The cadre system of the Chinese Communist Party entails the methods and institutions employed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to train, organize, appoint, and oversee personnel to fulfill a wide range of civil service-type roles in Party, state, military, business, and other organizations across the country. The system is composed of the several million full-time, professional staff, the cadres (simplified Chinese :干部; traditional Chinese :幹部; pinyin :gànbù).
China is a one-party state under the CCP. The management of cadres is one of the ways the CCP controls the state and influences wider society. Personnel must be loyal to the CCP, but are not always members themselves. Cadres are not only trained to be competent administrators, but also ideologically faithful to the party and its pursuit of socialism with Chinese characteristics. [1]
The word cadre most broadly refers to the staff that are tasked with the management of state and/or party affairs. Based on the Leninist concept of vanguardism, a cadre is a full-time, professional revolutionary dedicated to the goals of a communist party, who works at the discretion of its leadership. [2] This stands in contrast to ordinary members not involved in the running of the party on a day-to-day basis. The term was first used by the Chinese Communist Party at the 2nd National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in July 1922. [3]
The term in Chinese today generally extends to any person in a position of certain authority or responsibility subject to CCP oversight, whether or not they are members of the party. Professor John P. Burns of the University of Hong Kong defines a cadre as "the managers, administrators and professionals found in all sectors of the economy including enterprises, in administrative bodies including government, and in public service units." [4] The definition of the term has broadened significantly since the first decade of the People's Republic of China, spanning from its highest leadership down to relatively low-level positions. [5] Personnel in many positions of state-owned enterprises and other government-affiliated institutions are also referred to as cadres. These individuals are generally paid by the state. [6] [7]
At the national level, cadres in China generally are divided into six categories: [8] [3]
An additional distinction is made in China between leading cadres (simplified Chinese :领导干部; traditional Chinese :領導幹部; pinyin :Lǐngdǎo gànbù) and non-leading cadres. This distinction was first articulated in civil service reforms starting in 1993. [10] Leading cadre status is not dependent on rank, as many high-ranking cadres may nevertheless not be in what is considered a leading position. Leading cadre appointments are governed by the Organization Department of the Chinese Communist Party, whereas non-leading positions are generally managed by the personnel and human resources departments of their respective work units and organizations. [11] Organization Department branches at all levels keep a "leading cadre reserve list" (Chinese :领导干部候补名单; pinyin :Lǐngdǎo gànbù hòubǔ míngdān) from which capable cadres may be selected to fill leading positions as they become vacant. These lists are maintained by the next-highest level Organization Department (that is, a township-level list would be maintained by the county-level Organization Department, and so on). [12]
While concise statistics are not published, Chan and Gao 2018 estimated that there were roughly two million leading cadres. [13]
The Chinese Communist Party expanded rapidly in the initial years following its founding in 1921. After being driven back to Yan'an during the Long March, Mao Zedong focused on consolidating and expanding the CCP, whose membership had fallen from 300,000 to 40,000. Taking advantage of the Second Sino-Japanese War, which commanded the majority of the ruling Kuomintang's attention, the CCP grew massively over the next several years as it entered Japanese-occupied territory and recruited there. It relied heavily on its Red Army to establish power in these liberated territories and identify outstanding activists for recruitment. By 1939, it controlled over 150 counties with a population of over 100 million. [14]
The CCP's territorial growth necessitated more members to serve as cadres, and the party accordingly relaxed somewhat its membership restrictions on intellectuals, former left-wing Kuomintang officers, and others not of a purely working peasant background. [15] Peasants and laborers, while forming the core ideological base of the CCP, were largely illiterate and uneducated, and thus not well suited for the work of some higher-level cadre positions. Consequently, at the county level and above, the majority of cadres were composed of educated individuals. In contrast, branch and district Party cadres were overwhelmingly composed of local laborers and peasants, who knew local conditions well and could better form relationships with the community. [16] Still, despite the need for some educated cadres, during the Civil War era, the CCP focused mainly on recruiting peasants for guerrilla warfare. Thus, among the cadres, ability to lead and command fighters was generally more important than ability to manage occupied areas. [17]
After the Surrender of Japan and the resumption of active hostilities in the Chinese Civil War, Party membership continued to swell as it further advanced against the Kuomintang, reaching three million members by 1948. Much of this growth was driven by the occupation of Manchuria following Imperial Japan's withdrawal; the CCP dispatched 100,000 troops and 20,000 cadres to establish control over the territory. [18] While nationwide data does not exist on the breakdown of cadre versus non-cadre membership, it appears that a large number of Party members were considered cadres at that time. [19]
By the end of the Civil War, the Chinese Communist Party had established an organizational structure capable of governing itself and the non-CCP people and organizations it oversaw in occupied territories. Its focus, however, had been warfare, as opposed to statecraft, administration and economic development, and thus it soon faced a serious administrative manpower shortage. [20]
On 1 October 1949, having driven the Kuomintang out of Mainland China, Mao Zedong gave the Proclamation of the People's Republic of China at Tiananmen Square.
