438243

and ZhuReview of Public Personnel Administration

ROP32210.1177/0734371X12438243Jing

Review of Public Personnel Administration

Civil Service Reform in 32(2) 134­–148

© 2012 SAGE Publications
Reprints and permission:
China:  An Unfinished Task of sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0734371X12438243
Value Balancing http://rop.sagepub.com

Yijia Jing1 and Qianwei Zhu1

Abstract
Despite a consistent task to balance political, managerial, and legal values, China’s civil
service reform in the past three decades demonstrated a paradigmatic shift from a
conflict-oriented to harmony-oriented model. The 2005 Civil Service Law highlighted
a legal effort to institutionalize the coexistence of competing values. Such a shift was
justified by, besides the changed path of political reform, contextual factors including
the convergence of values, the strategy of decoupling, and the validated advantages of
a unified system. An examination of the post-2005 developments discloses complex
patterns of interaction between values across reform arenas, showing a limit to
the harmony-oriented model. Despite its capability to constrain outright conflicts,
China’s integrated political system faces an urgent demand of institutional capacities
to balance the competing values.

Keywords
civil service reform, values, reform models, Chinese human resource management

Introduction
China’s civil service reform was embedded in its incremental transition since 1978.
Serving China’s fast economic modernization, the building of a modern civil service
was meanwhile the Chinese Communist Party’s self-adjustment of its cadre personnel
management and hence an integral part of China’s political reform. Such a dual con-
text of civil service reform naturally raises a question about the compatibility between
its modernization motivations and political intentions.

1
Fudan University, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China

Corresponding Author:
Yijia Jing, School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University, 618 Wenke Building, 220
Handan Road, Shanghai 200433, People’s Republic of China
Email: jingyj@fudan.edu.cn
Jing and Zhu 135

The question is important due to the complexity and uniqueness in balancing

potentially conflicting values in the Chinese administrative state and its personnel
management, and it coincides with a deeply rooted and seemingly irresolvable ten-
sion between politics and administration that has attracted more ink than any other
single dilemma in administrative studies. Bureaucratic neutrality, a tenet of Weberian
bureaucracy, has been widely criticized as an impractical and even harmful utopia
(Rourke, 1992; Stivers, 1994; Svara, 2001). Instead, increasing politicization, both of
bureaucrats upward along the hierarchical chain and command (Aberbach, Putnam,
& Rockman, 1981), or of civil service across the industrialized democracies in recent
decades (Peters & Pierre, 2004), is argued to serve functional aspects by inducing a
more committed bureaucracy. Overconcentration on technical rationality, in extreme
situations, breeds administrative evil (Adams & Balfour, 2009). Yet a value-laden
civil service suffers a systematic internal disequilibrium (Kaufman, 1956; Wilson,
1976). Rosenbloom (1983, p. 224), pathbreakingly, sorts the fundamental administra-
tive values as managerial, political, and legal, arguing for an impossibility to synthe-
size them due to the American political culture that “emphasizes the separation of
powers rather than integrated political actions.” Such value incompatibility is not
limited to the United States. As a generic dilemma across modern bureaucracies,
value balancing is unexceptionally imperfect, temporary, and contingent on contex-
tual factors (Rutgers, 2008). Reform tides, like New Public Management, further
complicate the values and their relations (Hood, 1991; Kearney & Hays, 1998).
Such discussions in western contexts shed light on China’s civil service reform in
search of goals and directions. The Chinese bureaucracy in the prereform era had been
pained by its dual pursuit of a “red” and “professional” cadre team. Class-based cadre
selection, technocracy, and frequent political mobilization in effect tilted to a fully
tamed bureaucracy, regardless of its poor efficiency (Liu, 2001). Post-1978 reforms
began to redress such an imbalance. Aufrecht and Li (1995) notice that development
has risen as a competing value of socialism in shaping China’s civil service reform.
Current literature especially argues that, like the western democracies, China has been
facing a real and difficult task to balance professional expertise with political account-
ability (Lam & Chan, 1996a, 1996b; Tsao & Worthley, 1995, 2009). Yet despite the
awareness to value-related issue, a series of questions remain untouched or understud-
ied: What are the basic values of China’s civil service? Where are they from? How
have they molded the reforms? Can they be synthesized? How and to what extent have
they been balanced? Further studies are needed to lay a foundation for a value-based
approach to civil service reform in China.
Inspired by these questions, this article first develops a theoretical framework for
understanding the competing values in China’s civil service. We apply the framework
to analyze the reforms toward the 2005 Civil Service Law (CSL) and the law itself.
Then we examine some major post-2005 developments, followed by brief conclusions
and discussions.
136 Review of Public Personnel Administration 32(2)

