Abstract: “To take the right incentive of officials” is the key to government governance. This paper, taking the county as the research unit, focuses on the constraint structure of the “section-level ceiling” on promotion incentive, examines how local governments expand the space for effective operation of incentive mechanism by layering the region, lengthening the chain of personnel mobility and promotion; it brings the “social person hypothesis” back into the analysis and considers “social person” together with “political person” and “economic person” as different aspects of government officials, and examines how the triple(social, political, and economic) goal preferences come together to form incentives for government officials. It is found that regions differ in terms of their location, industrial resources and industrial bases, and these differences are projected into the bureaucracy system, shaping the regional hierarchy. When primary-level governments have the right to set their own incentives, the paper concludes, financial rewards, job promotions, and near-family benefits are matched, forming a relatively optimized match between governance subjects and governance tasks. However, with the reform of the governance system and the loss of the right to set up automatic incentives, townships with high governance loads are unable to incentivize primary-level cadres who lack career promotion prospects through financial rewards, thus making their governance fall into the dilemma of insufficient incentives.

Key words: primary-level government, regional hierarchy, incentive settings, governance entities, governance tasks