The cadre system is one of the few organs of the party-state which have functioned continuously during the PRC's history. [21] : 30
The Communist Party at the time faced an acute shortage of qualified personnel to the fill over 2.7 million public positions needed to govern the country. [22] By 1955, the CCP had established a system of appointments to fill positions modeled closely after the nomenklatura system of the Soviet Union. [23] Due to the high demand for manpower, the CCP was forced to rely on former Kuomintang officials to fill many of these positions as low-level, non-party cadres, which helped alleviate the shortage by 1952. By 1956, in part due to the Three-anti and Five-anti Campaigns, most of these former officials had been dismissed. [24]
The government of China in its early years also drew upon intellectuals (those with a high school or above education) to fill the gaps in its cadres. Older intellectuals were viewed as more susceptible to influences of bourgeois ideology, but their specialized skills make them useful. Younger intellectuals (new graduates around the time of the founding of the People's Republic) were similarly useful, and could claim they were less influenced by bourgeois thought than their older predecessors. [25] Even so, Mao's eventually grew suspicious of this group, and he eventually initiated the Socialist Education Movement in 1963 to purge perceived intellectual reactionaries from cadre ranks.
"Old cadres"—those who had joined the CCP before the founding of the People's Republic—maintained an outsize influence on governance in the years following 1949. They occupied the leadership positions of party committees at all levels, but were largely uneducated and lacked the administrative or other specialized skill of their ex-Kuomintang counterparts. [26] Broadly speaking, party loyalty took precedence over educational background for the promotion of cadres to high-level administrative positions in Maoist China. A college education did not become necessary to attain such positions until after the death of Mao. [27]
The Seven Thousand Cadres Conference took place in Beijing in 1962.
In 1965, there were 9.3 million government officials classified as cadres. [28] During the Cultural Revolution, the general disorganization of the CCP and China made limited any effective use of the system. Appointments to leadership positions became highly irregular, and the Central Organization Department was not mentioned in Chinese press at all from 1967 to 1972. [29]
Unlike contemporary cadres, cadres in the Mao era could not leave a government job to enter private business or to seek voluntary transfer to a different region or office. [30] Few cadre left their positions voluntarily -- doing so was almost always involuntary. [31]
Following the death of Mao Zedong and the sidelining of Hua Guofeng, China began to embark upon a series of systemic economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping. By 1980, efforts began to re-institutionalize the cadre system after the discord of the Cultural Revolution, so that the CCP would be able to effectively carry out the modernization of China. [29] These efforts particularly focused on a strengthened ideological education of cadres to reinforce understanding of their own role in the mass line connecting the people and the CCP. [32] That year, Deng called for a rejuvenation of the system via promotion of "revolutionary, younger, more educated, and more technically specialized" cadre. [33] : 120 Subsequent regulations included establishing a cadre retirement system, age limits for leading cadres, and new recruitment and promotion rules. [33] : 120–121 The CCP also implemented the "third echelon" policy. [33] : 121 The policy sought to promote a total of 135,000 younger officials at all levels to prepare for the retirement for the impending retirement of older leaders in 1985. [33] : 121–122
In August 1984, the system was reformed to decentralize authority, in part, because the Central Organization Department was unable to keep up with the nearly 13,000 positions it was nominally in charge of. [34] These reforms drastically reduced the number of positions on the central nomenklatura, transferring their management to provincial authorities. In turn, these positions were further devolved to lower authorities. [34] The total number of cadre positions—estimated at over 8.1 million in 1982 [35] (cf. 6,932,000 in 2007 per Li 2007) [36] —stayed the same, but overall control by local authorities increased. [34]
Zhao Ziyang, elected General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in January 1987, made a proposal for deep reform of the cadre system as a part of his address to the 13th Party Congress. Zhao sought to establish a more independent civil service not completely dependent upon the CCP, and thus reform the relationship between the party and the Chinese state. [37] Zhao envisioned a system wherein administrative cadres (i.e. civil servants) would be managed by their respective government bodies themselves, instead of the party's Organization Department, which would in turn shift toward a research and policy-focused role as opposed to one of personnel management and selection. Government recruitment and promotion would be merit-based, relying heavily on standardized examinations, and civil servants would receive a degree of protection from arbitrary dismissal. [38] Deng Xiaoping shared a dissatisfaction with the personnel system at that time, and also pushed for separation of the state and Party at the time. [10]
