Divide and Connect: Inter-Administration Mobility of Political Elites in Reform China

Shilin Jia

Department of Sociology, University of Chicago

Introduction

Division and connection are both essential and necessary components of any large-scale social organism. Division facilitates the efficiency of a system and differentiates its elements into different roles and domains. On the other hand, connection is needed for integrating different elements across social spaces via a social structure to prevent the system from falling apart. As stated in Durkheim ([1933] 1997, 84)’s classical work the Division of Labor in Society, there is an inherent tension between the two seemingly contradictory forces. One big challenge for a modern complex social organism is to figure out how these two contradictory forces could work together. In a large and complex social entity, an essential channel through which division and connection are enforced is career flows of personnels. Due to need for specialization and efficiency, people’s career trajectories would tend to be separated into different domains in which they can stay focused on and develop their expertise. On the other hand, a career transfer across domains could facilitate informational exchange and bring benefits to both the involved individual and the organization (Kleinbaum 2012; Zuckerman et al. 2003). One often neglected point is that these two forces are actually inter-dependent. Career transfers, which can be seen as network ties between different subunits of a system, are always acts of division (decoupling) and connection (coupling) (White 2008, 2). Every move entails not only presence but also absence of ties. Whether a move is an act of connection or division depends on its topological relationship with other moves (Granovetter 1973). Thus, understanding how a system is divided and connected requires knowing a history of a dynamic process that is always built upon antecedent moves. Such a dynamical perspective is especially needed when the subject of a study was un- dergoing significant structural change. A typical case is the transformation of the party state of China during the past 30 to 40 years. China’s unique experience of liberalizing its economy under a communist party dictatorship has surprised and puzzled many of its outside

1 observers. During the course of the transformation, the party state evolved from a Soviet- style centrally planned system into a multifaceted Leviathan with increasing geographical and functional differentiation, and the change in its mode of production has produced phe- nomenal economical growth. Conventional wisdom in organizational studies suggests that as modern organizations expand and begin to face increasingly complex environments, changes from centrally coordinated systems to decentralized and multi-divisional forms of governance become necessary (Chandler 1990; Fligstein 1985). Some economic scholars have argued that China’s economic reform indeed followed such a path (Qian, Roland, and Xu 1999; Xu 2011). Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party(CCP) has maintained its monopoly of power after three rounds of peaceful leadership transition. Economic decentralization did not lead to regime change. It has been proposed that the secret of the party state’s reform is economic decentralization, on the one hand, and centralized personnel control through its nomenklatura system on the other hand (Landry 2008, 79; L. C. Li 2010; Naughton and Yang 2004; Xu 2011; Zheng 2007, 53). The nomenklatura system that the CCP borrowed from its Soviet brother ensures that party leaders on each level of administration has final authority in deciding the appointment of lower-level posts down its administrative hierarchy. Party leaders can thus maintain political control of their subordinates through shuffling their positions. Inside a political institution, career trajectories of political elites delineate how power is delegated and congealed. Controlling the career trajectories of elites is definitely an effective means of maintaining control. That being said, the nomenklatura system itself, the rules of which have been relatively fixed, says nothing about how the party should direct the flows of its elites. As already explained, every system is built upon division and connection which generate two contradictory forces, a centrifugal force that tends to pull different elements apart and a centripetal force that tries to put them together. During the reform era, decentralization in mode of production was an urgent task for the party state to transform itself away from a centrally-planned system while what happened in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe constantly reminded the CCP to not go too much further and lose control (Landry 2008, 25). How did these two forces work together in the CCP’s personnel management? Very few systematic accounts have been given for the changing topological structures of the party state’s elite shuffling and their effects. Division and connection are topological properties that can be only understood on a systematic level when all moves are examined in relation with each other. Network coupling and decoupling are stochastic processes that are contingent upon antecedent moves and do not necessarily always follow a prescribed plan (Slez and Martin 2007). A full network of career moves and a dynamic perspective are needed for understanding how the party state has been divided and connected through the career trajectories of its elite members. Also, in a system with a fixed roster, career transfers are

2 always constrained by availability of vacancies. People cannot freely move inside the system, and career moves are generated by antecedent moves in vacancy chains (White 1970). Career moves can only be fully understood in light of how vacancies are distributed. Availability of data is a big challenge for studying such a system. This study overcomes this challenge by utilizing a unique dataset made possible by machine-assisted coding of the CVs of over 8000 top-level CCP elites. Their career moves over the period from 1978 to 2012 are tracked, and the moves span all important units of the party state. The moves are pieced together in vacancy chains. A common way in which local formations/divisions are integrated into a national system is through pecking orders in transitive relations (Martin 2009, 104-105,232-320), or more generally, a structural equivalence (White 2008, 7). This study documents an opposite trend. Analyses of the career moves and vacancy chains reveal a significant shift in mobility patterns from centralized functional coordination toward functional differentiation, and the main domain of activities shifted from ministries to provinces, which conforms to common understanding of the reform. However, to counter-balance this centrifugal force, the system did not rewire in a status hierarchy or any sophisticated structural equivalence. The mobility networks became increasingly cyclic. Transfers, especially among provincial administrations, became more frequent, and the most striking feature of the inter-provincial networks is their structurelessness. A closer look at the vacancy chains reveals the generating mechanisms of this change. The supply of initial vacancies shifted from provinces to ministries, and vacancy chains became consistently longer and longer over time. Ultimately, connection and division are all about survival. A major characteristics of this era is that the CCP also underwent “metabolic” transformations. Revolutionary cadres were replaced by younger generations of bureaucrats. Personnel management was not just a matter of control but also a process in which future leaders were selected. This study finds co-evolution of the party and its elite members in cohort replacement. New generations of bureaucrats trained as socialist engineers climbed up to the top of the institution through vacancy chains generated initially by retirement of old party cadres. The transformation was never taken place in a shock therapy but only gradually through homophily in the predecessors and successors, which guaranteed the continuity of the transformation. The paper will proceed in the following fashion. First, a historical account of the party state’s institutional transformation will be given, and its puzzles will be presented. After explaining methodological innovations in data collection, the paper will then proceed into descriptive analyses. Based on the descriptive patterns revealed by the empirical analyses, theories and evidences of why they could have emerged will be provided. Finally, the paper will discuss the implications of the empirical findings.

