The rapid economic growth in the past forty years of reform and opening up has attracted academic attention to the proactive entrepreneurial behavior of local governments. However,in recent years, the economic growth rate has slowed down, and local entrepreneurial enthusiasm has weakened. Under China??s unique institutional incentives, the behavior of local governments presents a phased “back-and-forth” phenomenon of proactivity and passivity. This requires not only an explanation of the previous rapid growth and proactive behavior but also an explanation of the recent slowdown in growth and passive avoidance of responsibility, and a return to the normative behavior of high-quality development. Research on local behavioral incentives is mostly synchronic,which helps to grasp the key mechanisms and logic but should consider its historical continuity. This paper takes the evolution logic of residual power control as a clue, sorts out the central control of local residual power in different stages, and reveals the implicit temporality between the transformation of local government behavior incentives and high-quality development. It constructs an innovative incentive mechanism for high-quality development, namely, the relaxation of residual power control under accountability adjustment. It is proposed that in the new era, effective incentives for local behavior need to coordinate the relationship between “relaxing control” and “tightening control”,realize the “institutionalization of residual power control” and “rebalancing of autonomy” to promote high-quality development. Although the perspective of residual power control is not sufficient to cover all the complex situations of local government behavior since the founding of New China,it helps to connect and answer the logical consistency between central residual power incentives and local behavior changes in the reform process. This paper provides an analytical framework that comprehensively reflects the transformation of local government behavior incentives to adapt to the needs of high-quality development, providing insights and exploratory evidence for understanding the direction of central-local interaction reform.