In the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, Zhao and other reformists fell from power and the civil service reform project denounced by remaining Party leaders. [39] Zhao's proposals were subsequently heavily modified and implemented as the "Provisional Regulations on State Civil Servants" in 1993, albeit on a much less comprehensive scale. The Regulations formally differentiated civil servants and cadres in certain state entities like hospitals, schools, and state-owned enterprises. It did, however, contain provisions for the systematic use of examinations, but only in recruitment for non-leading positions. [40] The Provisional Regulations established the first formal civil service in China since the founding of the People's Republic. [41]
The 1993 Provisional Regulations on State Civil Servants were deliberately narrow, a reflection of the desires of more conservative Politburo members, particularly Li Peng. [42] In 1995, the Ministry of Personnel released a report arguing that the Regulations needed to be expanded to include areas of state authority that were not included originally, such as the judicial system. [42]
In 1937, Mao outlined a broad vision of cadres as quality personnel capable of linking the CCP with the masses in the places where they worked. This vision was eventually included in the Little Red Book: [43]
Our Party organizations must be extended all over the country and we must purposefully train tens of thousands of cadres and hundreds of first-rate mass leaders. They must be cadres and leaders versed in Marxism-Leninism, politically far-sighted, competent in work, full of the spirit of self-sacrifice, capable of tackling problems on their own, steadfast in the midst of difficulties and loyal and devoted in serving the nation, the class and the Party. It is on these cadres and leaders that the Party relies for its links with the membership and the masses, and it is by relying on their firm leadership of the masses that the Party can succeed in defeating the enemy. Such cadres and leaders must be free from selfishness, from individualistic heroism, ostentation, sloth, passivity, and arrogant sectarianism, and they must be selfless national and class heroes; such are the qualities and the style of work demanded of the members, cadres and leaders of our Party.
The CCP in particular sought to avoid any manifestation of "bureaucratism" (simplified Chinese :官僚主义; traditional Chinese :官僚主義; pinyin :guānliáo zhǔyì), a general term referring to potentially undesirable traits that would hinder cadres' ability to effectively work toward achieving socialism. [44] Mao further expanded upon the list of these traits in his 1970 essay, "Twenty Manifestations Of Bureaucracy," including factionalism, stupidity, and reliance on excessive red tape. [45] Cadres that actively practice religion or frequent fortune-tellers have faced investigation and expulsion from the CCP. [46] [47] Cadres are also prohibited from investing in private equity. [48] Party members can be expelled for reading banned materials in private, using drugs, or soliciting prostitution. [49]
Pursuant to the 2018 amendments to the Civil Service Law and the 2019 Work Regulations for the Promotion and Appointment of Leading Party and Government Cadres, "political quality" and "political standard" are the most important criteria for recruiting and evaluating cadres. [33] : 135
The CCP runs party schools (Chinese :党校; pinyin :dǎngxiào) that provide training and education to mid-career Party cadres, as well as some military, government, and business cadres. [50] The highest of these are run by the CCP Central Committee and cater to cadres from across the country. The foremost party schools include: [51]
While the government of China and its legislature have technical authority to manage cadres, in practice, this is the sole purview of the CCP. Party committees at all levels (broadly, local, provincial, and national levels) take responsibility for cadre management, usually through the Organization Department, and generally one or two administrative levels lower than the committee. [52] Thus, the national Party body, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, will manage cadres at or above the provincial or equivalent level, and provincial Party committees will manage prefectures and prefecture-level cities, which in turn manage county-level cadres. County Party committees manage town and township cadres, which manage grassroots cadres. [53] The Central Committee itself only manages an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 cadre positions directly, including figures such as the provincial governors and deputy governors, chairmen of provincial People's Congresses, and chief procurators in the judicial system. [54]
All cadres have a specific grade (simplified Chinese :级别; traditional Chinese :級別; pinyin :jíbié) that designates their relative seniority at a national level. Grade also determines an individual's pay, with variation regionally and across different organizations. [11] A cadre's grade corresponds with the rank (simplified Chinese :职务; traditional Chinese :職務; pinyin :zhíwù; lit.'post', 'position') they occupy. Rank and grade are nationally standardized, allowing for cadres from different places to easily determine their position and authority relative to others. [55]
The administration of Deng Xiaoping made cadre system reform a component of overall Chinese economic reform. Cadres under Mao were often appointed based on revolutionary fervor as opposed to technical competence, and many were uneducated. [56]
