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