3 China’s Institutional Transformation and Its Puzzles

The Soviet Prototype

The blueprint of the central planning system of the party state of China came from its Soviet brother. Born at the time of the second industrial revolution and impressed by the giant factories that emerged in the industrialized West, Lenin, Stalin and their Bolshevik fellows envisioned their whole socialist country as a gigantic corporation ran efficiently by central planning rather than market mechanisms. As explained by Daniel Chirot (1991), the tragedy of communism was that it actually succeeded. The Soviet Union became the world’s most advanced economy in heavy industry, but its system also became too big to change. As new waves of industrial revolution came, it became increasingly inefficient and unable to adapt to new environment. Gorbachev launched glasnost in the hope of relaxing the system but unintentionally triggered its disintegration. Under central planning, the production of a system is not adjusted according to market fluctuation but commands from the top. The system allows concentration of huge volumns of resources to areas selected by the planners (Naughton 1995, 26). An essential aspect that was however not intended in the design but tuned out to be essential to the functioning of the system is its social fabric (Padgett 2012, 272). A system cannot run distribution of resources by itself but needs to be mobilized by a bureaucracy of personnels that tends to develop a vested interest of its own. Such a system would only work if its interest is in alignment with that of its elite members. For example, after the Great Purge, using the newly generated vacancies in the Soviet system, Stalin promoted a whole generation of ’red engineers’, and the upward mobility of this generation also paved the way to the Soviet success in heavy industry (282-284). On the other hand, when the need for reform is in conflict with the career interests of elites, problems arise. Frustrated by the sheer inertia of the Soviet bureaucracy, Gorbachev unleashed the force of civil society to push forward his glasnost, which, out of his expectation, teared the Soviet Union apart (See McFaul (2001, 33-60)).

The Chinese Version and Its Reform

Scholars have argued that the central planning system of China was never as rigid as that of the Soviet Union. For one thing, China was much poorer than the Soviet Union, and the Chinese economy was still largely rural at the beginning of the reform (Naughton 1995, 38). Also, Mao Zedong was always suspicious of the Soviet bureaucratic system. Rapid centralization after the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) soon made Mao and his comrades ﬁnd lack of motivation in production at the local level. To arouse enthusi- asm in production, massive decentralization was carried in 1957, and production tasks were

4 delegated to provinces (Zhao 1994). What followed was however the Great Leap Forward and its huge failure. Recentralization than took place with Liu Shaoqi seizing the control of the state administration but also bred seeds to Mao’s Cultural Revolution. In 1966, Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as a continued revolution allegedly against the class of bureaucrats and successfully eliminated his rivals by mobilizing the Red Guards to overthrow the state bureaucracy. From provinces to ministries, many party leaders were purged, and the Cultural Revolution had devastating effects on the PRC’s bureaucratic structure. As a consequence, after Mao’s death in 1976, China did not have a strong and unified bureaucracy, and this has been seen as an important precondition for the success of the economic reform that happened afterwards although the Cultural Revolution itself was not mainly about economic matters (Shirk 1993, 13). In the 1980s, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, China initiated its reform turning away from command economy. A major characteristic of the reform is that it was not carried with a coherently laid-out plan (Naughton 1995, 22). Unlike Mao, Deng was a pragmatist and was never over-concerned about ideological orthodoxy (Vogel 2011, 377-393). The reform did not take place in any shock therapy but very gradually with “trial and error” and political bargaining within the party (Shirk 1993, 16). Fiscal decentralization was carried on, special economic zones were set up, and regional experimentation was encouraged. The central planning system and the ministries that were in charge of it were not abandoned at once but preserved under a “dual-track” system in which a plan mechanism and a growing market mechanism coexisted for a long time while the state planners were still in charge of the transition (Naughton 1995, 8). In fact, the term “market” was not legitimized in official doctrines until the early 1990s, and many central planning ministries continued to exist into the 1990s. According to Padgett (2012)’s theorization, due to party factionalism after the Cultural Revolution, Deng was able to play ”robust action” across party factions as a broker, and his brokerage role was a key to CCP’s success in making such a gradual transition.

Answers and Puzzles in Personnel Control

In a comparative perspective, China’s institutional transformation poses an anomaly. Landry (2008, 3) found that during the reform, the PRC had become one of the most decentralized countries in the world in terms of the subnational share of total government expenditures. While ﬁscal decentralization has been strongly associated with democracy and federalism in the world, China remained to be a unitary state governed by the one-party rule of the CCP (9). Deng’s unique role as a charismatic broker might account for why the decentralization process could be skillfully controlled in its initial stage, but after Deng’s retirement and

5 death, the process has continued with three rounds of peaceful leadership transitions taking place in party congresses in every ten years. Given that a broker is by definition structurally irreplaceable, fragmentation would very likely become a big problem after the central figure is gone. It was exactly the problem of the post-Bismarck Germany that Max Weber (1978, 1385-92) was worried about and was characterized by him as the problem of “the routiniza- tion of charisma”.1 How was the Chinese system then rewired into a structure that was conducive to sustaining itself? Centrifugal forces have indeed always been a problem in Chinese politics. Functionally, as the party state’s policy goals became more pluralistic, bureaucratic fragmentation has been observed as a potential issue in connecting its different domains (Lieberthal 1992). Geographically, elite factionalism and economic localisms could also be a serious problem hindering the development of a national market (Li and Bachman 1989). Where is then the centripetal force in the system through which the CCP can centralize power? Scholars have argued that the secret lies in the CCP’s strict personnel management, known as the nomenklatura system (Landry 2008, 79; L. C. Li 2010; Naughton and Yang 2004, 9; Xu 2011; Zheng 2007, 53). The term nomenklatura has its origin in the Soviet Union. In Chinese it is called dangguan ganbu yuanze. It essentially specifies a list of important positions that party committees on each administrative level have direct authority in making appointment of. The list covers a wide array of government and non-government positions including heads of executive, legislative and judicial branches and party organs, managers of large SOEs (state-owned enterprises) and banks, principals of GONGOs (government-organized non-governmental organization), like guilds, worker’s unions and women’s confederations, and even editors-in- chief of major newspapers. The nomenklatura system is a major organizational pillar that the CCP relies on (Zheng 2010, 103-107). The CCP, as a Leninist Party by design, is an elitist organization.2 In China, almost all important positions on all administrative levels are held by CCP members. Being able to control and strategically reshuffle the careers of party elite members across different domains is definitely an effective means of retaining party authority, and empirical evidences have been found in both quantitative and qualitative assessments (Edin 2003; Landry 2008, 53). Studies also show that transfers of high-level party cadres across regions facilitated inter-regional economic cooperation (Xu, Wang, and Shu 2007). However, the rules of the nomenklatura system have been considerably stable in the party

1. Weber’s critique of Bismarck was that Bismarck made the German Bureaucracy so dependent on him such that after Bismarck, Germany had only bureaucrats but no politicians. Just as Weber was worried about, without a skillful politician like Bismarck, the ever-growing and internal inconsistency of the German bureaucracy led the German Empire to its defeat in the World War I. 2. Unlike Marx, Lenin (1963) envisions the communist party as professional revolutionary vanguards organized under strict party disciplines to lead proletarian revolutions.

