In 1995, Robert Behn introduced American public administration to the need for common “big questions” to become a significant academic discipline, similar to the physical sciences. Chinese civil service laws were just being promulgated then, and so the discussion that ensued in Public Administration Review and elsewhere was not particularly salient for China. The largely U.S. literature did not take an international or comparative turn, yet it later became an active conversation in the Chinese literature, which is struggling to deal with its own identity crisis and the value of its research. Developing the big questions of Chinese public management research is extremely relevant in today’s environment because China is the world’s second largest economy, and their civil service has had significant time to mature. Chinese researchers have recently called for the development of domestically embedded (i.e., Sinicized) big questions. This article discusses the relevance of Behn’s questions on micromanagement, ...