Knowing the Wrong Cadre? Networks and Promotions in the Chinese Party-State
| Author | Franziska Barbara Keller,Jérôme Doyon |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321719888854 |
| Published date | 01 November 2020 |
| Date | 01 November 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321719888854
Political Studies
2020, Vol. 68(4) 1036 –1053
© The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0032321719888854
journals.sagepub.com/home/psx
Knowing the Wrong Cadre?
Networks and Promotions in
the Chinese Party-State
Jérôme Doyon1
and Franziska Barbara Keller2*
Abstract
When do personal ties matter? Studies of political elite’s rise to power stress the importance of
personal ties, but do not consider the possibility of differential effects depending on who one is
connected to in elite struggles. We examine how ties formed among Chinese party-state officials
influence their career. Our research design provides a strong proxy to account for personal ties:
attendance of an exclusive and intensive training program for officials. We take advantage of the
exogenous assignment to cohorts in this program to establish a causal link between informal
connections and promotions. We find that the effect of personal ties depends on whether the
official is connected to the leader who dominates the promotion process or to the one who only
influences it through information control. Connections to the latter decrease the promotion
probability, likely because these officials are closely monitored by their superiors and more
powerful rivals.
Keywords
political mobility, patronage, China, networks
Accepted: 26 October 2019
Introduction
In a variety of political regimes, connections to the top leadership appear to provide sub-
stantial benefits when climbing the career ladder. Vladimir Putin’s childhood friends,
judo partners, and colleagues from St Petersburg, for instance, have had stellar careers in
government and state-owned corporations under his leadership (Dawisha, 2014). They
are not alone: a series of rigorous quantitative studies have confirmed that connections to
top leaders help political elites advance their careers, in both authoritarian and democratic
regimes (Fiva and Smith, 2018; Jia et al., 2015; Shih et al., 2012; Van Gunten, 2015).
1Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
2Division of Social Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Kowloon, Hong Kong
*Authors listed alphabetically
Corresponding author:
Jérôme Doyon, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 2JD, UK.
Email: jerome.doyon@area.ox.ac.uk
888854PSX0010.1177/0032321719888854Political StudiesDoyon and Keller
research-article2019
Article
Doyon and Keller 1037
These studies usually examine such ties within the framework of factional struggle, or
patronage. But if scarce top-level positions are indeed a prize that several networks vie
for, should we not expect that getting involved in such competition might come at a cost,
and that the wrong connections can hurt one’s career? Studies have found that connec-
tions to leaders who have retired, or otherwise lost power, bring little benefits and can
even be harmful (Shih and Lee, 2018), but could connections to active patrons also reduce
the chances of a promotion?
This issue is particularly relevant in the case of one-party systems, as their resilience
depends on their ability to provide institutionalized promotion channels for mid-level and
sub-national officials, and maintain elite cohesion. Authoritarian parties allow the leader
to credibly commit to sharing spoils and power with other elites, who in turn have a stake
in the survival of the party (Geddes, 1999). Providing institutionalized and meritocratic
promotion channels for officials, at the national and sub-national levels, is one such com-
mitment (Magaloni, 2006; Reuter and Robertson 2012).
To study how informal ties affect promotions in an institutionalized one-party system,
we focus on the Chinese case. The Chinese bureaucracy is a fruitful ground for research
on informal networks and their effect on political mobility. Using an innovative research
design, we improve on what we think are key weaknesses of already existing studies: the
fact that patronage ties cannot be measured directly and therefore have to be inferred
(Keller, 2016), and the difficulty of disentangling the effect of personal ties on promo-
tions from other factors, such as merit. We confront these problems by relying on the
exogenous assignment to different cohorts of a year-long training program for Chinese
officials that encourages close interaction between members of the same cohort.
Existing studies use relatively weak proxies: they assume a personal connection
between individuals who are born in the same locality, have attended the same school, or
who worked at the same institution (Shih et al., 2012) or locality at the same time (Jia
et al., 2015). But with such proxies, there is no evidence that the supposedly connected
individuals even know each other. We argue that our proxy for personal tie is stronger. We
compare pairs of alumni from different cohorts of the “Young cadres training program”
(zhongqingban), a year-long training offered at the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP)
Central Party School (CPS) to about 150 promising young cadres. We hold that the intense
classes, study-group, and team-building exercises of this program are more likely to cre-
ate personal bonds than simply graduating from the same university or working in the
same institution.
In addition, our research design can control, at least partially, for the meritocratic fac-
tor. By comparing only alumni from this program among each other, we ensure that any
effect observed is due to the cohort assignment, and not due to attending this prestigious
program itself, that is, the “brand name” effect. While their performance during the pro-
gram or after may vary, these officials were all selected to be part of it which set them
aside from others. Moreover, focusing on three adjacent cohorts allows us to argue that
the received training is the same, while the assignment to each cohort is exogenous.
The results of this study bring some nuance to the way we understand the effect of per-
sonal ties on political promotions. We find that being connected to the province’s number
one leader, the party secretary—who has the final say over promotions (Zeng, 2015)—is
beneficial to one’s chance of promotion. However, due to the small number of observations,
the estimate of this substantively large increase is also quite uncertain, that is, it is not sta-
tistically significant on conventional levels. More surprisingly, a connection to a local leader
who could influence the promotion process through his control of information—the head of
To continue reading
Request your trial