6 history. The only major rule change that took place during the period of interest happened in 1984. Before the change, the Central Committee of the CCP was responsible for making appointment two levels down the administrative hierarchy. After that, the authority was restrained to one-level-down.3. The reform was seen as a decentralization effort to relax the system (Landry 2008, 46-50; Zheng 2010, 107) Although the party tried to re-centralize some of its authority after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, and the list of positions specified by the system has changed from time to time, the basic rules of the system has not been significantly modified since then (Burns 1994; Landry 2008, 50-51; Zheng 2010, 107). The nomenklatura system itself is not really a variable. It does not say anything about how party cadre’s career trajectories should be strategically directed and maneuvered. The ability to reshuffle personnels is also not unique in communist China. Appointment through an administrative hierarchy is common in modern organizations, and in China, reshuffling of officials had always been an important control technique back to the days of imperial dynasties (Yeung 2007, 32). In the history of the Soviet Union, different general sec- retaries of the communist party all had different strategies of using the Soviet nomenklatura system (Landry 2008, 21). Thus, although the nomenklatura system is a very powerful tool, what should be more important is how it functions in practice, which is the subject of this study. The CCP’s personnel management has always been a very hot area of research. An obvious question to study is who get promoted to the very top of the system. For instance, educational credentials, factional ties and homophily with top leaders have been found to be important factors behind party cadres’ chances of getting promoted (Opper, Nee, and Brehm 2015; Shih, Adolph, and Liu 2012). Some studies have also focused on the paths they took to get promoted. There have been found various formal and informal rules guiding the career paths of party elites. Term limit is one major factor. Formally, the Constitution of the PRC restricts many government posts to be held for no more than two terms (10 years). For party posts, there is no explicit rule written in the Party Constitution with regard to term limits. But the Central Organization Department of the CCP has issued various editions of “Regulations on Selecting and Appointing Leading Cadres of the Party and Government” in 1995, 1999, and 2002 specifying that a leading cadre in a local party committee or government must be rotated if he has stayed in a post for 10 years (Bo 2004, 85; C. Li 2004, 62). Besides term limit, there is also avoidance principle. Party regulations demand that party cadres should not hold offices in their hometown after the first term (Bo 2004, 84). C. Li (2004, 62-63) also found that there was a strong tendency to restrict provincial top leaders to non-natives.

3. Below the Central Committee, one level down is the provincial/ministerial (sheng/bu) level. Two-level- down would include the municipal/bureau (shi/ju) level.

7 Retirement policy is another major constraint on party elite’s careers. Elite circulation can hardly be implemented if there are no vacancies to be filled. Retirement of elder politicians is a major source of supply of vacancies. The governing rules of retirement have been largely informal. During Mao’s era, party elites held lifelong tenures unless they were purged. Starting in the 1980s, Deng initiated effort to systematically retire senior political leaders. Clear-cut age limit started to be enforced in the 1990s. The cut-off age for being selected into the politburo has been first set to 70 and then lowered down to 68. For ministers and governors who do not get further promoted, the retirement age has been set to 65. These rules are not written but have been observed to be consistently enforced in recent decades (Bo 2007, 17-27). Formal and informal rules provide institutional constraints on elite circulation, but be- yond the rules, there is still a lot of space for maneuver. There have been very few systematic studies of spatial and temporal patterns in CCP’s elite transfers, and this paper attempts to uncover this unknown area. Particularly, the paper follows two threads. First, production always has something to do with division of labor, and the question is: how was change in mode of production reflected in change in personnel flows? Second, as already explained, despite the need to divide different party cadres into different roles and domains, there is a need to reshuffle their careers so that the system remains connected. How was this done in practice? Transfers are not just constraints but also opportunities. One major characteristic of the reform era is that the transformation of the party state was also a “metabolic” one. During this era, the CCP became one of the few authoritarian regimes in the world that successfully institutionalized leadership transition (Jiang and Zhang 2017, 7). Old party cadres who had early revolutionary experience in the founding of the PRC were replaced by younger generations of bureaucrats who started their careers after the PRC was founded (Lee 1991). In addition to controlling its elite members, the party also needed to develop and train its future generations of leaders. An important part of the CCP’s training of its elites was through accumulating work experiences in different administrations, and having such kind of experience has also become an important criterion for promotion to top positions in the Politburo (Kou 2010, 15-16). Thus, inter-administration transfers became channels through which party cadres ascended to the top of the system, and along with these transfers, there was also a co-evolution of party elites. A particular phenomenon that is worth mentioning is that a large proportion of top leaders in these new generations were trained as engineers in college and also began their early careers as engineers in central planning agencies, and for this reason, they were often described as technocrats. For instance, 16 out of 20 top leaders who served in the Politburo

8 Standing Committee from 1992 to 2012, had professional background in engineering. Con- ventional wisdom suggests that the trend was attributed to the regime’s need for science and technology during the reform period (Lee 1991, 400). Andreas (2009) argues that because many technocrats and old revolutional cadres were purged in the Cultural Revolution, their common experience pushed them forming an alliance in the reform period. However, after two decades of rule by engineers, in the 18th party congress, engineers suddenly disappeared, and only 1 out of the 7 new Politburo Standing Committee members began his career as an engineer. This reversing trend continued in the 19th Party Congress held in 2017. The two decades of rule by engineers were also the period in which many central planning ministries ﬁnally got dismantled. Unlike the Soviet Union where bureaucrats in central planning ministries developed vested interest against market reform, China’s institutional transformation after Deng Xiaoping was carried by technocrats who were trained as socialist engineers. How could a system be reformed by its products? Investigation of the transformation of the system would not be complete without knowing how it is related to the incentives of its members. Changing dynamics between the evolution of the nomenklatura system and the evolution of its elites are thus a third important thread this paper follows.

