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In this chapter, I focus on one turning point in reform and opening up because I think that it raises questions of theory and understanding that remain relevant today. The turning point I mean is the opening of the period we refer to as “reform and opening.”

There are, of course, many aspects of the inauguration of reform and opening up, including the power dynamics involved in the arrest of the Gang of Four, the return of veteran cadres such as Deng Xiaoping and the ideological turning point marked by the discussion on practice as the sole criterion of truth. All these aspects are interesting and important, but the one that interests me is the organizational turning point — the reform of the cadre system. The cultural revolution unleashed violence and chaos across China, but it most threatened the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) through its disruption of the cadre system. Senior cadres were harshly criticized and often jailed while younger cadres rose to power through “helicopter” promotions, an expression that points to the disruption of bureaucratic regimes and the lack of predictability in official careers.

One of the major effects of China’s turn toward reform and opening was the “regularization” of the cadre system. Hu Yaobang, in his 12 months, as the head of the Organization Department, had much to do with this. He tackled the 61-persons case, bringing Bo Yibo back into power (much to Hu’s later regret — Bo would, in 1987, preside over the “party life meeting” that removed Hu as General Secretary of the party) and oversaw the remaking of the party hierarchy. In 1980, after Hu Yaobang had left the Organization Department, the party would promulgate the Regulations Governing cadres. And soon after that, the retirement system was inaugurated, moving old and often hostile (to reform and opening) cadres out of positions, opening up opportunities for younger and better-educated cadres. Writers on China often refer to this as the “normalization” or “regularization” of the cadre system, and for years we tracked how each party congress brought in younger and better-educated cadres.

Hong-yung Lee wrote one of the books to trace this transition. Lee was optimistic about this transition from revolutionary cadres to party technocrats, believing that technocrats, by temperament and training are inclined toward compromise and bargaining. Moreover, the lack of informal ties among cadres, Lee hoped, would “compel the new leaders to rely more on formal procedural rules when making decisions and thereby facilitate the institutionalization of the Chinese political process.”¹ In the years since, the idea that China’s political process has become institutionalized has become widespread. Bo Zhiyue has discussed the “institutionalization of elite management,” and Alice Miller has argued that Deng Xiaoping and his reform coalition favored institutionalization of political processes as a response to the cultural revolution, both to prevent the over-concentration of power and to promote the modernization that was deemed the party’s primary task.

As these quotes suggest, there has been an argument that politics has become institutionalized at both the elite level and at the bureaucratic level. I do not think either of these arguments is correct, but here I want to concentrate on the bureaucratic level. The idea that China’s political system, the cadre system, has become institutionalized suggests that China has developed, or is well on the way to developing, a reasonable approximation of a Weberian bureaucracy, that party cadres are state bureaucrats, and that cadre management is “rational” (in bureaucratic terms). While much has changed in the past three decades, compared with the preceding Maoist era, the idea that the cadre system has become institutionalized leaves central features of the political system out. In general, when looking at bureaucracies, we judge them as more “Weberian” if they are chosen through a merit process, if bureaucrats perform jobs that can be specified by rules, if job performance is judged by objective criteria and if the promotion system is predictable. We all know that in the real world bureaucracies diverge from Weber’s ideal type. Patronage can influence the hiring process, it can be difficult to separate perception and bias from job evaluation, and some individuals can “own” their offices in a way that is very far from the Weberian ideal — J. Edgar Hoover and Arthur McDouglas come to mind as two clear examples.

But what I am talking about is not a divergence from an ideal type but rather a system that is established with different rules, both written and unwritten, and is not intended to approximate the Weberian ideal type. Looking at the party system in China, one has to start with the cadre management system, including the cadre evaluation system. At first glance, this system establishes a number of grades and rules of eligibility. People must have certain educational attainments, certain experience and be of a certain age in order to be eligible for specific jobs. (China may have the only personnel system that establishes a maximum age for taking up jobs at different levels, a product of concerted efforts in the 1980s to rejuvenate the bureaucracy.) The cadre management system sets out a number of different criteria (the specific criteria have changed over time and differ from place to place) for evaluating cadres. All these sound rather Weberian.

