THE INSTITUTIONS OF CADRE TRAINING

Cadre training involves a great many party and state institutions. Although overall responsibility at each level of administration rests with the general party committee, this responsibility is delegated to a separate committee directly under the party committee called the cadre education and training committee (ganbu jiaoyu peixun weiyuanhui, or ganjiaowei for short). This committee is responsible for drafting the annual cadre educational and training plan, and is the main forum for political decision making on cadre education and training. All other party and government departments, the party school, the academy of administration and the academy of socialism essentially have executive, rather than decision-making, responsibility for parts of the plan. It is therefore very telling that this committee is a party, rather than a government committee: it is in coordinating committees such as this that the party's Leninist leading role over state and society finds concrete expression.

The formal chair of the cadre education committee is the full party secretary. The deputy chair – and the person normally running the committee – is the deputy party secretary in charge of ideological work, who also doubles up as the full head of the party school. Other members include the party secretary of the party's discipline inspection committee, the standing deputy head of the party school, the head of the party's propaganda and organization departments, the head of the government's personnel bureau and also the party secretary of the working committee for directly administered departments (zhishu jiguan gongzuo weiyuanhui or gongwei, see below).