Still My Vassal: Recentralized Authoritarianism, “Reducible” Bureaucracy, and Cadre Selection in China

• In Event: The Authoritarian Playbook: Tactics Across Time and Regime Type

Abstract

This study examines how an ever-increasing recentralized authoritarianism has reshaped the cadre selection and official promotion in Xi Jinping’s China. Focusing on the “Province in charge of Cadre Management, two levels down” (PCM) reform, a nationwide multi-stage reform aiming to recentralize personnel authority control, and based on the fieldwork and case study of the Organization Department of Province A, this article provides a systematically exploratory, descriptive and explanatory examination of China’s personnel recentralization reform. We present how a weak formal institutional design gradually transformed into an effective actual operation, extracting three core patterns from our empirical materials: the “Multiple Candidate Lists” system, the “Quantitative first, Qualitative next” process, and the “Selecting Competence from Loyalty” criteria. Our empirical findings include two aspects. First, in terms of the process, there is a structural shift toward rationalization, normalization, institutionalization, and standardization of cadre selection. Second, in terms of the result, the criteria for official promotion have become increasingly meritocratic, namely competence-oriented and performance-based, in which the loyalty to the political system as a whole is more of a bottom line and prerequisite, while the personal or factional informal connections have significantly declined. To identify the key mechanism, we introduce the concept of “reducible” bureaucracy, a simplified principal-agent relationship that empowers higher-level authorities (province) to have direct control rights over lower-level agents (county), bypassing the intermediate bureaucratic levels (prefecture).

Authors

• Shiyi Chen, Sun Yat-sen University

• Ze Cai, New York University