Network Approach

Social mobility and social structure are “paired concepts” (Breiger 1990, 6). Over time, inter- administration moves of CCP elites form a dynamic network, which reveals the structure of the system. Studying each of the moves in isolation would not yield insight on what the structure looks like. Also, a social structure is not just about how a system is connected but also how it is divided, characterized by absence of ties. A classical example is the structure of brokerage, as analyzed in Padgett and Ansell (1993)’s study of the rise of the Medici in Renaissance Florence. Cosimo de’ Medici turned his party network into a state by establishing ties with other families and also segregating his dependents into diﬀerent social spaces. The structural advantage of a broker is established upon not only the connections he has but also the lack of connections his associates have. Division and connection are relational and topological properties that can be understood only when all moves are examined in relation with each other. In network terminologies, they are referred as “coupling” and “decoupling”. In Harrison White (2008, 36)’s words, “coupling describes the way in which diﬀerent parts of social structure are interlinked to work together, whereas decoupling designates the processes that lead each part to deal with some aspects of the ‘work’ and ignore others”. Because the structural position of every move depends on its relationship with other

9 Figure 1: Illustration of a vacancy chain moves, coupling and decoupling processes sometimes can be hardly planned. One study that illustrates the stochastic nature of coupling and decoupling processes is Slez and Martin (2007)’s study of party formation in the United States Constitutional Convention. The authors found that the coalition structure that the Constitutional Convention ended up with was largely crystallized by the constitution-writing process itself. The decision that each state delegation made at each step was contingent upon interdependent moves made by other players. The outcome cannot be inferred from the initial positions without knowing the process. Decoupling from somewhere entails embedding into somewhere else (White 2008, 2). In a system, centripetal and centrifugal forces usually coexist. For instance, in Gomez and Parigi (2015)’s study of intergovernmental organization (IGO) networks, in stead of just seeing a single trend of regionalization or globalization, the authors found both in an oscillating pattern. According to their finding, every centripetal action initiated by a global IGO was counterbalanced by a centrifugal action initiated by regional IGOs, which resulted in structural fluctuations. During China’s transformation, the tension between centrifugal forces and centripetal forces had always existed, and the transformation was a transformation “out of plan.” In this study, the career moves of CCP elites would be treated as a stochastic network, and its changing coupling an decoupling patterns are to be revealed. Job-mobility networks oftentimes have a special constraint. In a system where the number of positions is fixed, career moves are contingent upon availability of vacancies. A person cannot freely move inside the system and can only move to a position where there is a vacancy. On the other hand, vacancies can freely move inside such a system (White 1970, 2). A vacancy can be filled by a person from any unit in the system, which would generate another vacancy to be filled. Thus, career moves are really generated by chained vacancies as shown in Figure 1. Tracking vacancy chains can help to better understand how career moves are generated, and for this reason, generating mechanisms of vacancies will also be investigated.

10 Data and Methods

There has long been methodological difficulties in studying CCP elite politics. To outside observers, the CCP’s elite politics has always been seen as a “black box” because of its lack of transparency. This study is made possible by large volumes of newly available data gathered through computer-assisted coding. There are various official and third-party databases that keep track of CCP elites’ career trajectories. The database of choice is the Chinese Political Elite Database maintained by National Chengchi University (NCCU) in Taiwan. NCCU was formerly the Kuomingtang (the ruling party of China before the communist takeover in 1949)’s party cadre school and is renowned for CCP studies. The NCCU database supple- ments official ones with more accurate information (Center for China Studies 2015). The CVs contain all of the official positions each party elite has held and the starting and ending dates of the positions. As of 15 Feb. 2015, which was the date the author last updated the data, the database contained CVs of 8172 CCP political elites and was still continually being updated. According to its website, it contained CVs of Chinese political elites who had at least reached the level of vice-governor or vice-minister since 1990 and elites who had reached the level of governor or minister or above since 1966. All of the CVs are largely uncoded and presented as webpages. The author wrote a Python script to download all of the information displayed on each webpage including biographical information, e.g. sex, date of birth, level of education, etc, educational experiences, and job entries. Each entry corresponds to a job experience in a particular time period and has a starting date, an ending date, and a job description. The coding algorithm contains two parts, which are respectively to recognize the geographical (provincial) and functional (ministerial) unit in which each job experience took place. For simplicity, the author restricted ministerial coding to only positions within central ministries in Beijing. Numerous ministerial units have existed in the history of the PRC and many of them have ceased to exist. The coding strategy is that as long as the official name of a ministerial unit is distinct, it is counted as a distinct unit. Functional administrations, broadly defined, are not restricted to ministries in the State Council but also include party organs, non-government organizations, state-owned enterprises, and any institutions that enjoy the rank of a ministry or a vice-ministry. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is excluded from this study because job transfers between civilian posts and military posts are almost nonexistent in the reform era. Non-CCP politicians are also excluded from the study. Honorary positions and part-time jobs are not coded. Exact details and reasons behind the coding algorithm are provided in Appendix A. Machine-coding all job entries correctly is a very difficult job. The original database was compiled by different research assistants employed by NCCU, and the CVs also came from

11 heterogeneous sources so the formats of job descriptions vary. Different abbreviations can stand for the same position, and the same abbreviation can stand for different positions. Therefore, the author spent a very long time manually checking the coded results. In each round of error check, the author would draw a random sample of 100 political cadres from the full database, manually check all of their job experiences and mark down errors. After finding all mistakes in a sample, the author would correct the coding algorithm and let the machine to recode the data. Then, another round of sample check would be performed. The author totally did at least eight rounds of sample check. According to the last sample check, the success rate of the machine-coded result is about 97%. Details of the sample checks are provided in Appendix B. A Python script was then written to extract career flows among provincial and ministerial units from the coded data. If an individual held consecutive jobs in two different administrations, a transfer from the first administration to the second one was coded. There are a few cases where multiple positions were coded with respect to the same job entry. Details of how the network extraction algorithm worked are provided in Appendix C. A check of the results based on the last sample drew from the whole database is shown in Appendix B. Tracking vacancy chains is even more difficult. It requires knowing non only the origin, destination and time of each career move but also whether one move is a replacement of another move. To find out all vacancy chains, The author first wrote a script filtering out all potential replacement moves of each move based on match in time and origin/destination and also fuzzy match in job descriptions. Then the author closely read each potential match to see if it is an exact match. If a vacancy is filled by a person inside the same administration, the search algorithm and data structure would not allow the author to detect it. However, the replacement would nevertheless generate a new vacancy that needs to be filled. If another person from a different administration fills that vacancy, the algorithm and matching procedure would still be able to capture it. One bonus from tracking vacancy chains is that it helps to estimate the completeness of the data. Two questions can be answered. How often does a move appear to be a terminal move (that has no subsequent move) because the successor of the last vacancy is not included in the database? How often does a move appear to be an initial move (that has no predecessor move) because the predecessor of the first vacancy is not included in the database? An initial move is truly an initial move if and only if its predecessor retired or moved outside the system (for instance to a higher position outside the scope of this study, for instance the vice premier of the state). A terminal move is truly a terminal move if and only if the last vacancy was internally absorbed by the last administration or left outside the system. All other cases would be due to data missingness. During the manual check, the

12 author found only very few cases of data missingness. Details are provided in Appendix D.