But, in fact, the cadre management system sets up a series of tensions that make the system behave in a very un-Weberian fashion.

The basic tension is between a hierarchical order, which demands obedience to those higher in the system, and the need to govern a geographic area, whose people can plead, petition, and protest, but have no legitimate or institutionalized role in the decision-making process or the selection of their leaders. To borrow the terminology that was popular in discussing economic reform in the 1980s, there is a vertical coordination system, known as the tiao (strips), and a horizontal coordination system, known as the kuai (blocks). In the old planned economy, the problem was that regional economies performed better when vertical control was loosened, but when vertical control was loosened too much, the planning system was thrown off. So economists talked about the policy cycles of tightening and loosening that were an inevitable product of this system. To a large extent, marketization has resolved those tensions, though shadows of the old system remain in the existence of monopolies and oligopolies and their relations with the political system.

But this tiao–kuai problem remains very much alive in the political system. Whether one is talking about provincial party secretaries or county-level party leaders, there is always the problem of managing the geographic area one is in charge of but yet being responsible to the party — and particularly the party secretary — one level up. Party secretaries at various levels are invested with a tremendous amount of authority, certainly much more than, say, the governor of an American state. He (and it is almost always a he) is rather unconstrained by the bureaucracy he is appointed to head, the local legislature (people’s congress), the laws of the land or the court system. Although there are internal reporting systems that are supposed to reflect the actual situation up to higher levels, these seem to have little effect on the behavior of local officials. The newly appointed party secretary’s primary job is to please his superior. Indeed, the superior will be evaluated in part on how well the area he has governed has done, so his evaluation depends on how well his subordinates have done. The best way for a superordinate to help his subordinate do well is to give him latitude (authority) and support (money helps too). And, of course, the newly appointed party secretary will want to find people he trusts to work with him.

So, it is quite clear that although the system is supposed to be impersonal — and has features to reinforce that impersonality — such as the internal reporting system and the discipline inspection commissions at various levels — there is an organizational imperative to personalize the system. Some years ago, Ken Jowitt talked about Leninist systems as embodying what he called “charismatic impersonalism” — the party itself was supposed to be charismatic and the cadres were supposed to act impersonally, both with each other and vis-à-vis the population they were governing. This charismatic impersonalism was relatively easy to maintain when the party was in its revolutionary — exclusionary — phase, but it inevitably breaks down, Jowitt argued correctly, in its reform, or inclusionary phase. As the party’s charisma wanes, personalism and bribery increase. Although Jowitt talked about Leninist systems in general, his theoretical prescriptions track remarkably well with the Chinese experience. So in contrast to many observers of the Chinese political system today, Jowitt foretold a decline in institutionalization rather than an increase. However one judges this issue, personalism is an important part of the system and that stands in tension with the expectation of impersonalism in modern bureaucracies.

The problem of personalism, as Kevin O’Brien and Lianjiang Li have made clear, was exacerbated by the adoption of the “one-level down” management system in 1984. This new system encouraged cadres to be “hyper-responsive to their immediate supervisors at the expense of other interests.” At the same time, the end of widespread political campaigns has weakened party disciple and enhanced cadre autonomy.² Efforts to implement a civil service system have been largely unsuccessful, largely because civil servants are subject to the cadre management system.³

The cadre management system, based on hierarchical control, has real consequences for how the system works. As Zhou Xueguang has argued, one consequence is that the hierarchical nature of the system compels lower level cadres to engage in collusive behavior. As he writes, “facing unrealistic policy targets and strong incentive pressures, local officials develop coping strategies in the form of collusive behavior to ‘manufacture’ records and statistics to meet policy targets or to transfer resources from one policy area to accomplish the impending tasks in another area.”⁴ As administrative chains lengthen, the slippage between the demands of higher ups and the performance of local officials inevitably increases.

