Spatial mobility as a governance tool in the Chinese bureaucracy: mechanisms, patterns, and distributions

Abstract

The allocation of career opportunities in state agencies is central to promote conformity and discipline in authoritarian regimes. While prior studies mostly focused on positional promotion, they have not sufficiently considered the governance problems of authoritarian regimes as multi-regional organizations. This study systematically examines spatial mobility, another crucial but less-understood component of career mobility, in the Chinese bureaucracy. I propose that there are three major mobility mechanisms: (1) rewarding bureaucrats, (2) training bureaucrats, and (3) exerting political control. These mechanisms induce spatial mobility events with distinct patterns and distributions. Empirically, I analyze a unique dataset that comprehensively tracks bureaucrats’ mobility among key positions and jurisdictions in Jiangsu Province from 1990 to 2008. The findings confirm all propositions and show that political control is the most dominant mechanism. This research contributes to understanding the institutional arrangements of the Chinese bureaucracy regarding how various governance issues are addressed by spatially transferring bureaucrats.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong [ECS24621821] and the Faculty of Social Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong [#4930984]. The author thanks Xueguang Zhou, Andrew Walder, Walter W. Powell, Tony Tam, and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedbacks and comments. The Jiangsu Bureaucratic Structure dataset used in this study is proprietary data collected by a research group led by Xueguang Zhou at Stanford University, and the author is precluded from sharing the data with others. Researchers interested in replicating the results in this study would need to get permission from Xueguang Zhou for the replication data. I would be happy to provide assistance and computer code to go from the replication dataset to the results of the paper. The online supplement of this study can be found here: https://www.soc.cuhk.edu.hk/profile/zhu-ling/. An earlier version of this paper has been presented at the 2019 Annual Meeting of Association of Asian Studies and the 2019 Annual Meeting of American Political Science Association.

Notes

1 Studies have often found that bureaus in the systems of people’s congresses or CPPCC are "retirement bureaus,” and are thus dead-ends in terms of career mobility in the Chinese bureaucracy (Wang and Groot 2018). That is, while bureaucrats may be transferred in, they are rarely transferred out from those bureaus.

2 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Congress_of_the_Communist_Party_of_China.

3 See https://wenku.baidu.com/view/cee82324482fb4daa58d4bbc.html?from=search.

4 Due to the considerable differences in the risk sets of different types of spatial mobility events, I provide the details of risk sets and my strategy to deal with the left-censoring problems in the Findings section.

5 The only exception is the peaking time in 1997, which was three years after the 9^th Jiangsu Party Congress, which took place in 1994. Although there are no official documents that can directly explain this inconsistency, I conjecture that it may be because of the massive administrative restructuring in Jiangsu in 1996. Specifically, two county-level cities–Suqian and Taizhou–were promoted to become prefectures in July and August 1996, respectively. It is possible that the provincial leaders anticipated this event and decided to postpone the timing of many personnel decisions.

Additional information

Funding

Faculty of Social Science at CUHK;Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee;

Notes on contributors

Ling Zhu

Ling Zhu is an assistant professor of sociology at Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her overarching research interests consist of two substantive topics: (1) state governance in authoritarian regimes—how the bureaucratic organizations are structured and the bureaucrats are incentivized to maintain a delicate balance between political control (which requires power centralization) and regional development (which requires power de-centralization), and (2) mechanisms of reproducing economic inequality, gender segregation, and family advantages/disadvantages in China and in the United States.