what we saw in the documentary about Dandong. The mayor was directly responsible for the infrastructure projects of the city, and the citizens went directly to him to help solve their problems.  These problems that were unique to the city itself, and not particularly in other cities such as Shenzhen, which is undergoing rapid growth and modernization, while Dandong is falling behind.  This gives evidence to the fact that the central government does not have power over individual cities economies.  I also believe this is comparable to the American federalist system, where the states have their own economies and power over their own economies and infrastructure, education, etc.