The party–government relationship in the Chinese bureaucracy: Evidence from patterns of personnel flow

作者：Xueguang Zhou, Yun Ai, Jianhua Ge, Huijun Gu, Li Ding, Lan Li, Angela Lu, Wei Zhao, Zhu Ling · 发表于：Chinese Journal of Sociology · 年份：2021 · DOI：10.1177/2057150x211031055 · 被引用次数：8 · 研究领域：China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance、Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics、China's Ethnic Minorities and Relations

The party–government relationship is central in the governance of the People’s Republic of China, with its key characteristic being the former’s dominance over the latter. Focusing on personnel management practices and the resulting patterns of personnel flow across positions and offices in the Chinese bureaucracy, we examine the party–government relationship in light of personnel flows across the party and government sectors, and the offices/bureaus and positions therein, in the context of a large, multilayered Chinese bureaucracy. Previous research in this field has evinced 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 associated incentive mechanisms, wherein party–government relations are given minimal attention. The second tends to provide descriptive or normative accounts of party–government relations and their historical evolution but has not examined these relations in a quantitative and analytical manner. Our study builds on and goes beyond these existing studies in several ways. First, we propose a perspective that focuses on personnel management and patterns of personnel flow across positions and offices in the party–government relationship. We take the existing party–government structures as our starting point and examine how personnel flow patterns, or the lack thereof, provide information on the degree of personnel mixing between, an...