Descriptive Findings

In this paper, cross-sectional network graphs are used for analyses4. Each cross-section corresponds to a term of party congress (5 years). In each network, nodes are the geographical and functional administrations of the party state. Directed edges are transfers among the units. During the 35 years of interest, many administrations (mostly ministerial) were dis- solved, split, merged, or renamed, which could generate automatic transfers of jobs. The author simpliﬁed the graphs by deleting automatic transfers. Table 1 gives length distributions of vacancy chains by periods5. It can be observed that marginal supply of vacancies had been relatively constant. However, there is one consistent trend in the change in percentage distributions. Although the marginal supply did not always increase, the lengths of the vacancy chains on average increased consistently.

Table 1: Length distribution of vacancy chains over years

Table 2 and Table 3 give the estimates of opening and terminal probabilities by period and domain. The opening and terminal probabilities estimate where vacancy chains were first initiated and finally ended. It can be seen that from 1983 to 1997, vacancy chains were mostly initiated in ministries. Starting in 1998, vacancy chains became mostly initiated in provinces. With regard to terminal probabilities, there was a sudden decrease in terminal probabilities also starting in 1998, which means that vacancies arriving at provinces had less chances of getting terminated. Based on these two findings, we see a general change in how

4. For dynamic visualiztions, see www.dropbox.com/s/4g4lmlsnb1urc6b/output_3.wmv and also https: //www.dropbox.com/s/93g4g1ck74aofha/video_finale.mpg?dl=0 5. Because not all transfers are 1-1, a cadre can replace two posts, and one post can be replaced by two cadres, some vacancy chains are given weights less than 1.

13 vacancies were generated. As China deviated further and further from a centrally-planned system, the control of high-level jobs stopped starting at functional ministries. Provinces became the main domain where vacancies were generated.

Table 2: Estimates of opening probabilities by period and domain

Table 3: Estimates of terminal probabilities by period and domain

To reveal division/connection structures, loglinear analysis was performed to mobility tables constructed from the networks. Loglinear analysis is the most common method used in studying social mobility tables. Comparing raw counts in a mobility table can be misleading because different strata could have different marginal sizes, strata-strata transfers can happen by chance due to marginal structures. Loglinear models allow researchers to study association (interaction effect) between rows and columns (usually origins and destinations) in a mobility table while marginal effects can be accounted. One disadvantage of loglinear models is that they do not tolerate cells that have zero observations. For sparse networks like the mobility network studied in this paper, the rows (origins) and columns (destinations) have to be combined into meaningful groups. In this paper, the geographical and functional units of the Chinese party state are grouped into four categories, provinces, ministries, party organs, and others. A quasi-independence conditional association model is applied to the origin by destination by period table. The model can be written as: R C P RP CP 1 log(Fijk) = λ + λi + λj + λk + λik + λjk + δik {i = j}, (1)

R C P RP where Fijk is the expected frequency in the ijkth cell, λ is the main effect, λi , λj , λk , λik , and λjk are the marginal row, column, period, row-period interaction, and column-period interaction effects, and δik is the diagonal effect. If the diagonal effect is not included, then it

14 would become an independence model. The result is shown in Table 4. There is a significant difference in goodness of fit between the quasi independence model and the independence model. The diagonal effects are all significant except for provinces. The quasi-independence model is usually used as a null model for testing whether a mobility can be solely explained by marginal distribution of cells. The model is rejected at p = 0.002, which means that there is more origin-destination association than what would happen by pure chance. In other words, there is clear division of labor among those four types of administrations.

Table 4: Results of the independence and quasi-independence models applied to the full mobility table

model comparison L2 df p Independence 343.7 175 0.0000 QI 225.5 133 0.0000 QI vs. Independence 118.2 42 0.0000

With more finely grained categories, more patterns could be revealed. Provinces are divided into 6 regions according to the standard way of regional division in China. In contrast to what is found in Table 4, the most surprising pattern is that there is no pattern at all. Both the independence model and quasi-independence model are applied to the 6 × 6 × 7 table. The goodness of fit and parameter estimates of the diagonal effects are shown in Table 5. Neither of the two models can be rejected, and the quasi-independence model does not fit the data significantly better than the independence model. There was only some slight tendency among Southwest provinces (the most inland region) to send cadres to provinces in the same region before 1998. The effect disappeared in the latest 3 periods. The result suggests that among the inter-provincial transfers, the origins and destinations are independent. Do central nodes tend to remain central over years? For provincial units, surprisingly not quite so. Spearman rank correlations between centrality measures of consecutive periods are calculated for 29 provincial units that have been present in all periods in the analysis. The result is shown in Table 6. It can be observed that in-degree centrality6 measures are not significantly correlated at all, which means that among provincial units, destinations of transfers had only been popular by chance. Out-degree centralities are strongly correlated in earlier periods, which means that during earlier periods, transfers were likely to be sent out by a selected number of provinces rather than other provinces. The high correlation score indicates that there was a hierarchy in sending outgoing ties. Certain provinces were more likely to send out its elite members to other provinces. However, the correlations become

6. In-degree centrality is the number of ties a node receives, and out-degree centrality is the number of ties a node sends. Betweenness centrality, proposed by Freeman (1977), is a measure of how many times a node in on the shortest path between two other nodes.

15 Table 5: Results of the independence and quasi-independence model applied to the inter- provincial data

model comparison L2 df p Independence 117.9 175 0.9997 QI 75.15 133 1.0000 QI vs. Independence 42.75 42 0.4388

parameter estimates of the diagonal eﬀects

δEast δNorth δNorthEast δNorthW est δSouthCentral δSouthW est 1978-1982 1 0.944 -0.675 -0.609 0.212 1.442 (0.758) (0.649) (1.413) (1.41) (0.8) (0.69)* 1983-1987 -1.076 0.377 0.786 0.848 0.075 1.089 (1.41) (0.736) (1.011) (0.762) (0.968) (0.871) 1988-1992 0.158 1.006 -0.288 -0.179 0.286 1.389 (0.769) (0.753) (1.41) (0.755) (0.59) (0.752) 1993-1997 0.334 -1.44 0.162 0.233 0.722 1.676 (0.807) (1.373) (0.784) (0.951) (0.667) (0.763)* 1998-2002 0.999 0.203 0.539 -0.514 -0.319 0.304 (0.392)* (0.73) (0.745) (0.705) (0.563) (0.582) 2003-2007 -0.134 -0.328 -0.626 0.995 0.813 -0.511 (0.542) (0.886) (1.375) (0.553) (0.581) (0.628) 2008-2012 -0.128 -0.115 0.29 0.615 -0.179 0.401 (0.54) (0.578) (0.739) (0.663) (0.636) (0.745) Note. 0.1 is added to each cell to avoid sampling zeroes. Standard errors are reported in parentheses. weaker in later periods and even turn negative in the most recent period. Betweenness centrality scores are also highly correlated in the earliest period, which means that certain provincial units tended to appear on career paths of CCP elites more frequently. In the most recent period, the correlation scores are all negative. This suggests that there might be some systematic reshuﬄing in the most recent period.

