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.
