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Getting Ahead in the Communist Party: Explaining the Advancement of Central Committee Members in China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2012

VICTOR SHIH ,
CHRISTOPHER ADOLPH  and
MINGXING LIU
VICTOR SHIH*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
CHRISTOPHER ADOLPH*
Affiliation:
University of Washington
MINGXING LIU*
Affiliation:
Peking University
*
Victor Shih is Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Northwestern University, 601 University Place, Evanston, IL 60208 (vshih@northwestern.edu).
Christopher Adolph is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science and Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences, University of Washington, 101 Gowen Hall, Box 353530, Seattle, WA 98195 (cadolph@uw.edu).
Mingxing Liu is Associate Professor, China Institute for Educational Finance Research, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China (liumingxing72@gmail.com)
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Abstract

Spectacular economic growth in China suggests the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has somehow gotten it right. A key hypothesis in both economics and political science is that the CCP's cadre evaluation system, combined with China's geography-based governing logic, has motivated local administrators to compete with one another to generate high growth. We raise a number of theoretical and empirical challenges to this claim. Using a new biographical database of Central Committee members, a previously overlooked feature of CCP reporting, and a novel Bayesian method that can estimate individual-level correlates of partially observed ranks, we find no evidence that strong growth performance was rewarded with higher party ranks at any of the postreform party congresses. Instead, factional ties with various top leaders, educational qualifications, and provincial revenue collection played substantial roles in elite ranking, suggesting that promotion systems served the immediate needs of the regime and its leaders, rather than encompassing goals such as economic growth.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 106 , Issue 1 , February 2012 , pp. 166 - 187
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2012

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