Abstract
The goal of Chinese civil service reform is an appropriate balance in the relationship between politics and administration. This article examines the interaction between Chinese reformers and bureaucrats by raising two key questions: “What problems did Chinese reformers identify?” and “What measures did Chinese bureaucrats use to address these problems?” The article discusses three approaches that reformers took toward establishing a civil service system in China as they attempted to define, arrange, and interpret priorities to meet political and policy challenges. Core to the endeavor is the question of how far measures can be taken to reduce the power and authority of the Communist Party of China such that a state civil service can fully function. The article finds that, although some bureaucrats did want to adopt certain Western principles in civil service (as they understood or misunderstood them), for the most part they relied on an examination of the national political systems to define reform problems and formulate solutions. In the final analysis, because the reformers decided to write politics into the law, the bureaucrats needed to find ways through the legislation to formalize the leading role of the party, to make description fit with facts (i.e., comport with reality), and to unify personnel management power by merging a statutory civil service law with a nonstatutory personnel management system.
Keywords
Introduction
In 2005, after 25 years of effort, the Chinese government at last promulgated the Chinese Civil Service Law (hereafter the CSL). The CSL replaced the 1993 Provisional Regulations of the State Civil Service (hereafter the 1993 Provisional Regulations) and took effect in January 2006. The establishment of a civil service can be understood as a result of path dependency, displaying the centrality of the Communist Party as both the basis and the target for reform. The civil service reform process in China illustrates a policy inversion: China initially defined the problem as excessive concentration of power in the party, but ended by making political concentration of power in the party the solution. That contrast can be explained by examining the broad paths and patterns of China’s national conditions, the interrelations among China’s administrative and decision-making components, and the way in which China’s leaders defined the reform problems and its bureaucrats formulated the solutions. Core to this endeavor was the question of how far measures could be taken to reduce the power and authority of the party such that a state civil service system could fully function. The article’s purpose is to examine how and why civil service reform proceeded as it did in China.
The article provides a chronological analysis of the reform efforts. Two key questions are raised in the study of civil service reform: “What problems did the Chinese reformers identify?” and “What measures did the Chinese bureaucrats use to tackle these problems?” The article shows that Chinese reformers took three different approaches to establishing a civil service system. The differences between the approaches reveal the differences—developed over time—in the Chinese reformers’ vision of what a civil service system should be. In addition, these approaches also reveal how difficult it is to make changes to a highly unitary personnel management system.
All the reform efforts sought an appropriate balance in the relationship between politics and administration. This is consonant with former vice minister of personnel Hou Jiangliang’s statement that the driving intention behind reform is “to find what is instrumental and healthy and to discard what is not” (yangqi) within the contexts of China’s national political systems (Hou, 2007, pp. 5 and 57). What Hou meant was that whatever the shape and content of the civil service China would establish, it would have to be rooted in China’s national politics, the socialist law, and the prevailing, though nonstatutory, regime values. A Chinese civil service must promote the administrative capacity of the party-state without compromising the political hegemony of the Communist Party. This explanation is based on the premise that no reform starts from scratch. Inevitably, in creating institutions, there is always a high degree of path dependence (Lynn, 2006).
The article concludes by discussing what we can learn from China’s establishment of a civil service system. This study illuminates how reform was constrained by the centrality of the Communist Party, much as reforms elsewhere have been constrained by the path dependencies operational in their political systems. China’s historical and political heritage, cadre personnel management settings, and cultural and legal values engendered both favorable and unfavorable policy responses to the establishment of the civil service. In general, features of an existing politico-administrative regime are likely to exert a significant influence over both the choices of reforms for adoption and the feasibility of implementing certain types of reform. In China, some reform ideas (such as designing a bifurcated career in civil service) seem, at least in retrospect, doomed to failure, whereas others (such as the integration of political reality into the law) are supported or accepted by most stakeholders, given the one-party political structure in China. China’s civil service is both a legal and political construction and is largely a product of the ideology of the dominant political party, faction, or coalition.
A Note on Sources
This article draws on sources of information such as work reports, internal documents, leadership speeches, and monographs published by retired officials, not all of which are available to the public. Several rounds of interviews were conducted in December 2014 and in March and May 2015 with five ministry- and bureau-chief-level retired party and government officials who had been directly involved in the establishment of China’s civil service system. These officials agreed to be interviewed because the official restriction on discussing the process was removed 5 years after their retirement. This article draws on both practitioners’ and academics’ points of views. The limitations of combining these disparate viewpoints must be acknowledged up front. The author takes sole responsibility for any errors contained herein.
The Situation in China Prior to the Launching of the Civil Service System
Understanding what reforms need to be introduced generally begins with an analysis of the circumstances in time and place. Space constraints do not allow for a comprehensive analysis of all the national specificities leading up to the launching of Chinese civil service in 1993. To put the discussion in proper perspective, it must be stated clearly that before 1993, China did not have a distinct civil service and had not made much concerted effort to delineate a distinct civil service from the extremely large pool of state cadres (Barnett, 1967). The following bureaucratic particulars are worth noting:
The sweeping and encompassing scope of the party-state. The entire society is bureaucratized. All Chinese belong to a work unit. Cadres are personnel with leadership and authority as distinct from workers, peasants, and ordinary people. The acquisition of cadre statue is a prerequisite for essential job appointment within the party-state bureaucracy. Although distinctions are made between different types of institutions and hence different types of cadres, those distinctions are overshadowed by the concept of cadre.
Political centralization of leadership. Control by the Politburo and its divisions at each respective administrative level are a defining characteristic of cadre personnel management. There is an elaborate division of responsibility among the various party committees (groups) in the exercise of this authority. As did its Soviet counterpart, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses a nomenklatura system to regulate and centralize managerial authority over cadres in all sectors (Burns, 1994; Chan, 2004; Manion, 1985; Rigby, 1988). This means that partisan affiliation and political loyalty take precedence over administration.
Rules and regulations based on custom and norms. Cadre personnel management is basically customary, ideological, and secretive, and, as a consequence, highly informal. Rules and regulations are incoherent and are developed without adequate authority. Relevant documents are not for public viewing and are usually not expressed in formal, statutory language.
An entrenched belief that “the law should not comment on the party.” This belief asserts that law is subordinate to the party and is always a tool to serve. This belief may have been the primary deterrent to the establishment of a law-based civil service: there was reluctance to do anything that could be seen as limiting the power and authority of the party.