Table 6: Rank Correlations between Centrality Scores of Provincial Units in Adjacent Periods

Discussion

In organization theory, multi-divisional form (M-form) of governance is a classical solution to organizational expansion (Chandler 1990; Fligstein 1985). The theory holds that as an

16 organization expands and begins to face an increasingly complex environment, central coordination is no longer feasible, and decentralization in administration becomes a necessary organizational structure. Market reform of a central planning system is a process through which simple production goals (in heavy industry) is replaced by increasingly complex market demands. Scholars have argued that China’s institutional transformation was a transformation toward an M-form structure (Qian, Roland, and Xu 1999; Xu 2011). As Chandler (1990, 14) argues, ”structure follows strategy.” The decentralization process is reflected in the party state’s personnel flow structure. In a command system, production is coordinated by a few central planning ministries, and they should be among the busiest subunits in the system. Personnel exchange to and from central planning ministries should be frequent due to the need for coordination. As China deviated from the central planning model, many of those ministries became obsolete. Most ministries no longer played the significant role of coordinating the production of the system. Their central positions in personnel exchanges disappeared. Another agenda of the administration reforms was to increase efficiency through functional specialization. Many old ministries had overlapping responsibilities. For instance, in 1991, at least 7 agencies under the state council was in charge of agriculture and rural development (Burns 1993, 350-351). During the reform, redundant agencies were cut or combined so that the functional responsibility of each administration became clearer. Because the objectives of the system became diversified and were no long simple, there was a need for each functional administration to specialize in one area, and there was no longer strong need for ministries to exchange personnels. Also, because of specialization, when there is a job opening, the best candidate is often found inside the same administration, and thus vacancies there have higher chances being absorbed internally. In political sphere, the equivalent of a multi-divisional firm is a federalist state. Based on evidences of decentralization, some scholars argue that China has indeed become like a federalist state in many respects (Montinola, Qian, and Weingast 1995; Zheng 2007). However, the fact that China remains a unitary state under the dictatorship of the CCP suggests that structural decoupling is not the whole story. In a federalist state, political elites are entrenched in local social cleavages. It is hard to imagine that a Congressman from South Dakota would run for office in New York, or vise versa. There is no structural need for inter-regional mobility. In China, as the party state deviated further away from the command model and can no longer rely on central coordination through functional ministries, its provincial units became the main arena where economic activities were concentrated. As a result, reshuffling of provincial elites became a dominant control mechanism for monitoring local performance and also preventing local elites from forming independent kingdoms.

17 In literature, network control is often maintained through consistency. For instance, one common structure that has been found in many mobility networks is a pecking order, or status hierarchy. In the United States, empirical studies have found status hierarchies in career paths of Congressmen among congressional committees (Padgett 1990), hiring of new PhDs among academic departments in various disciplines (Han 2003), and mobilities of chiefs among leading restaurants (Borkenhagen and Martin 2017). On a more general level, it has been argued that all structures can be captured by the idea of “structural equivalence” (White 2008, 7; White, Boorman, and Breiger 1976). Behind structural equivalence is the idea that structures are found in regularity in presence and absence of ties (White, Boorman, and Breiger 1976, 731). In contrast, inter-regional mobility of Chinese political elites exhibits structurelessness. Saxenian (1994) also found structurelessness in mobility networks in the Silicon Valley, where job switching is normal and encouraged, and it is common to observe entrepreneur-minded engineers leaving big companies to join small companies for inspiration. She attributed such network structure as the source of greater solidarity in comparison to traditionally oriented hierarchical structure. Although the Chinese nomenklatura system has very diﬀerent rules of operation, structurally, it had been integrated in a similar fashion.

But Why?

So far, attempts have been mostly given on describing structural change. But why did it happen in its way? There is no reason to expect that a system would retain control and/or become more efficient. The fact that the Chinese system had a functional need for decentralization does not entail that it would decentralize. A reform could go against elites’ interest and become unable to proceed due to elites’ resistance. No system can act on its own and must be run by its personnels. The transformation must have been inter-locked with the party elites’ interest. In the 20 years of rule by technocrats after Deng Xiaoping, many central planning agencies were dismantled, downsized or downgraded. How could it have happened? In the Soviet Union, Gorbachev’s reform was met with strong resistance from Soviet bureaucrats, and he had to forcefully remove old party elites to push forward the reform. In his last years in office, the turnover rate in the Central Committee was even higher than it was during Stalin’s purges (Mawdsley and Stephen 2000, 197). In contrast, China’s reform has been noted to proceed in a piecemeal fashion. For one thing, as shown in the descriptive analyses, the CCP’s elite mobility pattern, at the beginning of the reform, although cer- tainly had central planning characteristics, was already a mixture, and there was significant

18 provincial presence. Nevertheless, a peculiar feature of the Chinese reform is that it was largely pushed forward by socialist engineers. For example, probably the most notable reformer during the period, was Zhu Rongji, who was the main architect behind China’s 1998 institutional reform and the Chinese Premier at the time. Zhu studied electrical engineering in Tsinghua University as an undergraduate. He spent most of his early career in the State Planning Commission. Zhu was purged and sent to re-education during the Cultural Revolution. After the Cultural Revolution, he mainly worked in the State Economic Commission before becoming the mayor of Shanghai, which paved his way to the national arena. Most top leaders in the Politburo, from the late 1980s to 2012, had similar experiences in their curriculum vitae. This generation of technocrats only disappeared from the political arena after two decades of rule by them. According to Harrison White (2008, 307), “career is anticipated memory.” The glasnost decoupling that happened during Gorbachev’s reign, was a dissolution in the expectation of the Soviet elitist engineers, which eventually let to their loss of conﬁdence in the system (307-308). Based on what is known about the Chinese reform, this paper proposes that in the CCP China, the anticipated career of high-level party elites was largely undisrupted, and it is one reason why the Chinese decoupling could have been pushed forward by elitist engineers. A common way in which social relations are maintained in anticipated manners is through “homophily”. In sociology, homophily is referred to the social mechanism that people who have similar backgrounds would tend to be connected together (Homans 1950; Lazarsfeld and Merton 1954). Homophily has been mostly found in voluntary associations. Opper, Nee, and Brehm (2015) found homophily to be a glueing mechanism in promotion of high-level Chinese political elites. According to their ﬁnding, the CCP Politburo Standing Committee members had exercised power in promoting party cadres who had similar backgrounds with them during China’s market transformation. This paper hypothesizes that homophily was a general control mechanism in the CCP’s elite replacement, and the following hypothesis is proposed.

