Liang Qiao - Political Mobility of Chinese Regional Leaders: Performance, Preference, Promotion

A monarch is usually born, a member of parliament or a president is usually elected, but a regional leader in China is usually orchestrated to replace his or her predecessor through an opaque process and for reasons not typically made public. The professional trajectories of Chinese regional leaders are mysterious in many ways. Their promotions and demotions can be predictable in terms of their age, gender, nationality, education, factions, and previous engagements in the political system. Yet, speaking of their capabilities, performances, opportunities, and arrangements, their futures can also be unexpected. Such arrangements always originate from within the Organization (zuzhi), which represents the Chinese Communist Party. What are the factors the Organization considers when making its final decisions on nominating and appointing a regional leader?

Todays regional leaders in China will very likely become the central leaders in the future. By making an empirical analysis of Chinese regional leaders political mobility, Qiao establishes a descriptive political mobility model that reveals leadership trajectories in Chinese politics.

Liang Qiao is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Renmin University of China in Beijing.

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/series/SE0768.

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161 Intellectual Discourse in Reform Era China

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162 Globalization and Welfare Restructuring in China

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163 Reconfiguring Class, Gender, Ethnicity and Ethics in Chinese Internet Culture

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166 Popular Politics and the Quest for Justice in Contemporary China

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167 Cyberdualism in China

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168 Political Mobility of Chinese Regional Leaders

Performance, Preference, Promotion

Liang Qiao

His fellow villagers asked (Cao Gui): It was planned by the meat-eaters, what is it for you to remonstrate with?

Cao Gui replied: Meat-eaters are little learning; they are not far-sighted.

Thus, he was shown in (to the Duke).

The Chronicles of Zuo (circa fourth century BC)

Unlike in a federal system, where a state and its administration are much more independent from the federal government, regional leaders in China serve as agents of the ultimately powerful central government, and practice their power as regional leaders in a much different way. In most open political systems, successions or appointments of officials or politicians may be polled or surveyed through more public and transparent means; such issues, as they affect many peoples everyday lives, may also be (and mostly will be) debated or discussed more openly with the press and the public. However, in Chinese politics, and to most Chinese, the mobility of political elites has not yet become an open topic, nor does it seem likely to become one in the near future. Rather, it is too discreet for open discussion. Discreet, it is; but the topic is also quite common and popular in private conversations. My father often recalls that his friends and he frequently enjoyed studying the appearance orders of senior Party officials (most were Chinese Communist Party [CCP] Politburo members) on the Peoples Daily s front-page coverage of major political events extending back to his teenage years during the Great Cultural Revolution. They discovered numerous political facts simply by thoroughly reading the contexts hidden within the front pages. Many Chinese, including professional scholars, still do that: they read between the lines of the state-run news medias editorials, study leaders speeches, and decipher rumors, even gossip, to find out what is about to happen to a certain leader. But to me, there is hardly any joy in doing this: even decades later, as citizens, we are still excluded from crucial decision-making that affects our daily lives in every way.