The Rigidity of the Cadre Personnel Management System
In his “818 Speech” at an expanded Politburo meeting on August 18, 1980, Deng Xiaoping raised problems with the cadre personnel management system, particularly the need to develop human talent to prepare China to enter into the global economy. What underlay Deng’s reform sentiments were clearly dissatisfaction with the rigid personnel management system and, most significantly, his belief that the role of the CCP in cadre management needed to be redefined. He was contemplating reasserting the power of the government (as opposed to the party) in the political system.
Before introducing reform measures, a line of argument needed to be made that would elicit support from all corners and would preempt any efforts to stall the reform initiative. In September 1986, the Central Political Structural Reform Small Group (hereafter the Central Small Group) was established under the leadership of Zhao Ziyang, the premier (later appointed secretary general of the CCP Central Committee), to make reform recommendations to the National Party Congress. In his work report to the 13th National Party Congress, Zhao Ziyang explained in depth Deng Xiaoping’s reform precepts and outlined the problems perceived as needing reform: There are serious defects in our existing cadre and personnel system. They are mainly as follows: The concept of the “state cadre” is too general and lacks a scientific classification; the power of cadre management is over-concentrated, and power and administrative responsibility are vested in different hands; the methods of management are outdated and simplistic, which hinders the rise of talented people; the management system does not have adequate rules, and there are not sufficient laws to govern personnel management. (Zhao, 1987, p. 37)
This list of problems demonstrates the scope of the issues that needed to be addressed, some of which went beyond cadre personnel management. At the heart of the matter was the fact that the cadre management system sought to protect a rank-in-person principle of personnel management, which would safeguard the party’s authority to choose and appoint leaders—cadre management being designed chiefly to manage core cadres at each administrative level. (For example, in 1986, there were 2,597 cadres at or above the ministerial level out of a total cadre workforce of 7.6 million; see Wu, 1997.) The rank-in-job principle, commonly practiced in most Western bureaucracies, was not common currency at the time, and the need for administrative efficiency was a subsidiary concern. In short, the cadre personnel system was designed primarily to manage people and not to manage daily affairs.
Problems Looking for Solutions
At the very initial stage, the drafting team focused primarily on its existing cadre management method rather than looking at other models of civil service management (e.g., in the West) in its attempts to define and resolve the problem of rigidity. China’s principle of party control of cadres establishes that the party at the level corresponding to the level of the organization the cadres work for will manage cadres. This is known as “management by rank and by type.” At the 11th meeting of the Office of the Central Small Group on November 25, 1986, Liu Junlin, director of the Research Office of the Central Organization Department, proposed the adoption of the principle of management by categories, a variant of management by rank and type (Wu, 1997).
Liu described how the principle of management by categories would work on November 25, 1986: Cadres would be divided into five categories (party personnel, state personnel, enterprise personnel, professional personnel, and personnel in mass organizations). A civil service was to be developed for the cadres in the state personnel category, and these cadres were to be subdivided into leading personnel, ordinary personnel, and service personnel (Wu, 1997). In March 1987, the drafting team revised the list of categories, using occupation (e.g., party personnel, state personnel, enterprise personnel, professional personnel, and personnel in mass organizations) as a guide for categorizing cadres. Occupation was chosen in an attempt to get away from using departments as the basis of categorization (Hou, 2007).
Management by category was designed to help Chinese officials, and by extension, the Chinese reformers, tailor the number of categories to be included within the cadre workforce and, on that basis, to alter the scope of civil service. As shown above, the officials made changes chiefly by referring to the existing nomenklatura system. In hindsight, it is apparent that officials relied on the nomenklatura system also to decide the magnitude, scale, and gravity of the political changes to be introduced. The officials conceded that this was not a calculated decision; they simply looked for ideas that were familiar to them because those would, in their view, help contain the effects of change (interviews, December 2014 and March and May 2015). This narrative appears to confirm the importance of path dependence (Lynn, 2006).
A First Attempt: Zhao Ziyang’s Idealistic Approach to Establishing a Civil Service System
The relatively liberal political environment in 1986 and the seemingly unfailing support of Deng Xiaoping emboldened Zhao Ziyang to make broader changes to the cadre personnel management system. Zhao was very receptive of Western experience in civil service reform, but his enthusiasm for Western models was not shared by other Chinese officials.
Before the 13th National Party Congress, the drafting team (which later became the Specialist Study Group on Cadre Management—hereafter the Specialist Group—working under the Central Small Group) produced several documents clearly stating their overall objectives in reforming cadre management system: liveliness and vitality. They wished to maintain the party’s power over its most senior members and the state at each correspondent level.
Their vision was at odds with Zhao Ziyang’s. To Zhao, the way to solve the problem of rigidity in personnel management was to free the civil service from party control. Zhao questioned the practice of using the party, rather than the government, to run the country. Thus, he posed a fundamental challenge to the cornerstone of Chinese political system—supremacy of the party over all sectors in society. On September 18, 1986, Zhao instructed the drafting team to emphasize the need for long-term stability in national governance, but 2 months later, on November 25, Cai Zhi (head of the Specialist Group) and Liu Junlin (executive deputy head of the Specialist Group) reiterated and defended their two original objectives in their draft provisional regulations.
A tug-of-war between the Specialist Study Group on Cadre Management and Zhao (and his aides) went on for some time, culminating in Zhao’s decision to temporarily disband the Specialist Group in March 1987 (because its proposal contended there was no need to create a separate ministry to oversee the development of a civil service system; see Wu, 1997). When the Specialist Group was reconstituted and reconvened on April 17, 1987, Zhao gave the group specific instructions to redefine their overall reform objectives, giving primacy to the stability of state administration.
To understand Zhao’s insistence on a stable and continuous state administration, one must recognize that in the previous few decades, the established governmental order in China had failed to provide necessary institutional stability. Constant political changes at the top of the power structure and political struggles among the elites rocked the whole bureaucracy, disrupted policy continuity, and hindered governance. It was difficult for the cadres to avoid political struggles given that the majority of them were party members and party control mechanisms extended into all aspects of society. Stability of state administration was later inserted into Article 1 of the 16th draft of the Provisional Regulations (released in May 1989).
Full implementation of the principle of management by categories would have meant moving away from unified central management and abandoning the practice of applying the same pattern of management to all sectors (Zhao, 1987). It would have helped separate the civil service system from the cadre personnel management system and would gradually have led to the elimination of the concept of cadre (Hou, 2007).
