THE UNWRITTEN NORMS OF POLICY EXPERIMENTATION AT THE LOCAL LEVEL

Many of the Communist Party of China’s (CCP) reform policies are not explicitly stipulated. For example, Xi Jinping emphasises promoting outstanding cadres and giving them exceptional promotions. However, since Xi Jinping does not have a deep relationship with the Communist Youth League and does not trust the cadres of the Youth League enough, these special promotion regulations are not used for the cadres of the League enough. Second, Xi Jinping does not like the social welfare policies in China. He believes that China cannot raise lazy people (养懒汉). Therefore, the cadres in the social welfare department have relatively few opportunities to receive good promotions. On the contrary, it is the fields that Xi Jinping likes and attaches great importance to, such as science and technology, politics and law, where the cadres may be promoted faster than others. This is an unwritten rule to determine which cadres may be promoted quickly and which ones may not. That reflects Xi Jinping’s personal governance reasoning and preferences. 

A second example is related to the local cadre management approach during the Xi Jinping period. The selection and transfer of students has become a very important system. The local governments sign contracts with many well-known universities to allow selected graduates (选调生) to work in local governments. Most of them serve as the department level leading cadres and are responsible for the implementation of complex agendas, such as promoting investment, poverty alleviation, environmental protection, and stability maintenance. If these selected students do well, they may be quickly promoted to the county level. But, it is difficult to get promoted further beyond the county level. Xi Jinping hopes to have a large number of young and outstanding cadres working at the grassroots level, especially as the county leaders. However, it is not necessarily expected that these selected graduates will move on to the higher positions. In other words, this type of talent management policy uses selected students as a tool. Although they may serve as the county level leading cadres at the age of about thirty, they may work at the county level for more than twenty years to help Xi Jinping with local governance.

These remarks were presented by Dr. Wen-Hsuan Tsai at Global Conference for New Sinology (GCNS), 2024