Abstract
This study considers how, in the absence of elections for national office, authoritarian ruling parties create organizational channels for selecting officials. Through a case study of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), I examine the selection problem facing the ruling party. Within the CCP, special training academies, also known as party schools, serve as a pipeline to higher party and government posts. An examination of selection patterns for these schools reveals that there exists a mix of political and professional factors which determine invitation to a party school training program, suggesting the coexistence of patronage and meritocratic processes in promotion for higher office. Empirical analysis of these selection processes takes three parts. Individual-level characteristics, such as party membership, frequency of interaction with superiors, and educational background, are significant predictors of selection for a party school program. Second, to control for selection bias, I employ a matching procedure and find that the “treatment” of enrollment in a party school training program significantly increases the likelihood that an individual will be promoted to a higher rank in comparison to those without party school training experience. Third, additional tests indicate that these schools serve a screening function for the party, thus providing an organizational means for CCP leaders to manage who enters the highest ranks of political leadership. In this sense, the training process itself serves an informational function for party authorities, beyond the ritual these organizations are long thought to embody.
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Notes
These include party committees for each administrative unit, United Front departments, the propaganda apparatus, party schools for training officials, and organization department (responsible for personnel decisions), among others.
Walder (2006) draws attention to the critical importance of personnel management for party and bureaucratic strength; the consequences of a loss of party discipline were evident, for example, during the turmoil of 1989 (followed by a rapid reassertion of party discipline).
Initially established as sites for training party activists, workers, and disseminating both revolutionary ideology and tactics, these academies continue to teach cadres the core theories of the CCP. For a history of these schools, see Wang (1992).
Recently, there has been growing interest in and multifaceted research on party schools in China. Shambaugh (2008a, b) considers party school reforms in the context of party rejuvenation and argues that recent investments in these schools reflect the party’s interest in strengthening political institutions to stave off the decline which eroded communist rule in the Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe. Pieke (2009a, b) embeds party schools in larger processes of ideological change in China. In a fascinating chapter 4, Pieke (2009a) presents findings from participant observation of party school courses in Yunnan Province (located in southwestern China) to give a sense of the teaching and learning environment within these institutions of China’s “administrative civilization” (Pieke, 2009a, p. 121). Lee (2010) has also conducted content analysis of course syllabi from the Central Party School in Beijing and subnational party schools to demonstrate how the party has shifted training content to emphasize governance and public administration ideas often imported from abroad, particularly Western public and business administration schools.
This figure is from the dataset of Przeworski et al. (2000), in which regime type is coded based on the presence of competitive elections.
Studies of elections in China are extensive, and local party officials may use election results to gather information on local political talent. For reviews of this literature, see Alpermann (2001), A. B. Epstein (1996), Gadsden and Thurston (2001), Kelliher (1997), Manion (1996), and Oi and Rozelle (2000).
Huang (2002) presents an overview of the direct and indirect controls in place to cope with problems of hidden action in the Chinese bureaucracy. A related discussion of the inability of authorities in the Soviet Union to solve the moral hazard problem within the bureaucracy and the contribution of hidden action by bureaucrats to regime breakdown, see Solnick (1996, 1998).
In 2005, the size of the cadre population was 47.78 million, which represents about 3.1 % of the total population (Ang, 2012). Out of these nearly 48 million cadres, approximately half a million become leading cadres (ranked at the county, or department, level and higher).
Party schools are the anchor within a larger category of organizations charged with cadre training. These organizations include cadre schools located in party organs such as state-owned enterprises, socialism schools, and communist youth league schools. At one time, the total number of cadre training organizations numbered over 11,000 (Central Party School Yearbook Editing Committee, 1985; Shambaugh, 2008b).
For a description of the CPS departments and training programs, see “Survey of the Central Party School,” available on the CPS webpage (http://www.ccps.gov.cn/dxgk/index.htm, accessed June 10, 2011). Party schools in China and (former party schools in) Russia have also expanded their academic portfolios, today accepting graduate students and offering distance degree programs of dizzying diversity. See Huskey (2004) and Pieke (2009a, chapter 3).
The hallmark policy declarations of various administrations have been developed and announced at the Central Party School in Beijing. Jiang Zemin elaborated on his “Three Represents” at the CPS in May 2000, followed by Hu Jintao’s call for a “harmonious society” in 2005. Scholars of Chinese politics have explored this policymaking function of party schools (Dickson, 2008, p. 76; Fewsmith, 2003; Wibowo & Fook, 2006; Y. Zheng, 2010).
The 2003 Regulations on the Selection of Party and Government Officials specified that candidates for a leadership post at the county level or above must have (1) a bachelor’s degree or higher, (2) at least 3 months of training in a party school or other executive training program, and (3) at least 5 years of work experience (C. Li, 2007a, p. 24). The 3-month training requirement was stipulated as early as 1995, in the Central Committee’s Interim Regulations on Selection and Appointment of Party and Government Leading Cadres. Training could take place at “party schools, colleges of administration, or other training institutes” (Bo, 2004, p. 82).
Zhao Xue, “China’s most special school—the Central Party School,” Southern Weekend (Nanfang Zhoumo), 8 November 2007. Young Cadre Training Classes, which all party schools convene each year in accordance with local training plans, remain the most selective and prestigious programs for ambitious party officials. This is one training class among the dozens that party schools organize each year.