Zhao’s strong orientation toward stability of state administration and policy continuity naturally favored a permanent civil service.
In Zhao’s plan, personnel in the category of professional civil servants will have permanent tenure in office and be managed in accordance with the law governing civil service. For posts in this category, people have to pass a public examination in open and fair competition. Their job responsibilities will be clearly defined, and their performance will be evaluated in accordance with stipulated standards and procedures. Their promotion, demotion, reward, and punishment will be based mainly on job performance. (Interviews, December 2014)
For professional civil servants, career security and training, wages, welfare, and retirement were to be guaranteed by law. Personnel who wished to transfer from outside the civil service into posts in this category were also to be subject to examination.
The relevant provisions of the Constitution and the Organic Law were to manage the category of political-affairs civil servants. Their tenure was stipulated for a specified period of time. The Central Committee of the party and local party committees at various levels were to recommend candidates in the political-affairs category at the correspondent levels to the national or local people’s congresses. Political-affairs civil servants were under the nomenklatura control of correspondent party committees and were not to be managed and regulated by the civil service regulations. They would instead be managed in accordance with “political requirements” (interviews, December 2014). The crucial difference between these two categories of civil servants was in the variations of their conditions of service and their degree of career protection. By establishing a group of professional civil servants, state administration could be insulated to a certain degree from political interference.
Zhao’s Radical Proposals
To assert governmental, rather than party, authority to manage the country, Zhao Ziyang and his aides proposed several profoundly radical and far-reaching measures to curb the power and authority of party committees at all levels. The measures included the following: 1. Reducing the number of full Central Committee members from 210 to 100 and the number of Central Committee reserve members from 138 to 20 (210 and 138 were the numbers of members of the two committees at the 12th National Party Congress) 2. No longer requiring that provincial leaders be either Central Committee members or reserve members 3. Reducing the number of Central Advisory Committee members to between 250 and 280 at the 13th National Party Congress and eventually to about 120 4. Abolishing the Central Secretariat and turning it into a standing administrative office to support the Politburo, which was to be headed by the secretary-general of the central government 5. Requesting that the central government and the National People’s Congress deliver the decisions of the Standing Committee of the Politburo 6. Minimizing the number of concurrent appointments leading party members could hold in the government and other sectors 7. Abolishing the standing committees of party committees at all correspondent levels and party core groups in government offices and organizations (Wu, 1997, pp. 268-283).
Had these measures been fully implemented, they would have dramatically altered the political landscape and fundamentally changed the party-state’s organizational configuration. They would have dwarfed the role, power, and authority of party organizations nationwide. Because some of the recommendations were so groundbreaking and controversial, most were discussed only within the Office of the Central Small Group, whereas some of the less radical ones were forwarded for discussion to the Standing Committee of the Politburo (interviews, December 2014 and May 2015).
Some of the less radical measures dealt with the cadre-managing structure. For example, one stipulated that party committees should manage only the most important cadres, leaving other cadres to be managed by relevant systems (Dai, 1990). Naturally, the Central Small Group needed to determine which cadres belonged in the category of “most important” and which could be managed by localities or by the respective (governmental) departments.
In March 1988, the Ministry of Personnel was established, and on November 4 of that year, two groups of cadres originally under the control of the Central Party Committee were transferred to the State Council for supervision (Burns, 1994). These cadres belonged to two categories: one from the government organs at the central level and the other from service units and economic enterprises. The transfer scheme was seen as experimental, but the basis of the transfer decision was not entirely clear. What was clear, however, was that the transfer scheme did not fully accord with Zhao’s plan, which stated that the newly created Ministry of Personnel should manage state cadres at the level of vice minister or equivalent in the central government. This was probably a concession based on negotiation among the stakeholders.
All interviewees acknowledged that Zhao Ziyang was not succeeding with the civil service reform even well before the political turmoil of May-June 1989 (interviews, December 2014 and March and May 2015). Zhao (the party general secretary) had lost his strategic and overall power in the State Council to Li Peng (the premier) on the topic of establishment of a civil service system (Shirk, 1993).
Reflection: Administrative Orders Were a Default Selection in Zhao’s Plan
Three interviewees who supported Zhao’s aides in formulating the reform ideas described Zhao’s approach as idealistic. It was inconceivable to them that Zhao Ziyang would be able to accomplish his plan through an administrative order requiring approval by the State Council. An administrative order was neither an appropriate nor an effective instrument with which to launch reforms of such magnitude—ones that challenged and would have the effect of shrinking the power and authority of the party. Using an administrative order to launch such profoundly controversial political structural reform was like putting the cart before the horse. The reform path had made a default selection (interviews, December 2014 and March and May 2015). Comprehensive political structural reform cannot be achieved by simply creating a state civil service.
An argument against Zhao’s receptivity to Western civil service systems (based on the Western systems’ incompatibility with Chinese culture and socialist legacies) can be used to support the viewpoint that Zhao’s approach was overly idealistic. Proposing a bifurcated career in civil service clearly overlooked the party’s need for undivided loyalty from all party members, regardless of their rank or the type of unit they worked in. Interviewees did not dispute that argument but emphasized that Zhao’s plan was perceived as endangering—and actually would have endangered—the interests of the entrenched forces of the status quo, and hence lost their support (interviews, March and May 2015).
Zhao’s plan would have drastically reduced the CCP’s ability to use political patronage to reward obedient supporters. Using a fusion of politics and administration, the CCP had succeeded in building patronage and network-based selection, appointment, and promotion mechanisms that systematically rewarded political loyalty with career opportunities (Walder, 1995). Party officials had a different critique of Zhao’s plan. The problem, they said, was not that it drew on practices from Western civil service systems or that it created professional civil servants, but that it could not align the interests of all party personnel to support it. Instead, many vested interests were being uprooted. According to John Burns, in 1987 less than 1% of the 4.2 million cadres covered by Zhao’s plan would be designated “political civil servants” and managed by organization departments (Burns, 1989, p. 741). One interviewee estimated that under Zhao’s plan, party committees at or below the provincial level would have controlled no more than 5% of the original number of working personnel in all sectors at the next level (interviews, March 2015). It goes without saying that it was not in the interests of most party personnel to support Zhao’s plan.