Another consequence of the cadre management system is that cadres trying to meet the demands of higher ups inevitably confront local residents who have different expectations. Throughout most of the reform era, local cadres have been under pressure to speed up economic growth. In the 1980s and 1990s, local cadres tried to reconcile the demand for higher growth with their shortfall in economic resources by overtaxing the peasants. Whereas central policy limited taxes to 5% of peasant income, local cadres often collected 30–40%. The inevitable result was “rightful resistance.”⁵ Since the tax reform in 1994 further restricted local resources and especially after the agricultural tax and miscellaneous fees were eliminated in 2006, local officials turned to the requisitioning of land to attract investment. Again, the result was “mass incidents,” which increased year by year. This is to say, the increase of mass incidents is a direct result of the cadre responsibility system.⁶

A third consequence is corruption and selective policy implementation. A basic goal of any organization is to bring organizational goals and performance incentives into alignment. Throughout much of the period of reform and opening this has meant higher levels pushing for economic development and allowing local officials a great deal of latitude in how to do it. A certain (but unknowable) amount of graft has been part and parcel of this system. Certainly, when Li Changping went to Qipan county he quickly found out that he was expected to participate in corruption; indeed, his refusal to accept bribes was a reason for cadres not to trust him.⁷ Perhaps, the worst sort of corruption, from an institutional standpoint, is the buying and selling of office. The data for how much of buying and selling of office occur in China is not clear, but certainly it is a non-trivial amount. Jiangnan Zhu’s careful look at the case of Heilongjiang, in which more than 100 officials were involved in the buying and selling of office, argues that because party secretaries have the decisive say on promotions, they have both the ability and incentive to profit from the sale of offices. In contrast to those who argue that China’s political system is undergoing institutionalization, Zhu notes that the buying and selling of office “de-institutionalizes” the state.⁸

Aligning incentives is not always easy. When the central state is focused on economic growth, this goal aligns very nicely with the interests of local cadres, whether in terms of their professional development (chances for promotion) or personal interests (corruption). It is difficult, in the context of the cadre management system, to “fine-tune” or multiply policy goals. One of the reasons why the local cadres engage in collusive behavior, Zhou Xueguang points out, is that the criteria on which their behavior is being judged is not always clear. If higher-ups have multiple goals — say, environmental protection, economic growth and the “well-being” of the population — understanding the criteria for promotion becomes even more difficult, and the personalization of bureaucratic relations intensifies. One way to deal with this uncertainty over goals is for the local cadres to pick the policy goals that he believes the superordinate cares about most — especially if that goal aligns with his own personal interests. Thus, there is a systemic tendency toward selective policy implementation.⁹

The problem of alignment between the goals of the center and the interests of the local cadres becomes particularly severe when they diverge. The policy of fangquangrangli 放权让利 that was followed in the 1980s was very good at stimulating economic growth, but it also setup centripetal forces that loosened the center’s control. The tax-sharing system that was implemented in 1994 and the elimination of the agricultural tax and miscellaneous fees in 2006 were intended to strengthen the center’s control (which they did in fiscal terms), but they deprived the localities of revenues while still expecting them to develop the economy. It is not surprising that local cadres found new sources of revenue, exacerbating cadre-mass relations and worsening the problem of corruption.

In recent years, there has been a debate about whether promotions are based on personalistic considerations (such as patron–client ties) or on merit. Given that local level cadres find the criteria for promotion less than clear, that the differentiation between levels of the bureaucracy is not large enough to constrain behavior, and that misbehavior is rarely sanctioned, the incentives to develop informal ties and to promote people on the basis of them, at least in part, are very strong. The evidence of the sale of office also suggests that control over promotion is highly concentrated and not subject to effective oversight. Although merit may enter consideration for promotion, it seems pretty clear that it is not the only consideration.

