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Time Is Power: Rethinking Meritocratic Political Selection in China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2020

Yu Zeng  and
Stan Hok-wui Wong Open the ORCID record for Stan Hok-wui Wong [Opens in a new window]
Yu Zeng
Affiliation:
Southeast University. Email: zengyu_seu@seu.edu.cn.
Stan Hok-wui Wong*
Affiliation:
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
*
Email: shw.wong@polyu.edu.hk (corresponding author).
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Abstract

Whether local officials in China are promoted on a meritocratic basis has been the subject of long-standing debate. Merit is commonly gauged by a leader's ability to deliver local GDP growth. Although some find economic performance to be a strong predictor of the career success of local leaders, we argue that the existing measure, which focuses on the promotion outcome of a single career step, is problematic because the career success of individual local leaders is seldom determined by a single promotion, or the lack thereof. We propose an alternative measure that is more suitable for China's political context: the length of time until promotion. Analysing the time it takes to gain promotion for four types of local leaders, we find that good economic performance is associated with a shorter time until promotion. However, the cumulative time-reducing effect of economic performance is far from significant, as it is generally insufficient to help local leaders overcome the age ceiling for promotion.

摘要

摘要

关于中国地方官员选拔是否基于贤能的讨论旷日持久。以往研究对贤能的衡量主要是观察官员发展其辖区内经济的能力。尽管一些研究发现官员在经济方面的表现是预测其晋升的一个强指标，但我们认为现有基于一次职位变动观察的测量方法是有问题的，因为地方官员职业生涯的成败很难由一次晋升决定。我们提出了一种更符合中国政治环境的新衡量方法：晋升时间。通过对四类官员晋升时间的分析，我们发现经济表现好的官员更有可能在短时间内得到提拔。然而，经济表现的累积效应并不显著，它不足以能够帮地方官员突破晋升年龄天花板。

Keywords

economic performancecadre managementChinese politicspolitical selectioncadre trainingmeritocracy经济表现干部管理中国政治政治选拔干部培训选贤制度
Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 245 , March 2021 , pp. 23 - 50
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Copyright
Copyright © SOAS University of London, 2020

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Footnotes

The authors contributed more or less equally to this work.

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