How the Communist Party of China works: a very brief summary
One of the most common questions people ask me about China is how the Chinese Communist Party works in practice.
By what criteria are CPC leaders promoted or demoted? How are local, provincial, and Beijing leaders selected? What is the relationship between Beijing and the provinces? How hierarchical is the system? How meritocratic is the system? Do personal networks matter?
This summary by Ezra Vogel in his biography of Deng Xiaoping is the clearest and shortest answer I have found to these questions:
China for centuries had been a centralized government with control over regional governments. Mao had further centralized these powers so that they extended deeply throughout the country. But Deng pulled back on the governing structure that tried to penetrate everywhere. Instead of setting tight rules that local areas had to follow, he established a system in which governing teams, selected by the next higher level, were given considerable independence as long as they managed to bring rapid growth.
The core governing structure in Beijing that Deng established is, as under Mao, centered around the Politburo and the Secretariat. It is linked to local areas through a network of party leadership teams (lingdao banzi) that is present in every locality and at every level of every major office of government. Each leadership team is responsible not only for directing the work of the Communist Party at its level, but also for overseeing the government office (or economic or cultural unit) under it. The team is expected to make judgments about broad overall issues and see to it that work within its jurisdiction makes an overall contribution to the four modernizations.
The higher levels of the party pass down rules for how the leadership teams should conduct their work and they send down endless numbers of directives to each level. They also hold meetings with lower levels, sometimes by inviting the lower-level leaders to attend higher-level meetings, but also by sending higher-level officials on inspection tours of the lower levels. When officials at the higher level consider an issue very important, they can and do intervene. But it is difficult for them to monitor all developments at the lower levels, so the team ordinarily has considerable freedom in guiding the work at its level.
The key leverage that Beijing has over the provinces is the power to appoint and dismiss the members of the leadership team. Team members commonly serve a term of several years, but they can be dismissed at any time by leaders at the next higher level. The several members of a party leadership team are given responsibility for different sectors and are judged not only by how well they manage their respective sectors, but also by how well the entire team and the unit it supervises perform. In Deng’s era and in the decades after Deng, those judgments were based overwhelmingly on how much the team contributed to China’s overall economic growth. Over the years, secondary criteria have become more important for judging the performance of the teams, criteria that include the training of the next generation of officials, environmental protection, managing disturbances, and responding to emergencies.
Like Deng, Deng’s successors believe that a sense of commitment to the overall goals of the nation can be achieved by the proper selection, training, and supervision of officials. Because officials at the next level down have a great deal of freedom over how they do their work, the selection and training of the members of a team are done with considerable care. At each level, younger officials judged likely to excel because of their overall intellectual ability, reliability under stress, mature judgment, ability to work well with colleagues, and dedication to serving the party and the country are picked for special training, mentoring, and testing.
Indeed, considerable time is spent mentoring officials at every level. A mentor’s role is to suggest to younger, lower-level officials how they should enhance their performance and skills. The most promising young officials are allowed to accompany their superiors to various high-level meetings and to take part in informal gatherings at party retreats. They are also permitted to attend classes at the party schools, with those judged with the most potential for national leadership positions taking courses at the Central Party School in Beijing, and those considered likely nominees for provincial or urban official positions taking leadership courses at the party schools in their respective regions. Not all party members, who numbered 37 million when Deng ascended the stage, shared the camaraderie that developed among those selected to attend retreats with higher officials and to become students at the party schools. Those who attended party schools not only got to know each other as well as those who attended the party school before and after, but also became acquainted with those higher-level officials who would visit the party schools and, with the help of evaluations by party school officials, make recommendations about their future positions. Although officials in the Organization Department kept personnel files and could make recommendations, the members of the party leadership team at each level made the final decisions about who should be promoted in their jurisdiction.
There is a danger in allowing local leaders so much freedom. The system that Deng founded, which endures today, emphasizes results more than following rules and helps nurture officials who have a broad vision in evaluating issues, who are entrepreneurial, and who support rapid growth. Without tight supervision from above, however, many of these officials have found ways not only to enrich China, but also to enrich themselves and their friends while alienating others in their locality.
(…)
By the time Deng stepped down, young party officials had to prove their ability by first passing examinations to the better high schools and better universities. Deng’s focus on meritocracy has deep roots in China, which was the first country in the world to select officials on the basis of their performance on examinations. Beginning in 605 c.e., during the Sui dynasty, China had used written examinations as the chief criterion for determining which aspiring candidates were qualified to become government officials. But from the time when the imperial examinations ended, in the year after Deng was born, until Deng ascended the stage, China had not had the combination of stability and leaders’ political determination to reestablish a national meritocratic basis for selecting officials. When Mao was alive it was impossible to use educational achievement as the major criterion for selecting officials. Many of those who had made contributions to the Communist cause and emerged in high positions simply had not had any opportunity for university training during the chaotic war and revolution years of the 1930s and 1940s. Furthermore, Mao considered political commitment (“redness”) a more important qualification than expertise, and he favored peasants and workers over candidates from the “bad classes” (landlord and capitalist families), who were generally better educated. For this reason, examinations were not the main criterion for selecting and promoting officials. Indeed, many of the officials after 1949 were veterans from the Communist armies or guerrilla forces who were barely literate. If examinations had been held, they and their children would not have outperformed the children from the “wrong social classes” who had received better formal training. After Mao’s death, Deng boldly dismissed a “good class background” as a criterion for selecting officials; instead he strictly relied on qualifications as measured by entrance examinations. Under new guidelines that Deng introduced in 1977, many children and grandchildren of those once labeled as belonging to the “bad classes” passed examinations, gained admission to the best universities, and became officials.
In fact, Deng established a system of highly competitive meritocratic examinations at each level, from elementary school through university to officialdom. His goal was not to produce social equality but to sift out the ablest and provide them with the best education possible. Examinations were given for entrance to elementary school, junior middle school (the equivalent of grades seven to nine in the United States), senior middle school (grades ten to twelve), and college, and those who made it into the most competitive schools were given the best teachers and facilities.
The unified examination system that Deng introduced in 1977 for universities was not only specifically for future officials. It was a system for selecting the ablest young people for large organizations in all walks of life. But all those selected as officials had first proved themselves in examinations at each educational level. Even among those who became officials, the ablest from the best universities would get jobs in the central government, whereas those who had gone to less competitive universities would start out at lower levels in the bureaucracy. As the number of university graduates rapidly increased in the late 1980s and beyond, additional exams became important for selecting government servants from among university graduates. Once selected as an official, however, one rose through the system not primarily by taking further examinations but on the basis of work performance. This system has been continued under Deng’s successors.