I think that one way to conceive of the difference between the cadre system in China and a Weberian-style bureaucracy is to think of the difference between “cadres” and “administrators.” Is the term “cadre” simply a translation of the term “administrator” or “bureaucrat”? I don’t think that anyone who has looked at the Chinese political system would argue that it is. What distinguishes a cadre from a bureaucrat is first of all the very personal relationship between the superordinate and the subordinate. Ultimately, it is the superordinate who judges the behavior of the subordinate, and this makes satisfying the demands of the superordinate the primary consideration, guiding the subordinate’s behavior. Second, and in tension with this first characteristic, the subordinate is given a great deal of leeway to achieve whatever tasks have been assigned. Note the difference between “tasks” and “job descriptions”; bureaucrats have job descriptions, cadres have tasks. Tasks are policy goals, such as “grow the economy” and do not necessarily come with the resources necessary to accomplish them. It is up to the subordinate to figure out how to complete the tasks. And that means that the subordinate must have a great deal of discretion, indeed, of arbitrary power. Without that arbitrary power, the cadre would just be a bureaucrat. This suggests that in contrast to the separation of person and office that characterizes Weberian-style bureaucracies, that person and office really are one and the same, at least during the period in which one holds office. This is really quite different either from traditional systems in which one holds office by virtue of characteristics possessed by the individual (such as aristocratic blood) and from Weberian-style separation of person and office. As long as the cadre system holds, cadres can perform their jobs more or less well and more or less honestly, but they will not become bureaucrats. And the party system will not become a Weberian-style bureaucracy.

All this raises an interesting question about the changes that seem to be going on now. There are two changes that seem to affect the party system. The first is the separation of the local court system out from the party committee at the same level, with finances coming directly down from the province. The idea would be that this would make court judgments less susceptible to interference and hence more predictable. The other is that the Discipline Inspection Commissions one level above are to take charge of corruption investigations, thus tightening vertical supervision. These reforms are intended to reduce the scope of the local party secretary’s power. Will this turn cadres into bureaucrats? I don’t think so. At best, it will reduce corruption at the local level, and to the extent it does, one can only hope that it succeeds. But it is not intended to build a Weberian-style bureaucracy, so it will not lead to the sort of “institutionalization” that some people have been discussing.

The conclusion is that the term “institutionalization” has been used widely in the literature without examining what this term means. Looking at the cadre system in China, we may indeed find that it is younger and better educated than in previous years, but I find no evidence to persuade me that China’s bureaucracy is becoming increasingly Weberian over time. Indeed, the demands of the “party controls the cadres” (dang guan ganbu 党管干部) principle sets up tensions between hierarchical control and the need for collusive behavior, between demands for impersonalism and the need for personalism, and the priority of loyalty (both personal and political) over merit that make it unlikely that the cadre system will over time evolve into a Weberian bureaucracy. Indeed, as outside observers, it is important for us to recognize that efforts to professionalize the bureaucracy are indeed subversive of party control.

¹Lee, Hong Yung. 1991. From Revolutionary Cadres to Party Technocrats in Socialist China. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 405.

²O’Brien, Kevin J. and Li, Lianjiang. 1999. “Selective Policy Implementation in Rural China,” Comparative Politics. Vol. 31, Issue 2: 167–186.

³Burns, John P. and Xiaoqi, Wang. 2010. “Civil Service Reform in China: Impacts on Civil Servants’ Behavior,” The China Quarterly. Issue 201: 58–78.

⁴Zhou, Xueguang. 2010. “The Institutional Logic of Collusion among Local Governments in China,” Modern China. Vol. 36, Issue 1: 47–78.

⁵O’Brien, Kevin and Li, Lianjiang, Rightful Resistance.

⁶Minzner, C.F., 2009. “Riots and cover-ups: Counterproductive control of local agents in China”. U. Pa. J. Int’l L. Vol. 31: 53.

⁷Changping, Li. Woxiangzonglishuozhenhua.

⁸Zhu, Jiangnan. 2008. “Why Are Offices for Sale in China? A Case Study of the Office-Selling Chain in Heilongjiang Province,” Asian Survey. Vol. 48, Issue 4: 558–579.

⁹O’Brien, Kevin and Li, Lianjiang. 1999. “Selective Policy Implementation in Rural China,” Comparative Politics. Vol. 31, Issue 2: 167–186.