Interviewees also strongly believed that given the national conditions in the 1980s, many aspects of Zhao’s plan were unachievable, and in that sense too, the plan seemed idealistic. They gave two examples to support this view. First, there was no position classification scheme to support the pertinent changes in recruitment and selection, performance appraisal, training, salary, welfare, and the like. A position classification scheme is necessary to lay out what level, skills, and experience are required for a position, to define the various classes of position in terms of duties, responsibilities, and qualification requirements, and to establish principles and standards for remuneration and welfare. Without a position classification scheme, any measures to regulate recruitment and selection, performance appraisal, training, salary and the like would simply not be implementable (interviews, December 2014 and March 2015).
Second, interviewees said that making the civil service examination mandatory for all those who wanted to get in or to stay on in the newly established civil service system was impractical: Many personnel who had been working for an extended period of time had only a questionable ability to read and write. A high failure rate for the civil service examination would be devastating, especially for those old-timers who joined the government as far back as 1949. The wisdom that “red [political attributes] is much better than expert [technocratic knowledge]” was still dominant among the cadre workforce in the mid-1980s. On top of this, officials in placement offices at all administrative levels across the country had annual mandatory targets to meet for assigning jobs to demobilized military personnel and university, college, and professional school graduates (constituting approximately 39% of the total number of new intakes in 1986; see interviews, March and May 2015). Relying on an examination to simultaneously achieve all these objectives would have been both a nightmare and an impossibility: There was no way to have a fair and competitive examination while accomplishing policy-driven and outcome-specific results. In short, there are good reasons why Zhao’s approach was seen as idealistic.
A Second Attempt: Li Peng’s Patchwork Approach to Civil Service
Following the June 4th Incident, momentum for comprehensive political structural reform started to slow down, with the emphasis shifting to party building and strengthening the party leadership. Furthermore, because there was no consensus among top leaders on the shape of reform and its urgency, the reshuffling of party leadership that occurred after October 1987 militated against the establishment of a civil service system.
Slowdown Under Li Peng
When Li Peng became premier, he and his cabinet were hostile to his predecessor’s reform program. Nonetheless, it was difficult for Li Peng, newly “elected” as he was, to publicly reject the implementation of a civil service system, which was supported by two supreme bodies, the 13th Party Congress and the 7th National People’s Congress. Eventually, in October 1988, he chaired a cabinet meeting that decided to slow down work on the establishment of a civil service under the pretext that it needed to be coordinated with other reforms. Li Peng stalled the implementation by saying that if a civil service system was going to be established in accordance with the principle of management by categories, the functions, personnel, and administrative quotas of all agencies must first be clarified. Until that was accomplished, it would be impossible to determine which agencies fell under the purview of the civil service system. In the same meeting, Li Peng said, “We must start our reforms from the practical situation. We should not rush to reach a decision” (People’s Republic of China [PRC], 1993, pp. 25-36), implying that the time was not ripe for developing a civil service law.
The period between June 1989 and October 1991 was the most difficult time for those trying to establish a civil service system. Starting with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, from January to May 1989, other State Council agencies, including the National Audit Administration and the bureaus of custom and excise, taxation, construction, and building materials, refused to pilot the civil service system changes regarding wages, position classification, and the scope of civil service on the grounds that the negative economic and political conditions at the time were not conducive to it. Furthermore, they added that because it was unclear whether the premier would support the civil service system, the Ministry of Personnel should slow down its work (PRC, 1993). During the second half of 1991, the same group of officials once again joined forces and argued that a civil service system based on merit and the separation of the party from the government was a “Westernized” measure, which was at odds with China’s national political systems (PRC, 1993, pp. 199-200; interviews, December 2014). From October 1988 to October 1991, the New China News Agency and People’s Daily refused the request to report on work regarding the civil service system (PRC, 1993).
After receiving Li Peng’s instructions to slow down implementation of the civil service system, Chinese bureaucrats sought ways to make the hostile atmosphere in Beijing more receptive toward change. As agents for change, the Ministry of Personnel and the Central Organization Department took several steps to make the establishment of a state civil service system seem irreversible (interviews, December 2014 and March and May 2015). Both agencies made use of national conferences and workshops with party and government officials and academics in universities organized between 1989 and 1990 to report their progress piloting the reforms, to discuss the revision of the 16th draft of the Provisional Regulations, to share and publicize the new conception of a civil service system, and, most important, to send a clear signal to all stakeholders that the Ministry of Personnel and the Central Organization Department were ready to modify and to repackage the reform objectives.
An Exchange of Questions and Answers
In China, successful reform requires strong support from the Politburo’s standing committee members, and from as early as August 1989, bureaucrats from the Ministry of Personnel and the Central Organization Department began appealing to this group for support. On August 23, 1989, Minister of Personnel, Zhao Dongwan, had a phone conversation with Li Peng. On December 7, 1989, he met with Jiang Zemin. On February 22, 1990, he met with Song Ping, and finally in August 1990, he met with Qiao Shi. All these meetings and discussions were presented and widely publicized as evidence (even without actually disclosing the details) that neither the Party Central Committee nor the State Council had decided to undo the drafting and hence the implementation of civil service system (PRC, 1993). The meetings also put huge pressure on the premier. Finally, Li Peng’s cabinet members agreed to exchange views with the two agencies, raising several questions in connection to the establishment of a civil service in a meeting on January 10, 1991 (PRC, 1993): 1. After the June 4th Incident, how can development of a civil service system be continued? 2. How can China distinguish its civil service system from those of its Western counterparts? 3. What steps and measures should be taken to implement China’s civil service system, which cannot be built overnight? 4. How can the civil service system be related to the cadre personnel management system? (pp. 179-182)
Adding to the pressure on Jiang Zemin and Li Peng was the fact that Deng Xiaoping sent out a strong signal on his Southern Tour (taken between January 18 and February 21, 1991) that he would withdraw his support from them if the group did not faithfully carry out the implementation of a civil service system. Therefore, on December 18, 1991, 11 months after Deng’s tour, Li Peng and his cabinet gave further specific instructions on implementing a civil service system.
