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, and the interconnectedness or separateness of, the
party and government sectors, areas, and offices. Second, we develop a set of
analytical dimensions and measures to capture different aspects of the
party–government relationship, such as the degree of stability and
specialization in party and government positions and offices. We also propose
measures of personnel mixing and interconnectedness between party and
government offices. Third, we apply these analytical dimensions and measures to
systematically examine the multifaceted patterns of personnel flow and the
resulting party–government relations in a large Chinese bureaucracy at the
provincial, municipal, and county levels in an entire province, between 1990
and 2008, with over 40,000 key officials and over 300,000 person–year records.
Our findings show that there are noticeable variations in patterns of personnel
flow among party and government positions and offices, with the former
experiencing higher rates of mobility and more generalist characteristics. On
the other hand, we also find considerable mixing and interconnectedness among
positions and offices between the party and government sectors. These findings
suggest that, in the Chinese bureaucracy, party–government positions are
organized into an integrated hierarchical order whose boundaries are formal in
structure but fluid in terms of personnel flows, especially in those key
positions in different administrative jurisdictions.
