Birth influences future: examining discrimination against Chinese deputy mayors with grassroots administration origins

Ying Wang,Lei Hua

doi:10.1057/s41599-020-00572-1

Abstract

There is no systematic empirical study to address the unfair political treatment of Chinese officials with grassroots beginnings. This research addresses this gap by conducting theoretical and empirical studies. Drawing on a new biographical database of Chinese deputy mayors of municipal cities, this paper conducts competing risk regression and classical logistic regression modeling to examine the role of career starting level in deputy mayors’ political careers. The empirical analysis provides solid results and demonstrates that the higher the career starting level, the greater the probability of getting promoted and the lower the risk of political downfall, which indicated that deputy mayors who started their careers in grassroots-level governments were associated with the lowest probabilities of promotion and highest risks of falling. The unfair political treatment is the tragedy of grassroots cadres and does not match the importance of grassroots work, which leads to great discontent and may threaten the sustainability of Communist Party rule in the future.

Highlights

Chinese officials’ political careers are of great concern in academic circles and arouse many discussions among scholars
As the CPC pays more attention to economic development and economic competition, some scholars believe that economic performance such as GDP growth is the key factor in political promotion, and a considerable amount of empirical research has demonstrated a positive correlation between economic performance and political promotion of Chinese leaders (Bo, 1996, 2002; Landry, 2003; Chen et al, 2005; Li and Zhou, 2005; Choi, 2012; Lin, 2012)
The third contribution of this study is to introduce competing risk regression modeling to analyze political career of Chinese officials, which has never been reported in the relevant literature before

Summary

Introduction

Chinese officials’ political careers are of great concern in academic circles and arouse many discussions among scholars. We again take the regression results of the full sample as an example: the odds ratios are 1.36, 1.91 and 2.54, corresponding to the different levels of Chinese governments from municipal to central This indicated that the chances that the deputy mayors who started their official careers in municipal, provincial and central governments will get promoted to the municipal-level cadres is 1.36, 1.91 and 2.54 times higher, respectively, than the deputy mayors who started in the grassroots-level governments. The former may be largely because of concerns about their ethnic identity and worries about ethnic conflicts caused by the investigation and punishment of ethnic minority officials, while the reason for the latter is protection from the Tuan Pai (团派) (Pang et al, 2018b)

Conclusion

Findings

Four standards for cadres