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Abstract
Despite a consistent task to balance political, managerial, and legal values, China’s civil
service reform in the past three decades demonstrated a paradigmatic shift from a
conflict-oriented to harmony-oriented model. The 2005 Civil Service Law highlighted
a legal effort to institutionalize the coexistence of competing values. Such a shift was
justified by, besides the changed path of political reform, contextual factors including
the convergence of values, the strategy of decoupling, and the validated advantages of
a unified system. An examination of the post-2005 developments discloses complex
patterns of interaction between values across reform arenas, showing a limit to
the harmony-oriented model. Despite its capability to constrain outright conflicts,
China’s integrated political system faces an urgent demand of institutional capacities
to balance the competing values.
Keywords
civil service reform, values, reform models, Chinese human resource management
Introduction
China’s civil service reform was embedded in its incremental transition since 1978.
Serving China’s fast economic modernization, the building of a modern civil service
was meanwhile the Chinese Communist Party’s self-adjustment of its cadre personnel
management and hence an integral part of China’s political reform. Such a dual con-
text of civil service reform naturally raises a question about the compatibility between
its modernization motivations and political intentions.
1
Fudan University, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China
Corresponding Author:
Yijia Jing, School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University, 618 Wenke Building, 220
Handan Road, Shanghai 200433, People’s Republic of China
Email: jingyj@fudan.edu.cn
Jing and Zhu 135
Civil service reform was initiated in 1980 when Deng Xiaoping proposed four
General Principles of cadre team building as revolutionary, young, knowledgeable,
and professional. Reformers, believing that the Party’s micromanagement over the
bureaucracy had harmed the latter’s administrative capacity and thus the Party’s
138 Review of Public Personnel Administration 32(2)
years of deliberation, the incremental reform mentality led to the PRSCS as a partial
solution. Consequently, comprehensive cadre personnel management of the Party
continued. Since late 1989, a vice head of the Organizational Department would
assume the head of the Ministry of Personnel, which was left the authority to manage
nonleading governmental officials. Major regulations on public personnel manage-
ment, especially those on leading cadres, such as the 2002 Ordinance on the Selection
and Appointment of Party-Governmental Leading Cadres, were issued by the Party,
covering both civil servants and other cadres.
In comparison, the Outline to Deepen the Cadre Personnel Institution Reform,
issued by the Central Party Committee in 2000, provided comprehensive guidelines
for cadre personnel reforms. The Outline emphasized three principles: (a) The four
General Principles of cadre team building and a dual emphasis on virtue and talent;
(b) Party manages cadre; and (c) Rule by law (yi fa ban shi). These principles coin-
cided with the aforementioned three values and demonstrated a keen intention to
reconcile them. While the Outline mandated coherent leadership of the Party over
party-governmental cadres, enterprise cadres, and science and technology cadres, it
demanded specialized management institutions. Besides its promise to introduce
flexibility, competition, and exit mechanisms, it required improved rule making and
adjudication to prevent bureaucratism, nepotism, and corruption. The Outline gave
priority to building democratic and regular procedures, such as democratic recom-
mendation and appraisal, poll, quiet period before office taking, competition-based
selection and election, tenure system, probation, and resignation. The Outline gave a
strong signal that civil service reform should follow a route of party-led
rationalization.
experienced growing convergence. The one-party system and its long-term focus on
pragmatic goals have in effect depoliticized the bureaucracy and isolated it from
unscrupulous political intervention. Political loyalty of the officials is best mani-
fested by their activeness and performance in handling the challenges like China’s
reentry into the WTO in 2001, rampant corruption and distrust of the government,
citizens’ burgeoning right awareness, and emergence of complex social issues, rather
than by proactive involvement in politics like that during the Cultural Revolution.
Political leadership serves economic development, and vice versa. Other factors,
like the shifting characteristic of Chinese politics from class-based ideologies to
guanxi-based clientelism (Oi, 1985), and the emergence of bureaucratic fragmenta-
tion (Zhao, 1992), limit the strength and harm of political intervention.