Hypothesis 1. Along vacancy chains, predecessors were more likely to be replaced by successors with similar backgrounds.

Behind the hypothesis is the idea that elite replacement was not just motivated by factional need but also maintained through organizational inertia. Through such kind of homophily in elite replacement, elites’ anticipated career is maintained. Thus, even though the home ministries of high-level Chinese political elites were aﬀected by the reform, their anticipated career was still guaranteed. In the long run, the metabolism of the party state took place through cohort replacement. Cohort replacement is often a main driving force

19 behind gradual social change (Ryder 1965), and it was what happened at the 18th Party Congress in 2012, where the engineering generations disappeared from the Politburo. More generally, for elite reshuffling to work, it must not only be a control mechanism but should also bring benefit to the involved personnels. In the Chinese political system, the most valuable resource is power associated with high-level positions . An inter-administration transfer is often a step-stone for promotion if itself is not a promotion. Thus, it would not be suprising to find out that

Hypothesis 2a. Being involved in inter-administration transfers increased party elites’ chances of reaching higher positions in the party state.

As noted by Simmel (2009, 391), “the greater significance of personal talent ... is as much the cause as the effect of the sphere of one’s substantive functions combining interchangeably with the characteristics and interests of multiple locations.” Behind Hypothesis 2a is the idea that being transferred across ministries is also a sign of being trusted and valued by the party. To support this claim, this paper further proposes that a party elite’s chance of reaching higher positions is associated with the number of chained transfers he/she is involved in. As already explained, all transfers are contingent upon availability of vacancies. After one vacancy is filled, another opens. But a vacancy can be absorbed internally by an administration without being passed down to another administration. Therefore, vacancy chains can have varying lengths, and a single-length vacancy chain would simply be an isolated transfer in which the vacancy generated by the transfer is absorbed by the sending administration. A chained transfers or non-single-length vacancy chain is more likely a part of a larger reshuffling scheme than an isolated transfer is. The length of a vacancy chain can be seen as a proxy for control. The paper speculates that being involved in a larger reshuffling scheme is a clearer sign of being trusted by the party and should help a party cadre’s chance of climbing higher up the Chinese political ladder. Based on these speculation, the following hypotheses are proposed.

Hypothesis 2b. Being involved in chained transfers further increased party elites’ chances of reaching higher positions in the party state.

Hypothesis 2c. Being involved in longer vacancy chains further increased party elites’ chances of reaching higher positions in the party state.

Results

In the author’s analyses, personal-level attributes about CCP elites were extracted from their CVs and also merged with an external dataset7 created by Shih, Shan and Liu. The

7. The dataset can be downloaded from Christopher Adolph’s website and was analysed in Shih, Adolph, and Liu (2012)’s paper.

20 external dataset covers all members and alternate members of the CCP Central Committees from the 1st party congress to the 16th party congress. In addition to biographical variables, the following key career variables are calculated for each observant.

• party rank: Alternate Central Committee (abbreviated as ACC) membership is coded as 1, and Central Committee (abbreviated as CC) membership is coded as 2. Above the CCP Central Committee, there are two higher levels, Politburo (abbreviated as PB) membership and Politburo Standing Committee (abbreviated as PBSC) membership. They are coded as 3 and 48. If a person is not inside any of the committees of a party congress, his/her rank in that party congress is coded as 0.

• # of inter-organizational transfers before entering the Politburo Because entering the Politburo often induces certain transfers, to make better causal claims, this paper only counted the number of transfers before entering the Politburo.

• # of provincial/ministerial/party/other positions held in addition to the first position To understand the value of different types of work experiences, the author decomposed the total # of transfers into the numbers of provincial/ministerial/party/other positions held in addition to the first position each cadre held.

Vacancy chains form a person-person network where each person who left a position was matched with a successor who replaced him. With personal-level data, whether vacancy chains in the party state were generated through ”homophily” can be tested. Frequencies of vacancy matches by sex and ethnicity are shown in Table 9. For male predecessors, the chance of getting replaced by a female successor is 5.2% whereas the chance for female predecessors is 33.3%. For Han predecessors, the chance of getting replaced by a successor from an ethnic minority is 3.5% whereas the chance for non-han predecessors is 23.7%. It appears that although females and ethnic minorities constituted a tiny proportion of high- level elites in the Chinese communist party state, their positions were replaced with special arrangements. Table 8 gives the frequencies of vacancy matches by professional background. For economic analysts and engineers, the proportions in the diagonals are much higher than the proportions in the same columns. The degree of homophily suggests that there is clear division of labor in the vacancy matches. Table 9 breaks down Table 8 into periods. Re- placements of engineers by engineers mostly happened in the ﬁrst two decades. By contrast, economic analyst, as a new profession, were almost non-existent in the ﬁrst decade and only appeared in functionally specialized vacancy replacements in later decades. In the centrally

8. The CCP Politburo is nested inside the Central Committee, and the Politburo Standing Committee is nested inside the Politburo.

21 Table 7: Frequencies of vacancy matches by sex and ethnicity

planned system of the party state, engineers occupied the most privileged positions in coordinating the production of the country. Table 9 suggests that during the earlier periods of China’s economic reform, engineers played signiﬁcant roles in mobilizing the party state. In the most recent decade, functionally specialized vacancy replacements decreased greatly in numbers. This can be seen from Table 10 which breaks vacancy replacements to domains. It can be seen from the result that functionally specialized replacements mostly took place in ministries and also provinces, but not in party and other units. The homophily hypothesis is supported by the results.

