The party–government relationship in the Chinese bureaucracy: Evidence from patterns of personnel flow

Abstract

The party–government relationship is central in the governance of the People’s Republic of China, with its key characteristic being the former’s dominance over the latter. Focusing on personnel management practices and the resulting patterns of personnel flow across positions and offices in the Chinese bureaucracy, we examine the party–government relationship in light of personnel flows across the party and government sectors, and the offices/bureaus and positions therein, in the context of a large, multilayered Chinese bureaucracy. Previous research in this field has evinced two different lines of inquiry. The first focuses on personnel flows in the Chinese bureaucracy, with an emphasis on individual-level career trajectories, mobility patterns, and associated incentive mechanisms, wherein party–government relations are given minimal attention. The second tends to provide descriptive or normative accounts of party–government relations and their historical evolution but has not examined these relations in a quantitative and analytical manner. Our study builds on and goes beyond these existing studies in several ways. First, we propose a perspective that focuses on personnel management and patterns of personnel flow across positions and offices in the party–government relationship. We take the existing party–government structures as our starting point and examine how personnel flow patterns, or the lack thereof, provide information on the degree of personnel mixing between, and the interconnectedness or separateness of, the party and government sectors, areas, and offices. Second, we develop a set of analytical dimensions and measures to capture different aspects of the party–government relationship, such as the degree of stability and specialization in party and government positions and offices. We also propose measures of personnel mixing and interconnectedness between party and government offices. Third, we apply these analytical dimensions and measures to systematically examine the multifaceted patterns of personnel flow and the resulting party–government relations in a large Chinese bureaucracy at the provincial, municipal, and county levels in an entire province, between 1990 and 2008, with over 40,000 key officials and over 300,000 person–year records. Our findings show that there are noticeable variations in patterns of personnel flow among party and government positions and offices, with the former experiencing higher rates of mobility and more generalist characteristics. On the other hand, we also find considerable mixing and interconnectedness among positions and offices between the party and government sectors. These findings suggest that, in the Chinese bureaucracy, party–government positions are organized into an integrated hierarchical order whose boundaries are formal in structure but fluid in terms of personnel flows, especially in those key positions in different administrative jurisdictions.