Decoupling, as a detachment between adopted formal structures and real activities
(Meyer & Rowan, 1977), explains the selective imposition of political leadership and
its mild influences. Despite a consistent emphasis on political rightness, civil service
reform since the early 1990s never seriously retreated from a focus on rationalized
management. Politicians are aware that there is limit to political intrusion in profes-
sional issues and refrain from taking destructive actions. Meanwhile, gaps between
formalities and contents in adopting rationalized management often exist. Announcing
a reform often symbolizes effective leadership as an alternative to action (Dong,
Christensen, & Painter, 2010; March & Olson, 1983). The mere attraction of attention
helps claim credits and legitimacy, and avoids confronting internal power discourse in
cadre personnel management. The logic of confidence and good faith, as suggested by
Meyer and Rowan (1977), looms large in China’s civil service reform that features
celebrations of superficial success as well as easy neglect of failures.
Third, the CSL’s juxtaposition of values also reflected the increasing confidence
and experiences of the Party in controlling the bureaucracy. A unified political leader-
ship did not necessarily constrain rationalized management. As Wilson (1887, p. 202)
argued more than one hundred years ago, “the desire to keep government a monopoly”
led to enthusiasm “in discovering the least irritating means of governing.” The large-
scale downsizing and structural reforms in 1993 and 1998 demonstrated the capacity
of the political leadership in shaping the bureaucracy. Such capacity was also strength-
ened by China’s continuous economic growth and fiscal affluence. Between 2000 and
2007, China’s annual growth rate of fiscal revenues was 18%, affording discretionary
funds to compensate the losers of the reforms, for example, by sending laid-off civil
servants to universities for postgraduate studies.
Recruitment
The CSL stipulates a two-stage competitive examination in recruiting nonleading civil
servants at or below section chief level (ke ji), including those transferred from state-
owned enterprises or military force. Table 1 shows the intensifying competition.
A major recent change in recruitment was the qualification requirement on grass-
roots working experience.2 Since the Ministry of Personnel started pilot exams in
1989, the emphasis on knowledge and IQ has overwhelmingly favored fresh univer-
sity graduates. Human capital in governments was significantly enhanced.3 The grow-
ingly elite-oriented bureaucracy posed a threat to the Party’s mass line. In Hu Jintao’s
report to the 17th National Congress of the Party in 2007, he warned the deteriorating
grassroots governance and called for promoting excellent cadres at the grassroots level
and the front line of production to enrich party-governmental agencies.
Besides a quest for bureaucratic representativeness, openness, and political patron-
age, the new emphasis was also justified by the merit principle. Overemphasis on
exam performance had led to a modern Ke ju zhi and seriously hindered cadres from
understanding complex public affairs, making and implementing policies, and adapt-
ing to specialized work.4 This is especially harmful for central agencies that make
national policies. Furthermore, direct recruitment of students to central, provincial,
and municipal governments reduces the upward mobility of grassroots civil servants
and demoralizes these “street-level bureaucrats” (viz., civil servants employed by
county and township/street governments) that account for about 60% civil servants.
Such congruence of values induced quick actions. Provincial and central recruits
with grassroots working experience reached 50% in proportion in 2008. In 2009, it
rose to be 70% for central agencies and 60% for provincial agencies. In Shanghai,
municipal agencies have stopped recruiting fresh university graduates since 2008.
Position Classification
Position classification is the precondition for specialized personnel management.
