Chinese Journal of Sociology ›› 2020, Vol. 40 ›› Issue (2): 137-167.

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The Party-Government Relationship in the Chinese Bureaucracy: Evidence from Patterns of Personnel Flow

ZHOU Xueguang1, AI Yun2, GE Jianhua3, GU Huijun4, LI Ding5, LI Lan6, LU Qinglian7, ZHAO Wei8, ZHU Ling1   

  1. 1. Department of Sociology, Stanford University;
    2. School of Sociology and Psychology, Central University of Finance and Economics;
    3. Business School, Renmin University of China;
    4. Computational Communication Collaboratory, Nanjing University;
    5. School of Sociology and Population Studies, Renmin University of China;
    6. Institute of Higher Education, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Beijing University of Technology;
    7. College of Business, City University of Hong Kong;
    8. Department of Sociology, UNC-Charlotte
  • Published:2020-03-20

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Abstract: The party-government relationship is central in the governance of the People's Republic of China,with its key characteristic of the former dominating the latter. Focusing on personnel management practice and the resulting patterns of personnel flow across positions and offices in the party and government sectors,we examine the party-government relationship in light of personnel flows across the party-government sectors, and the offices/bureaus and positions therein, in a large Chinese bureaucracy.
Previous research shows 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 the associated incentive mechanisms. But the party-government relationships are given minimum attention. The second tends to provide descriptive or normative accounts of party-government relationships and their historical evolutions but has not examined these relationships in a quantitative and analytical manner.
Our study builds on and goes beyond these existing studies in several ways. First, we proposed a perspective that focuses on personnel management and patterns of personnel flow across positions and offices in the party and government sectors. We take the existing party-government structures as our starting point and examine how these personnel flow patterns, or the lack thereof, provide information on the infusion and interconnectedness, or distance and separateness, between the party-government sectors,areas,and offices.
Second,we developed a set of analytical dimensions and measures to capture different aspects of the party-government relationship,such as the extent of stability and specialization in the party and government positions and offices. We also proposed measures of the diffusion and interconnectedness among the party and government offices.
Third,we applied these analytical dimensions and measures to systematically examine the multifaceted patterns of personnel flow and the resulting party-government relationships 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 30 000 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 infusion and interconnectedness among positions and offices between the party and government sectors. These findings suggest that, in the Chinese governments, those 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.

Key words: party-government relationships, personnel flow, interconnectedness among offices, bureaucracy