Staffing Leviathan: Homogenizing Cadre Management Across a Fragmented Local State

• In Event: City and Local Governance in China

Abstract

Using local organizational histories and yearbooks, we have constructed a dataset of over 50,000 local bureaucrats in Shanxi Province. This new database of Shanxi’s Communist Party, government, and military officials, extending from the provincial level to the township level and from the founding of the party to the present, allows us much deeper insights into temporal and geographic variation in Party personnel management than have been possible using previous datasets focused on central officials or Reform Period provincial and municipal chief executives. By shifting our focus to the rank-and-file, who tend to spend their entire careers in a single jurisdiction rather than transferring frequently from locale to locale, we shed light on periods of stability and instability in the bureaucracy. In particular, we show how the varied local experiences of the Cultural Revolution ended with a uniform and extensive changing of the bureaucratic guard in the early 1980s, which in turn gave way to increasingly routinized personnel management during the later Reform Period.

Authors

• Hao Chen, University of Southern California

• Saul Kriger Wilson, Harvard University