China's New Civil Service: What the Emperor Is Wearing and Why

Abstract

Two recent articles in the PAR (Tsao and Worthley, 1995; Aufrecht and Li, 1995) purport to introduce China's civil service system to American readers. We find them severely wanting as guides to understanding and interpretations of China's administrative and the emerging personnel framework.(1) First, the similarities drawn with the Pendleton Act in Tsao and Worthley's article are superficial and rambling.(2) What is particularly inadequate is that this article does not pay sufficient attention to the widely different points of departure of the American and China's endeavor to establish civil service. This has led to an incorrect understanding of both the process and substance of the in and, consequently, has produced an unwarranted emphasis on the similarities of the experiences in the United States and China.(3) Second, Aufrecht and Li hope that their discussion of and context will help readers understand China's civil service system. We are afraid that this objective was far from being achieved. There is no attempt in their article to show how cultural values have shaped policy development and outcomes. Instead, it is simply asserted that these values play important, often unspoken, roles affecting the design and implementation of civil service in China (p. 175). Third and most important, these articles do not correctly grasp the main issues and the political dynamics involved in the attempt to introduce civil service system in Socialist China. Tsao and Worthley's article covers the civil service system, organizational restructuring, anticorruption efforts, and comparative analysis in the span of few pages. We would have preferred them to be more selective and provide more focused analysis of the civil service system. They say that China's civil service regulations marked milestone and represented a real reform but do not say what the was and what changes have been introduced. Similarly, Aufrecht and Li's article is obsessed with certain aspects of Chinese life and culture (p. 181). This has prevented them from examining the new framework and the linkage between reform, on the one hand, and and context, on the other. Problems for Reform and Solutions The search for similarities in the experiences in with those of other countries may lead to failure to understand both the distinct problems for and the solutions proposed to deal with them in Socialist China. Admittedly, China's can be understood in terms of the advent of merit system (Chow, 1991). However, the problems that need to be addressed by civil service in are far larger in scope and more complicated in nature than in other countries. We refer to the report to the 13th Congress of the Communist Parry of (CPC) in 1987, which first embraced the concept of civil service, to see what problems were perceived as needing reform. There are serious defects in our existing and personnel system. They are mainly as follows: The concept of the state cadre is too general and lacks scientific classification; the power of management is overconcentrated, and such power and administrative responsibility are vested in different hands; the methods of management are outdated and simplistic which hinder the rise of talented people; the management system does not have adequate rules, and there are not sufficient laws to govern personnel management (Zhao, 1987; 37).(4) Although the definition of problems changed in the aftermath of the Tiananmen incident in 1989, this list of problems serves to demonstrate the uniqueness of the problems to be addressed by China's reform. Many of these identified problems were rooted in the existing party-state structure, and they called for very different solutions, which were much broader in scope and different in substance from the civil service reforms in Western countries. …