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 econ- omy 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, decen- tralization 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