Table 8: Frequencies of vacancy matches by professional background

Table 11 gives the frequency distributions of all the discrete variables by max party rank. Max rank is the highest rank a person achieved in his/her career. For people born in more recent cohorts, their careers have not ended by the time this research is conducted, and their max ranks are thus unobserved. Therefore, the author only included people born between 1924 and 19549. Just from bivariate associations, it appears that females and ethnic

9. For people born between 1950 and 1954, there is still one more chance of getting into the Politburo at the 19th party congress held in October, 2017. Thus, a more conservative approach is to only include people born before 1950. However, only a very few of the 1950-54 cohort were still having this chance at the

22 Table 9: Frequencies of vacancy matches by professional background by period

minorities were very unlikely to get into higher positions while having a college degree, being an engineer, and having studied in the Soviet Union or former communist Eastern European countries all help. How would one’s aggregate career aﬀect his/her highest achieved rank? Personal-level predictions are shown in Table 12. For simplicity, party rank is treated as a continuous variable in this paper. For every party cadre, the aggregate number of inter-administration transfers and chained transfers in his/her entire career are calculated. Chained transfers are transfers that are involved in vacancy chains that have lengths longer than 1. The average length of the vacancy chains each cadre is involved in is also calculated. The predicted variable is the highest rank a person ever achieved in his/her career. Again, only cadres born between 1924 and 1954 are included. Model (1) is a baseline model that only considers each cadre’s background characteristics. It can be observed that cadres born in later cohorts were less likely to achieve higher ranks. Having some professional expertise generally helped time this paper was written. The impact of not observing the 19th congress is probably negligible. Also, the minimum birthyear threshold, 1924, insures that all senior cadres who had earlier revolutionary credentials are excluded.

23 while engineers had the greatest advantage. Having studied in the Soviet Union or other former Eastern European communist countries also was a big plus. The result of model (2) suggests that there is slight profession-birth year interaction effect, but its higher BIC score suggests that it is not as parsimonious as the simpler one. College degree is tested separately in model(3) because including it would result in a reduction in sample size due to data missingness, and it is found to be not important and dropped from further analyses. In model (4), number of inter-work unit transfers is included, and it is not surprising to see that it is positively associated with achieving a higher rank and adds more explanatory power to the model. Number of chained transfers and average chain length are added to model (5), and both of them have significantly positive impact on max rank. The results suggest that a chained transfer is more important than an isolated transfer in a party elite’s career. Being involved in longer chains is also an indicator that a person is more politically significant than others. Model (6) suggests that the effect of isolated transfers decreased over time and the effect of chained transfers increased over time. However, its higher BIC score suggests that it is not as parsimonious as model (5). In model (7) the effect of transfers is decomposed into the effects of additional provincial/ministerial/party/other work experience. Its result suggest that an additional provincial experience provides the most added value while experiences inside additional other units provide the least added value. In model (8), after number of chained transfers and average chain length are added, the effect of additional other unit disappears, which suggests that a transfer to a peripheral administration inside the party state is only beneficial insofar as it is a part of a chained scheme. It can also be observed that there is a drop in the effects of being an engineer and also that of being an economic analyst after transfer variables are included. This means that transfers are mediators between professional expertise and highest achievement. The same is true for the effect of studying in the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries. One more result that is worth noticing is that ethnicity only has an effect after career experience is controlled. This result suggests that ethnic minorities had special channels to get promoted and bypass work experience requirements. But as Table 11 has already shown, their chance of getting into the top 2 echelons is almost nil. The special channels they got were mostly for decorative purposes, and they were not given training experiences in diverse administrations of the party state as Han Chinese elites were. The results of the OLS regressions suggest that the CCP had tight control of promotional channels. To be eligible for higher positions, party elites had to go through long career sequences traveling through various administrations to fill positions others left. Based on the description of the CPED database where the party elites’ CVs were har- vested from, the population of this study is all the CCP elites who have ever reached the

24 vice-minister/governor level or above. The database is most likely incomplete. However, because CC and ACC members are all included. The only type of data missingness can only be due to non-inclusion of relatively low-ranked cadres who had never entered the Central Committee and had zero or very few transfers and especially chained transfers. The eﬀects of transfers and chained transfers can only be underestimated in this study. Thus, the same conclusions should hold if complete data were available.

Summary and Discussion

In sum, during the period from 1978 to 2012, the party state of China was gradually trans- formed from a Soviet-style centrally planned system to a more ﬂexible system. Decentraliza- tion in its mode of production did not mean decentralization in personnel control. Decoupling in the party state’s function domain was counterbalanced by increasing inter-provincial coupling via longer vacancy chains. Traces of a centrally planned system can be seen in the party state’s personnel management at the beginning of its institutional reform. Some ministries played central roles in the party state’s elite mobility networks, and vacancies were more oftenly initiated in ministries rather than provinces. However, as the system became more decentralized in its mode of production, functional ministries no longer enjoyed their prominent roles in elite circulation. The main domain of inter-administration mobility became increasingly concentrated in provinces. In more recent periods, ministries had become a more isolated domain. A remarkable feature of the new paradigm is the degree of ran- domness in inter-provincial ﬂows. Vacancies became increasingly generated either initially or intermediately in provinces, and longer chains had made more inter-regional mobility possible. Change does not happen simply because there is a need for change. Institutional transformation can hardly be implemented if it is not interlocked with the interest of its personnels. The paper proposes two mechanisms to explain why the observed structural change could have taken place. First, party elites were largely rewarded with anticipated career. After Deng, technocrats who were trained as socialist engineers took control of the party state not because they were the most needed leaders for the reform but because they were the most trained and experienced cadres in the planning era and continued to enjoy special mobility channels in the new era. China’s reform did not happen in any sudden replacement of elites. Rather, elites who accumulated the most experience were chosen to become new leaders on the top, which was the second mechanism behind the structural change. Transfers were not just means of control but also opportunities for involved party cadres. New generations of party cadres ascended to top positions through accumulating experiences in various work

25 units inside the party state. Work experiences in provinces and transfers via vacancy chains provided the most added value in party elites’ career histories. Being controlled by the party is also a sign of being trusted. Eventually, after many rounds of transfers, the party did not just achieve its personnel control, but also had its newer generation of top politicians available, and the metabolism of the party only took place in the long run through cohort replacement. For instance, after the 1998 reform in functional decoupling, engineers disappeared from vacancy replacement in the early 2000s. But during the two party congresses from 2003 to 2012, China was stilled ruled by engineers at the very top. 11 out of the 13 Politburo Standing Committee Members began their careers as engineers. The only two exceptions were the two younger members, Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, who were included in the 17th Politburo Standing Committee as successors of the older generation. But based on what is observed on the provincial/ministerial level, it would not be surprising to see that in the 18th party congress, there was suddenly only one engineer left in the Politburo Standing Committee. On a more general level, this paper demonstrates that the classical question of how social institutions persist and evolve out of often contradictory social relationships can be better answered in dynamic perspectives. Paradoxes are often only paradoxes when viewed stati- cally. Causes and eﬀects sometimes can only be distinguishable in temporal orders. When pieced together, contradictory elements might be nothing but parts of the same process.

26 Table 10: Frequencies of vacancy matches by professional background by domain

27 Table 11: Frequency distributions by max rank

28 Table 12: OLS regression of max rank on individual-level characteristics

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