Article 14 of the CSL lists three categories: comprehensive management (CM),
142 Review of Public Personnel Administration 32(2)
Compensation
Cadre compensation under the planned economy featured a fundamental emphasis on
equality. Before 1993, civil servant income included basic wage, position wage, rank
wage, seniority wage, and subsidies, whose standards were nationally unified. Since
the 1993 tax assignment reform, local governments were allowed to offer subsidies to
their employees. Fiscal decentralization proliferated local subsidies, resulting in
income imbalance between civil servants and other social groups, and between civil
servants in different regions and agencies. In 2004 civil servants in Shanghai received
Jing and Zhu 143
Year Wage income (RMB) Nonwage income (RMB) Total income (RMB)
1995 8,719 (48.2%) 9,367 (51.8%) 18,086 (100%)
1996 9,939 (46.4%) 11,501 (53.6%) 21,440 (100%)
1997 11,120 (41.7%) 15,556 (58.3%) 26,676 (100%)
1998 12,803 (42.7%) 17,213 (57.3%) 30,016 (100%)
1999 15,222 (45.1%) 18,536 (54.9%) 33,758 (100%)
2000 17,374 (46.1%) 20,321 (53.9%) 37,695 (100%)
2001 18,500 (40.6%) 27,019 (59.4%) 45,519 (100%)
2002 20,445 (37.6%) 33,864 (62.4%) 54,309 (100%)
2003 20,438 (33.5%) 40,643 (66.5%) 61,081 (100%)
2004 22,529 (33.8%) 44,042 (66.2%) 66,571 (100%)
Source: Shanghai Municipal Government (2005).
annual income of cadres at or beyond deputy division level qfu chu ji). In 2009,
Chongqing required leading officials in courts and procuratorates to disclose such
information on designated web sites and local news papers. The weak political com-
mitment led to a fragmented reform free of external oversight.
may converge or diverge in different aspects or stages of a reform. When values con-
flict, inertia and implementation deficits appear exactly like the western democracies.
Biased priorities assigned to these values often explain the failures of both the Chinese
bureaucracy and its reform.
This article leaves further directions for future studies. A fundamental issue is to
explore the limit of a unified system to accommodate competing values. While a
check-and-balance system is subject to fission, an integrated system is subject to
entropy (Hirschman, 1970). Historically, degradation of a unified system, especially
due to corruption, proved to be an inescapable disease that could ruin the regime’s
capacity of value balancing and led to unrestrained disasters and system collapse. A
big question for civil service reform in an integrated system like China is how institu-
tional innovations can be induced or tolerated to engender “creative destructions” and
self-rejuvenation forces. As can be found that the supportive contextual factors of a
harmony-oriented model are all dynamic and the equilibrium clung to these factors is
weak and unreliable. Further differentiation of values is unavoidable. Decoupling is
not viable when the system’s slack diminishes and the bottom line of any value is hit.
A unified system may also be efficient in making terrible blunders. These situations
are all real and can be more real as the reform deepens. Besides other methods of
inquiries, we recommend comparative studies between China and Asian countries like
Japan, South Korea, and Singapore that share common cultural roots and similar mod-
ern history. By comparing China with countries located in between regarding their
forms of political system, the proposed value-framework may be further tested and
enriched.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the Major Program of the
National Social Science Foundation of China (10zd&009).
Notes
1. The Four Basic Principles are socialism, proletarian dictatorship, Marxist–Leninism and
Mao Zedong Thoughts, and Party’s leadership.
2. Grassroots working experience refers to a 2-year working experience outside the civil ser-
vice or at its grassroots level.
3. The proportion of civil servants with a college diploma or beyond rose from 30% to 86%
between 1992 and 2007. Data are from the talk by Yin Weimin, the Minister of Human
Resources and Social Security, on March 3, 2009, available at www.gov.cn.
4. Ke ju zhi was the state exam institution to select governmental officials in ancient Chinese
dynasties (Jing, 2010). It was blamed for the pendantic nature of the Chinese bureaucracy.
Jing and Zhu 147
5. The data are from a talk by Li Yuanchao, the Chief of the Central Organizational Depart-
ment, on Dec 13, 2009.
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Bios
Yijia Jing is professor and assistant dean of School of International Relations and Public
Affairs, Fudan University. He researches privatization, governance, civil service, and adminis-
trative reform. He is director of Center for Collaborative Governance Research at Fudan
University and editor in chief of Fudan Public Administration Review. His recent articles are
published on Public Administration and Development and Public Administration Review.
Qianwei Zhu is professor and chair of the Department of Public Administration, School of
International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University. He researches public administra-
tion theories, human resource management, and civil service reform. He has authored and
coauthored 5 books and more than 40 journal articles.