In responding to the questions and instructions given by Li Peng and his cabinet members, the drafting team revised their early document, “Briefing Note on Establishing and Implementing a State Civil Service System” (created in November 1988), submitting a new version on July 15, 1991, to the Politburo Standing Committee for further instructions. The drafting team set forth a few points in this new version to respond to the questions raised by Li Peng and his cabinet members. The following summarizes their three main lines of argument:
1. Adapting to national settings requires a civil service system built on practical, rather than idealistic, grounds that can achieve acceptance by Chinese people. First, the Chinese civil service system will emphasize the four cardinal principles. Chinese civil servants will have to follow the party line, whereas Western civil service systems emphasize only political neutrality. Second, the Chinese civil service will emphasize the principle of party control of the cadres. All principal officials, including political civil servants, must be recommended and managed by party committees (groups) at correspondent levels. Third, the Chinese civil service will emphasize the objective of wholeheartedly serving the interests of the people. We demand that civil servants be clean and execute their public duties in accordance with the law, regulations, and the policies of the government. They must not work for their own interest and must accept the people’s supervision. This is in contrast to Western civil service, which is built on an employer–employee relationship. In the West, there are several agencies that coordinate the interests of civil service and the government (which implies that Western civil servants are not safeguarding the interest of the public). Fourth, the Chinese civil service system will emphasize the principle of combining integrity and competence. Political ideology and moral integrity must be given primacy. Western civil service emphasizes transcendence of class interests and cannot advance such a comprehensive way of selecting and appointing civil servants.
2. Developing a civil service with Chinese characteristics means reconnecting to and consolidating the relationship with the cadre personnel management system. A civil service system is the key to the reform of cadre personnel management. Cadre personnel management reform needs a civil service system to assure continuity and preserve the excellent traditions of cadre work. This is what we (the central party) must affirm. In other words, a reformed Chinese civil service must steep itself in the cadre personnel management system: the identification, scope, power, and authority of a reformed Chinese civil service must be defined in relation to and confined within the cadre personnel management system.
3. The third question raised in the January 10, 1991 meeting underscored the need for the drafting team to reset the pace, magnitude, and substance of the civil service system implementation. The new emphasis was on “keeping China’s core political system intact.” In this context, civil service reform was simply to undertake a limited change in policy and practice and to reverse all measures that sought to diminish the power and authority of the party in managing cadres (interviews, March 2015).
To adhere to Li Peng’s instructions, several actions were taken:
The first move was to reinstate the rank-in-person management method—the backbone of nomenklatura—and to reinforce the concept of managerial power jurisdiction, that is, the concept of having the party system authorize jurisdiction at each level of management in selection, appointment, and promotion of the entire cadre workforce.
On July 10, 1990, it was decided that the Central Committee, working through the Central Organization Department, would exercise nomenklatura authority over the head and deputy head positions in the two groups of senior cadres that the Ministry of Personnel received power to manage on November 4, 1988.
It was decided on October 19, 1990, that party offices established within governmental offices and organizations would not have to adopt the position classification system. They would continue to use the rank-in-person management method.
The most important decision, which was made in early 1992, was to allow agencies other than government offices and organizations (such as people’s congresses, people’s political conferences, the judiciary, the procuratorate, and democratic organizations) to be managed separately from but with reference to the civil service system (hereafter referred to as “making reference arrangements”), thus significantly blurring the boundaries of the civil service system (interviews, May 2015).
Li Peng was very concerned about preserving the Chinese version of a political spoils system, which allowed the CCP to reward through political patronage. The concessions offered by the Ministry of Personnel and the Central Organization Department represented the end of the threat of assault on the nomenklatura, and Li Peng was reassured that a reformed civil service would not threaten the leading role of the party. The concessions not only destroyed the distinctiveness of the proposed civil service but also brought the nomenklatura system back to the center stage.
Unlike Zhao Ziyang’s 1988 proposal for a state civil service, the 1993 Provisional Regulations continued the practice of not permitting the law to comment on the party. The 1993 Provisional Regulations neither feature the principle of the party controlling cadres nor highlighted the principle of management authorization. Presumably, these principles were established by usage and accepted as common practice. As such, they were not spelled out in legislative language and not easily enforceable by law, and therefore not featured in the 1993 Provisional Regulations (interviews, December 2014).
In implementing Li Peng’s instructions, the drafting team focused on dispelling the fear that the state civil service intended to eliminate the party bureaucracy—what Li Peng termed “departification” (feidanghua). An important first step was to comprehensively revise the general principles of a state civil service. The problem of overconcentration of cadre management power in the party that the 13th Party Congress had identified was no longer perceived as an issue. Policy continuity and institutional stability were no longer emphasized, as is apparent from the removal of stability as one of the reform objectives from Article 1 of the 16th draft (Xu, 1989). Li Peng replaced stability with the objective of maintaining vitality and liveliness in the civil service system, with an emphasis on the political loyalty of state officials. Career security was openly rejected in favor of a mechanism that allowed the government to dismiss politically unreliable or disloyal officials. Li Peng described this as a system that would enable the new to supersede the old, with an emphasis on “keeping the exit unimpeded” (interviews, December 2014).
To counteract the criticism that Zhao Ziyang’s reform package would have Westernized Chinese political structures, particularly the civil service system, the drafting team decided to remove the categories of political and career civil servants as stipulated in Articles 3 and 4 of the 16th draft and to replace those categories with the categories of party and state leading cadres and party and state ordinary cadres (Lin, 2006). These categories reinforced the nomenklatura system: under the unified management power of the party, party and state ordinary cadres were managed by the civil service divisions in accordance with the Provisional Regulations. Party committees retained sole authority over important tasks such as selection, promotion, and performance appraisal for party and state leading cadres (interviews, March and May 2015).
Another important directive given by Li Peng reversed full-scale implementation of competitive examinations. Li Peng took exception to the fact that except for the category of political civil servants, professional civil servants at all levels had to take and pass an examination before being appointed. Because Li Peng did not completely ban open (competitive) examinations, the drafting team kept the examinations, but limited the posts for which an examination was necessary to those below the level of section chief (see Article 13 of the 1993 Provisional Regulations).
The fourth step the drafting team took was to require open examinations only upon entering the system, not when moving to a new position within the system. Chapter XI (Change Position) of the 1993 Provisional Regulations continues the nomenklatura practice of allowing cadres to change position within, or to transfer among, administrative units of the state or to move to an enterprise or service institute without taking an examination. In addition, an employee of an enterprise or service institute could transfer to an administrative unit of the state without taking an examination. In reality, prior to the June 4th Incident and continuing to the present day, this has been a common practice for transfers from the party to government offices and organizations, mass organizations, enterprises and service institutes, and vice versa. All these steps were taken to demonstrate the intention of turning away from Western political-neutrality practices (as misunderstood by the CCP leadership).