Certain cadres have access to a special supply system for foodstuffs called tegong. [57]
Pursuant to the cadre evaluation system, each level of China's parallel party and state bureaucracies designs formal criteria for the level subordinate to it, listing targets to be achieved in the forthcoming year. [58] Targets are evaluated on a points basis, typically out of 100 points total for all criteria. [59] Leaders are ranked annually relative to their peers. [59]
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), officially the Communist Party of China (CPC), is the founding and sole ruling party of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Under the leadership of Mao Zedong, the CCP emerged victorious in the Chinese Civil War against the Kuomintang. In 1949, Mao proclaimed the establishment of the People's Republic of China. Since then, the CCP has governed China and has had sole control over the People's Liberation Army (PLA). Successive leaders of the CCP have added their own theories to the party's constitution, which outlines the party's ideology, collectively referred to as socialism with Chinese characteristics. As of 2023, the CCP has more than 98 million members, making it the second largest political party by membership in the world after India's Bharatiya Janata Party.
The Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party, formally known as the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, is the highest political body of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.
Hua Guofeng was a Chinese politician who served as Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party and Premier of the People's Republic of China. The designated successor of Mao Zedong, Hua held the top offices of the government, party, and the military after the deaths of Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai, but was gradually forced out of supreme power by a coalition of party leaders between December 1978 and June 1981, and subsequently retreated from the political limelight, though still remaining a member of the Central Committee until 2002.
The Central Military Commission (CMC) is the highest national defense organization in the People's Republic of China, which heads the People's Liberation Army (PLA), the People's Armed Police (PAP), and the Militia of China.
The orders of precedence in China is the ranking of political leaders in China for the purposes of event protocol and to arrange the ordering of names in official news bulletins, both written and televised. It is also sometimes used to assess perceived level of political power. Although there is no formally published ranking, there is usually an established convention and protocol, and the relative positions of Chinese political figures can usually be deduced from the order in meetings and especially by the time and order in which figures are covered by the official media. Since 1982, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party has been the highest ranking official in the People's Republic of China (PRC).
Paramount leader is an informal term for the most important political figure in the People's Republic of China (PRC). The paramount leader typically controls the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People's Liberation Army (PLA), often holding the titles of CCP General Secretary and Chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC). The state representative (president) or head of government (premier) are not necessarily paramount leader—under China's party-state system, CCP roles are politically more important than state titles.
The Central Committee, officially the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, is the highest organ when the national congress is not in session and is tasked with carrying out congress resolutions, directing all party work, and representing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) externally. It is currently composed of 205 full members and 171 alternate members. Members are nominally elected once every five years by the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. In practice, the selection process is done privately, usually through consultation of the CCP's Politburo and its corresponding Standing Committee.
Kang Sheng was a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official, best known for having overseen the work of the CCP's internal security and intelligence apparatus during the early 1940s and again at the height of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A member of the CCP from the early 1920s, he spent time in Moscow during the early 1930s, where he learned the methods of the Soviet NKVD and became a supporter of Wang Ming for leadership of the CCP. After returning to China in the late 1930s, Kang Sheng switched his allegiance to Mao Zedong and became a close associate of Mao during the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese Civil War, and after. He remained at or near the pinnacle of power in the People's Republic of China from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1975. After the death of Mao and the subsequent arrest of the Gang of Four, Kang Sheng was accused of sharing responsibility with the Gang for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and in 1980 he was expelled posthumously from the CCP.
The Civil Service of the People's Republic of China is the administrative system of the traditional Chinese government which consists of all levels who run the day-to-day affairs in China. The members of the civil service are selected through competitive examination.
