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.
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