Reflection: Li Peng’s Patchwork Approach Was a Plan Without a Clear Destination
Upon becoming premier, Li Peng knew that he could not continue Zhao Ziyang’s plan because Zhao’s plan was seen as Westernizing the Chinese political system. And yet, Deng Xiaoping insisted on implementing the 13th Party Congress Report’s call for the establishment of a civil service system. Both Li Peng and Jiang Zemin were new to the job and had yet to formulate an overall strategy for governance. Given the situation, it was natural for Li Peng to delay the implementation of a civil service system. Li Peng’s reinterpretation of the principle of management by categories can be seen as a strategy to buy the premier more time to formulate his next move (interviews, March and May 2015).
Li Peng’s instructions of December 18, 1991 were careful not to reject the idea of a civil service system. Instead, these instructions emphasized that any civil service system must support the leading role of the party (PRC, 1993). Li Peng’s overall approach was to patch together measures devised to undo those portions of Zhao Ziyang’s plan that would have eliminated party dominance in personnel management without discarding Zhao’s plan entirely. Many ministers in the State Council felt that Li Peng’s plan lacked clarity regarding its final destination (interviews, March and May 2015), but under the circumstances, Li Peng’s political wisdom drove him to take the most cautious path—neither overdoing nor underdoing.
In February 1992, after Li Peng approved a progress report on implementing a state civil service system that incorporated most of his guidance, the Ministry of Personnel and the Central Organization Department decided to request that the 14th Party Congress examine and approve the draft Provisional Regulations. After review and approval first by the Politburo Standing Committee and subsequently by the Politburo, the Provisional Regulations were approved at the Second Executive Meeting of the State Council, which was held on April 24, 1993.
A Third Try: Zeng Qinghong’s Reality-Compatible Conversion Approach
On June 23, 2000, the General Office of the Central Committee issues an important paper, “Outline for Deepening the Work on Cadre Personnel Management” (hereafter referred to as the 2000 Outline), demanding that action be taken to develop a civil service law (PRC, 2000). In response, the Ministry of Personnel submitted a report to the Central Organization Department asking for instructions and requesting that the drafting process for the CSL be launched in early August 2000. The report discussed several issues left unresolved by the 1993 Provisional Regulations.
The first was the peculiar nature of the 1993 Provisional Regulations. The regulations dealt with the rank and position, power and authority, rights and duties, benefits and disciplines, and so forth of officials from the top rank (including the premier) down to section-level officials, but it was odd, for example, for the premier to approve and implement regulations that would define his own rank, power, and authority. The report implied that the lack of a proper law dealing with cadre personnel management was an outstanding problem. The Provisional Regulations were inevitably transitional in nature and, in fact, enacted at a low level (as administrative regulations promulgated by the State Council rather than statutes). The report was attuned to the need to stop managing cadre personnel by secretive internal or sensitive intra-party rules and regulations. More broadly, the report necessitated senior party officials to consider shifting their mind-set from administration by policy to administration by law, however initially formulated.
The second unresolved problem was the scope of the civil service. Song Ping and Li Peng continued to press the Ministry of Personnel to work on their demands after the promulgations of the 1993 Provisional Regulations. In 1995, the Ministry of Personnel provided a detailed report on the scope of the civil service and proposed several ways to improve it—but those ways did not include treating party organizations as part of the civil service (PRC, 1995). Zeng Qinghong echoed the concern of Song Ping and Li Peng. On August 19, 2000, he informed the Ministry of Personnel that the CSL must integrate the civil service and the existing cadre personnel management system and that it must reinforce the principle of party control of cadres (PRC, 1995). Zeng also directed the drafting team (composed of officials from the Ministry of Personnel and the Central Organization Department) to expand the scope of civil service (interviews, December 2014).
Zeng’s instructions raised the third issue, which was perhaps the most fundamental one: ensuring that the principle of party control of cadres be enshrined in law. This issue was touchy for the Ministry of Personnel because addressing it at all might challenge the entrenched belief that the law should not comment on the party. This was both a political and legal matter. Would making a civil service law applicable to party cadres mean that personnel in party organizations could be subject to litigation in court? Would including party cadres under the civil service law effectively place party organizations under the people’s congresses? These were the questions raised by both the Law Office of the State Council and the Work Committee on Legal Affairs of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress in May-June 2004 (when the examination bill was presented to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress for discussion). Before addressing this difficult question, the Ministry of Personnel submitted an argument to Zeng in support of including party cadres under the law. It read, According to the definition of “civil servant” in the 1993 Provisional Regulations and statistics from 2013, there were about 4.9 million civil servants nationwide before the reform. With the inclusion of cadre personnel in the state civil service, the number jumped to 6.3 million. It is inconceivable that there is no law to regulate the 1.4 million personnel working in party organizations, the people’s congresses, the people’s political consultative conferences, judicial and procuratorial organizations, and other democratic party organizations. (Interviews, December 2014; Chan & Li, 2007, p. 389)
The drafting team submitted a paper titled “Request for Instructions on the Problems of Developing a Civil Service Law” to the Politburo Standing Committee on December 18, 2001 (PRC, 2001). In its meeting on December 27, 2001, the Politburo Standing Committee approved the decision to confirm to the principle of party control of cadres in law, along with the guiding thoughts and the legislative principles behind the law. Article 4 of the CSL states clearly the guiding thoughts behind the drafting process: The civil service shall conform to the guidance of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, and the important thought of the “Three Represents”; it shall follow the basic line of primary-stage socialism, observe the line and policies of the CCP on cadre matters, and adhere to the principle that the party exercises leadership over cadre matters (People’s Republic of China [PRC], 2005, p. 57).
The goal was to assert the political nature of the Chinese civil service system, referencing China’s special political systems. The CSL spells out clearly the basic rights and responsibilities of civil servants and firmly rejects the establishment of a politically neutral civil service system (Hou, 2007).
Three legislative principles were approved:
maintaining (regime) stability,
continuing to base civil service reform in the cadre personnel management system, and
incorporating the significant changes brought about by party reform of personnel management.
Before discussing further the three legislative principles, it should be noted that the drafters of the CSL sought to formalize a historical reality: The Communist Party holds tight control over leadership change and management at various levels. In addition, the drafters also wanted to emphasize that activities that had formerly been hidden should now been conducted in full view. In short, the CSL was designed to acknowledge reality and unequivocally underscored the leading role of the party and its organizational divisions at various levels in cadre personnel management, in effect bridging the gap between law and reality (Chan & Li, 2007).