The government of the People's Republic of China is based on a system of people's congress within the parameters of a unitary communist state, in which the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) enacts its policies through people's congresses. This system is based on the principle of unified state power, in which the legislature, the National People's Congress (NPC), is constitutionally enshrined as "the highest state organ of power." As China's political system has no separation of powers, there is only one branch of government which is represented by the legislature. The CCP through the NPC enacts unified leadership, which requires that all state organs, from the Supreme People's Court to the President of the People's Republic of China, are elected by, answerable to, and have no separate powers than those granted to them by the NPC. The CCP controls appointments in all state bodies through a two-thirds majority in the NPC. The remaining seats are held by nominally independent delegates and eight minor political parties, which are non-oppositional and support the CCP. All government bodies and state-owned enterprises have internal CCP committees that lead the decision-making in these institutions.
The 17th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party was held in Beijing, China, at the Great Hall of the People from 15 to 21 October 2007. Congress marked a significant shift in the political direction of the country as CCP General Secretary Hu Jintao solidified his position of leadership. Hu's signature policy doctrine, the Scientific Development Concept, which aimed to create a "Socialist Harmonious Society" through egalitarian wealth distribution and concern for the country's less well-off, was enshrined into the Party Constitution. It was succeeded by the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party.
The Organization Department of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party is a human resource management department of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that controls staffing positions within the CCP.
The history of the Chinese Communist Party began with its establishment in July 1921. A study group led by Peking University professors Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao to discuss Marxism, led to intellectuals officially founding the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in July 1921. In 1923, Sun Yat-sen invited the CCP to form a United Front, and to join his Nationalist Party (GMD) in Canton for training under representatives of the Communist International, the Soviet Union's international organization. The Soviet representatives reorganized both parties into Leninist parties. Rather than the loose organization that characterized the two parties until then, the Leninist party operated on the principle of democratic centralism, in which the collective leadership set standards for membership and an all powerful Central Committee determined the party line, which all members must follow.
China Executive Leadership Academy in Pudong is a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cadre school located in Pudong, Shanghai. The school, considered to be among the top four party schools in China, opened in late 2005.
In Maoism, a capitalist roader is a person or group who demonstrates a marked tendency to bow to pressure from bourgeois forces and subsequently attempts to pull the Chinese Communist Revolution in a capitalist direction. If allowed to do so, these forces would eventually restore the political and economic rule of capitalism; in other words, these forces would lead a society down a "capitalist road".
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) frames its ideology as Marxism adapted to the historical context of China, often expressing it as socialism with Chinese characteristics. Major ideological contributions of the CCP's leadership are viewed as "Thought" or "Theory," with "Thought" carrying greater weight. Influential concepts include Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, and Xi Jinping Thought. Other important concepts include the socialist market economy, Jiang Zemin's idea of the Three Represents, and Hu Jintao's Scientific Outlook on Development.
The organization of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is based upon the Leninist concept of democratic centralism.
Li Ganjie is a Chinese politician serving as the head of the Organization Department of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He is a member of the 20th Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party and a secretary of the 20th Secretariat of the Chinese Communist Party. He has previously served as head of the National Nuclear Safety Administration, deputy party secretary of Hebei, the Minister of Ecology and Environment from 2017 to 2020, and the Communist Party Secretary of Shandong from 2021 to 2022.
After the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) extended its ruling to most parts of China and set up a national government in Beijing in 1949, it encountered a lot of new tasks. The first was to rebuild the economy, which deteriorated sharply during the last years of Nationalist Party (KMT) governing. The strategy that led CCP to state power is termed as "using the rural areas to encircle the cities" (农村包围城市). Thus, one difficulty CCP had in economy was that it had little experience in dealing with the urban part of the economy. Furthermore, facing the threat of KMT's fighting back, it needed to consolidate its political power. To meet these challenges, a new and coherent wage system in the economic sector was needed. Naturally, this transformation of wage system had both political goals and economic goals. Economically, via setting up a new wage system, CCP wanted to stabilize the economic situation, to ensure normal people's everyday living and also to further develop the economy. Politically, CCP not only wanted to distinguish itself from the old KMT regime by this new wage system, but also to make the wage system suitable for the future socialist economy. After two wage reforms in 1952 and 1956, a new wage system was established, and its influence continued to today.
The Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People's Republic of China is a 1981 document adopted by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party which assesses the legacy of the Mao Zedong era and the party's priorities moving forward.
Library resources about Cadre system of the Chinese Communist Party |