This survey is modeled after the General Social Survey conducted in the USA. A report of the CGSS sampling design and survey methodology is available at http://www.ust.hk/~websosc/survey/GSS2003e0.html. Tibet, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan were excluded from the survey. The ratio of the urban sample size to the rural sample size is 5,900:4,100, giving an urban bias to the sample. First-stage regression estimates are presented with weights to compensate for this.
To compare the findings from this matching process versus a probit regression, the online appendix presents estimates from a probit regression in which the dependent variable is promotion to administrative rank and the key explanatory variable is selection for training at a party school (Appendix Tables 6 and 7).
This model was estimated using the pscore command in Stata. Descriptive statistics are reported in the online appendix (Tables 1 and 2), available at academics.hamilton.edu/government/faculty/charlotte-lee.
The nature of these interactions and the actual frequency as a measure of time per week, for example, were not given in the data. Individuals were asked, “In your job, the frequency of contact with your upper-level leaders is which of the following?” and could respond “never,” “rarely,” “sometimes,” and “often.” Admittedly, this is an imperfect way to measure the strength of respondent ties to her superior; response categories are subjective and no anchoring measure is available. The analysis here collapses the latter two and former two response categories to create a dummy variable.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for drawing attention to this finding and its implications.
Parkin focuses on the social, economic, and political privileges that accrue to the hereditary-based transferal of property and education (pp. 152–154). Efforts to modernize and apply merit-based criteria for selection have also taken place in China’s civil service reforms. Burns observes, “The specific goals of the party’s civil service reform were first, to improve the quality of the cadre corps so that it could meet the new challenges of economic development, and second, to increase the perceived legitimacy of the selection of cadres which had been tarnished during the Cultural Revolution by such doctrines as the ‘blood line theory’ and since then by favoritism and patronage (‘going through the back door’)” (Burns, 2004, p. 40).
This logic may explain the finding for Gansu province, but not for the other three significant provincial-level units.
Please refer to the online appendix for the distribution of estimated propensity scores for individuals by treatment status and propensity score block (Table 4). Individuals with high propensity scores were most likely to be selected for party school, though not all individuals with high propensity scores actually attended. Treated individuals with a propensity score of 0.8 and higher have no comparisons in the control group and are not included in estimations of ATT limited to the common support. However, because of the broad overlap in propensity scores across treated and untreated groups, it is possible to carry out differences-of-means tests across the two groups and determine the ATT.
To confirm that matches are balanced, the results of t tests for the equality of means in the treatment and control groups, both before and after matching, are presented in the online appendix (Table 3). There were no statistically significant differences in the means of control variables across the treatment and control groups, post-match. Additional robustness tests, also provided in the appendix, include estimations of the ATT using different matching algorithms and the results of a probit regression estimate on the effect of party school training on promotion (Appendix Tables 5 to 7). Probit regression estimates were similar to the matching results, with a statistically significant marginal effect for party school of 0.17.
In this sense, this paper builds on and departs from Pieke’s (2009a) argument that party schools are sites for refining and disseminating the “neosocialist” tenets of post-Mao party authorities.
Furthermore, separate tests to determine the ATT of degree programs within party schools found no statistically significant effect. This suggests that cadres who enroll in party schools for a degree are not more likely to be promoted to higher administrative ranks, reinforcing the importance of selection and invitation to a training program. Signaling the intention to serve in the party bureaucracy by pursuing a party school degree does not appear to yield payoffs in terms of climbing the career ladder.
I conducted field interviews in the party schools of one coastal province, one inland province, and one Special Economic Zone from 2007 to 2008 (N = 168). Sites included provincial-level, city-level, county-level, and township-level schools.
In an interview with a county-level organization department cadre in May 2008, he described how a certain number of points are allocated to training in evaluation rubrics for party cadres (interview 212). According to this official, individual cadres have a “study and training” (xuexi peixun) component to their evaluation package, of which training performance is worth up to 30 %. In terms of official regulations, The Trial Regulations on Cadre Education and Training Work (2007) state that “each cadre education and training department must in accordance with cadre management powers create and perfect a cadre education and training file and submit cadres’ training situation and evaluation results” (article 43).
Only one interviewee, at a department (chu)-level training at the Central Party School, said that discussion sessions were tape recorded (interview 40, October 2007). Interviews with party school officials and organization department officials at the city level and below indicated that organization department monitors are more commonly sent to take handwritten notes.
This training class is the “Young Cadre Training Class” (zhong qingnian ganbu peixun ban).
Of the 45 individuals who were not promoted to a higher rank following their enrollment in the CPS key point training class, the largest number was on a propaganda career track (39 %). About one quarter of those who stalled was in economic management positions, while the remainder was evenly distributed across the courts-related, security-related, and engineering-related occupations.
Putnam (1976) counts educational institutions among the channels for elite recruitment, alongside parties, bureaucracies, and local governments, due to the professional network-building that takes place in these organizations. There is the well-known case of France’s grandes ecoles, which are the centerpiece of a long tradition of state educational institutions in which public and private elite connections are forged (Suleiman, 1977). In his longitudinal study of political elites in Mexico, Smith (1979) notes the pivotal role of a single national university in building the careers of public officeholders from 1900 to 1971.
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The author wishes to thank Yuen Yuen Ang, Emily Conover, Xiaobin He, Xiaojun Li, Victor Menaldo, and two anonymous reviewers for the helpful comments on draft versions of this paper. All errors remain the author’s.
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Lee, C. Party Selection of Officials in Contemporary China. St Comp Int Dev 48, 356–379 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-013-9132-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-013-9132-0