Maintaining (Regime) Stability
Behind the first legislative principle is the idea of writing politics into the law, that is, capturing in the law the prevailing political values and realpolitik of the regime that presumably are maintaining the nation’s stability. The question is the extent to which unified leadership under the Communist Party of China could be legislated, and more specifically, how, technically speaking, that could be accomplished. The drafting team had to find ways to turn the principle of party control of cadres into “state and legal will.” In doing so, the drafting team needed to address three issues (interviews, March and May 2015).
The first issue was the meaning of party control of cadres in the law. The drafting team relied on Document No. 9, titled “A Notice on Strengthening Party Building,” issued by the General Office of the Central Committee on August 28, 1989, to clarify its meaning. According to Document No. 9, the term has a “fixed meaning” as a matter of law with four components: 1. The party must strengthen its leadership, formulate policy, and determine the direction of cadre work 2. The party shall recommend and nominate all core and principal cadres 3. The party must direct cadre personnel management reform 4. The party must oversee, supervise, and monitor all cadre personnel work. (Hou, 2007, p. 196; PRC, 1990, pp. 12-23)
The second issue was how to express the inclusion of cadre personnel in the law. In drafts prior to 2005, cadre personnel other than manual workers in the following seven types of entities were included: party organizations, people’s congresses, administrative bodies, people’s political consultative conferences, judicial bodies, procuratorial bodies, and democratic parties (PRC, 2001). When the draft law was circulated from March to June 2004, that listing approach received strong opposition from all corners. In November 2004, after receiving support from the Politburo Standing Committee (particularly Zeng Qinghong), the drafting team proposed a new, definitional approach: They would use three criteria to determine which positions fell within the purview of the civil service: (a) performance of public duties (i.e., the exercise of policy making, executive, and supervisory powers), (b) placement in an established post, and (c) payment by the state of all wages and benefits. The difference between the two approaches is that the definitional approach conceals party personnel and organizations in the law, even though the party had approved expressing in law the principle of party control of cadres.
The third, most controversial, issue was whether the full name of the party (the Communist Party of China) should be stated in the law. All interviewers agreed that not using the full name of the party seemed improper. They all remained silent regarding this deficiency in legal expression, and they defended the decision not to use the full name as something that had to be understood in the context of China’s particular (i.e., one party) political system (interviews, March and May 2015).
Continuing to Base Civil Service Reform in the Cadre Personnel Management System
The main purpose of the second legislative principle was to continue and further Li Peng’s instructions to keep China’s core political system intact and Song Ping’s instructions to locate civil service reform within the cadre personnel management system. To carry out these instructions, the drafting team needed to clearly define what the managerial jurisdiction (i.e., the legal limitations on it) of the party and the state would be after blurring the distinction between civil servants and cadre personnel.
After consulting with the General Office of the Secretariat of the Central Committee, the drafting team outlined two types of managerial jurisdiction under the law. The first is abstract—the power to make general policies. That power was exclusively assigned to specific units. The second is operational—specific management power, namely, the power to make rules and regulations to govern different aspects of personnel management (such as rewards and punishment; Lin, 2006). The party was given exclusive purview over the first type of management authority and jurisdiction, and the state (i.e., civil service divisions) was given purview over the second. Managerial jurisdiction now finds expression in the CSL in Articles 5 (the general provisions), 33 (on performance appraisal), 40 (on appointment and removal), 57 (discipline), 64 and 67 (on transfer and avoidance), 85 (on resignation and discharge), and 101 (on legal responsibility).
In addition to resolving the issue of managerial jurisdiction, the drafting team also needed to find a way to state the status quo of cadre personnel management in the law. After several rounds of extensive consultation with all the stakeholders and receiving specific instructions from Zeng Qinghong, it was agreed, The existing personnel management system and organizations will remain intact. Legal procedures must be separated from internal procedures. The law shall not name specific agencies (particularly the Central Organization Department and local party divisions) and shall simply use the term “the central administrative departments” to refer to those agencies, which have the requisite portfolios. (Hou, 2007, p. 199)
Article 10 of the CSL states, The central administrative departments of civil servants shall take charge of the comprehensive administration of civil servants. The local administrative departments of civil servants above the county level shall take charge of the comprehensive administration of civil servants within the jurisdictional divisions thereof. The administrative department of civil servants at a higher level shall guide the administration of civil servants as carried out by its counterparts at a lower level. The administrative department of civil servants at all levels shall guide the administration of civil servants of all organs at the same level.
The inclusion of this article in the law asserted the continued leading role of the party in personnel management on one hand while seeking to avoid mentioning the party on the other hand. It also reinforced the one-level-down management and rank-in-person principles, thereby indicating the continuity of the nomenklatura system in the law.
Article 63 of the CSL stipulates that a civil servant can move within the civil service corps to a position in an enterprise or service institute or to a position that conducts public affairs in a mass or people’s organization. A change of position can take the form of a transfer, rotation, or temporary assignment. This provision assures the continuation of broad career mobility as practiced within the nomenklatura system. It allows regular position reshuffling in certain cases, as well as reshuffling to reward political loyalty in most other cases.
Incorporating the Significant Changes Brought About by Party Reform of Personnel Management
The 1994 decision of the 14th Party National Congress to step up measures to manage party and state leading cadres rendered the 1993 Provisional Regulations outdated because the Provisional Regulations only applied to personnel in administrative organizations of the state, excepting manual workers. The fact that the party addressed this issue was important because a civil service law that did not cover the party and state leading cadres would be a “half-finished” law (Hou, 2007, p. 139; Lin, 2006, pp. 26-27; interviews, December 2014).
The drafting team addressed this issue by applying the distinction between two types of cadres created in the 2000 Outline in the Examination Bill of the CSL. Based on this distinction, the drafting team formally implemented a framework that divided responsibility and authority in personnel management between the party and the state, thus officially discarding Deng Xiaoping’s instructions to separate the party from the government. The drafting team inserted two clauses to spell out the division of responsibility and authority, initially in the several draft laws and finally in the CSL itself. Article 3 of the CSL now states, The present law shall govern the obligations, rights, and administration of civil servants. Where there are different provisions for the appointment, dismissal, and supervision of leading members of civil servants and for the obligations, rights, and administration of judges and prosecuting attorneys, such provisions shall be observed.
Article 105 of the CSL states, The term “leading members,” as prescribed in the present law, refers to the leading members in state organs, which shall not include leading members of internally established offices and organizations.
One interpretation that can be made, after reading these clauses, is that although both types of cadres can be managed by the same basic principles and general management methods, special provisions (such as the 2002 Regulations on Selection, Appointment, and Promotion of Party and State Leading Cadres, hereafter referred to as the 2002 Regulations) promulgated by the party to deal with certain management issues—for example, selection and appointment, performance appraisal, training, exchange, and dismissal and resignation—applied to the party and state leading cadres (Hou, 2007; Lin, 2006). That is what has been referred to as the separation of internal procedures from legal procedures. In brief, the 2002 Regulations applied to the party and state leading cadres, whereas the CSL applied to the party and state ordinary cadres (interviews, May 2015).
The Central Organization Department was very keen on showcasing the significant changes in cadre personnel management undertaken by the party after the promulgation of the 1993 Provisional Regulations. The incorporation of those changes was a full recognition of the work and achievement of the Department on such issues as open selection, competition for posts, probation periods, public announcement before an official appointment, cadre supervision, cadre inspection teams, reports on important matters for party and state leading cadres, and the like (Chan, 2003, pp. 408-410; Lin, 2006, p. 26).
With these legislative principles firmly established in the law, the drafting team proceeded to advance several arguments to convince all stakeholders (particularly officials in all the law offices) that using the law to reflect the principle of party control of cadres was not a problem. The first was that, given the widespread, specific references to the party’s leadership and its status and usefulness in many extant laws, its inclusion in the CSL should not be problematic. Furthermore, if extensive references were needed, they would be proportional, necessary, and appropriate as a matter of law and practice (PRC, 2001, p. 42). The replacement of the listing approach to cadre inclusion with the definitional approach created a sense that the civil service would have a modestly restricted scope.
The second argument was that the party, together with the people’s congresses, the people’s political consultative conferences, the judiciary, and the procuratorial organizations, was a principal and indispensable part of the political system (PRC, 2003, p. 33, 2004, p. 33). Based on the first two arguments, the drafting team advanced a third one: If one accepts the first two arguments, then it is natural to take action through legislation that aligns that legislation with facts (i.e., makes it comport with reality; interviews, May 2015).
After several rounds of discussions, the Law Office of the State Council, the Law Committee of the NPC, and the Work Committee on Legal Affairs of the Standing Committee of the NPC agreed to put the CSL Examination Bill up for a second reading by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC). That second reading took place on December 25-27, 2004.
One outstanding problem remained after the Standing Committee of the NPC conducted the second reading. The Work Committee on Legal Affairs of the Standing Committee of the NPC still had strong reservations about including the principle of party control of cadres in writing in the CSL. The committee continued to hold that the law should not comment on the party. The drafting team and the Law Committee of the NPC held a contrary view and argued that the writing of the principle into the CSL rightly reflects China’s national character and circumstances and simply formalizes a historical pattern: the party tightly controls leadership change and management at various levels. All in all, the CSL does not aim to change how the party and the state interact. Nor does it seek to change the rules of the game. (Interviews, May 2015)
Three vice chairpersons of the Standing Committee of the NPC (Wang Shaoguo, Gu Xiulian, Sheng Huaren) sided with the Law Office, although they were still unsure of the political implications. Finally, the chairman of the Standing Committee of the NPC, Wu Bangguo, made the decision to instruct the drafting team to write the principle of party control of cadres into Article 4 of the CSL (interviews, May 2015).
Conclusion
What can we learn from China’s experience in establishing a civil service system? A point of great interest for cross-national study is the extent to which Chinese reformers incorporated Western principles of civil service. In the contemporary world, reform ideas and solutions are shared globally. China’s reformers had studied Western civil service arrangements. This article provides evidence that some of them (such as Zhao Ziyang and his aides) did want to adopt some Western principles, as they understood or misunderstood them. But it is important to understand that the point of departure in considering these principles in China was fundamentally different from what it was in the West. China originally saw its problem as too much political concentration of power in the party, yet ended by embracing political concentration of power in the party as the solution. Clearly the point of departure in defining a reform objective will affect the trajectory of change, may subsequently alter the reform content, and, in some cases, reverse the reform process, as happened in the case of China’s civil service, analyzed here.
Second, at critical moments, political will is important, as evidenced in the case of Deng Xiaoping and Wu Bangguo. That having been said, what Deng Xiaoping had supported was an idea for change (the separation of the party from the government). Such an idea needs policy actors (in this case, the drafting team) to give substance to it, to show how it can adapt to local conditions, and to package it in such a way that it can withstand political challenges from all corners and gain support from key stakeholders. Wu Bangguo’s political will—to enshrine the principle of party control of cadres in the CSL of 2005—was brought to fruition primarily owing to the concerted efforts of the drafting team and their bargaining efforts with all the stakeholders. Without many years of hard work by the drafting team, the civil service reform effort would not have reached all the way to Wu Bangguo’s office for a decision that was so important to the CSL’s enactment in 2005. A single political champion cannot guarantee policy success—in this case, the promulgation of the CSL—it takes the combined effort of many players.
Third, this article also shows that Chinese bureaucrats inevitably strive to advance and protect their own policy agenda and interests. Similar to their counterparts in the West, Chinese bureaucrats have a strong preference for stability over changes. When changes are inevitable, they will make concerted efforts to contain the effects of those changes.
The final and perhaps the most important lesson to take away from this study is that the broad paths and patterns of China’s national political systems have limited the reform options open to both Chinese leaders and Chinese bureaucrats. Zhao Ziyang, Li Peng, and Zeng Qinghong all probed the extent to which the primacy of the party in the governmental administrative system could be reconfigured. Zhao Ziyang’s plan was seen to have undermined that primacy, and hence was regarded as unacceptable to most stakeholders. Li Peng’s overall approach represented a strong orientation to maintain the status quo. Zeng Qinghong’s approach sought not only to underscore the leading role of the party in cadre personnel management but also to legitimize the power and authority of the party in cadre selection and management by enacting the CSL. Through the enacting of that law, the principle of party control of cadres became the “state and legal will”—that is, state policy and legal intention. The three legislative principles underlying the CSL, which were approved by the Politburo Standing Committee on December 27, 2001, clearly stress the primacy of the party in the governmental administrative system and categorically state that a reformed Chinese civil service must steep itself in the cadre personnel management system. One might say that when the reform problems are perceived as “home grown,” the solutions must be, too.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author is indebted to David Rosenbloom, Guy Adams, and John Thomas for invaluable comments and suggestions.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research is funded by a small-scale grant from the City University of Hong Kong (Project no. 9610160) and a National Research Foundation of Korea grant funded by the Korean government (NRF-2014S1A3A2044630).