Competing Civil Service Values in China: A Framework

Existing literature confirms the values generalized by Rosenbloom (1983) except for
a lesser attention to the legal value. This reflects the delayed development of rule of
law in China and the fact that most literature was written before the 2005 CSL was
enacted. Yet a direct application of Rosenbloom’s framework is not viable. In China,
competing administrative values did not emerge as a result of the separation of powers
between independent branches of government that represent these values respectively.
While these branches of government do exist, they are under the Party’s unified lead-
ership that demands coordinated actions. A sound analytical framework of China’s
civil service values has to highlight the core role of the Party, whose vision of an
appropriate bureaucracy determines how far the reform can go. Indeed, these values
are not independent of the Party. In this context we redefine the three major values.
Political value. Political leadership of the Party over all branches of government, as
prescribed by the 1982 Constitution, demands its effective control of the bureaucracy.
Exempt from electoral competitions, the Party’s political governance is directly car-
ried out by the bureaucracy and thus entails the latter’s political loyalty and respon-
siveness. Such a political mandate resurged after the social movements in the late
1980s. Officials should comply with the Party’s political leadership and its socialist
ideology. Such a strong control is guaranteed by the Party’s monopoly over the
appointments of cadres in and outside the governments. While Party membership is
not a precondition of office taking, party members assume most high-ranking
positions.
Managerial value. Post-1978 reforms demanded a modernized bureaucracy capable
of managing a liberalized economy and a growingly diversified society, as the Party
shifted its central task from class struggle to economic development. Bureaucrats
should be well educated, competitively recruited, professionally trained, and appropri-
ately motivated and evaluated. Values like scientific management, efficiency, profes-
sionalism, managerial accountability, and innovation have been increasingly accepted
(Liou, 1997). A merit-based system has been introduced that favors technocrats with
backgrounds in engineering and economic management (Liu, 2001). The popular
GDPism highlights a distorted results-based management.
Legal value. Rule of law is a rather new value despite China’s long history of written
laws. The current emphasis on due process, fairness, transparency, and predictability
is the self-discipline of the Party that lacks external control. Effective making and
implementation of formal rules and procedures is expected to introduce an impersonal
bureaucracy, prevent abuse of power, and afford external monitoring. Yet a shift from
a discretion-based to rule-based system faces strong political resistance. Although in
1986 it was first proposed to make an Administrative Procedure Law, such a law is still
unavailable.
Unlike the United States where the rise of the administrative state facilitated the
devolution of independent values into the administrative branch (Rosenbloom, 1983),
China’s bureaucracy was at its beginning an integrated system of rule making,
Jing and Zhu 137

implementation, and adjudication, featuring a party-state regime. Such an institutional

design intended to maximize centralized coordination, efficiency, and flexibility,
besides a primary purpose of maintaining political leadership. Although post-1978
reforms have been characterized by a gradual and incomplete devolution of functions
from party-governmental agencies to legislative and judicial agencies, such a change
aims to improve the division of labor rather than the separation of powers. Essentially,
civil service values in China lack external inputs, and so does their balancing.
Consequently, in contradistinction to the United States, it is more difficult for
China to crystallize and demarcate these values. They are affiliated to the Party
and lack independent lives. Their essence and priorities are left to the learning and
self-reflection of the Party in its governing practices. The political value has, tradi-
tionally, outweighed the other two and constituted a basic source of empowerment,
uncertainty, and intervention. Since 1978, the comprehensive changes in the Chinese
society have gradually shifted the pillar of the party-state’s legitimacy to its perfor-
mance in managing socioeconomic issues in a highly complex and capricious global
system. The accompanied transformation of the Party from revolutionary to prag-
matic set a foundation for the rising importance of the managerial and legal values
(Jing, 2008), accelerating their internalization into the bureaucracy.
Two models of value balancing in civil service can thus be tentatively generalized.
One is the conflict-oriented model that treats civil service as an arena where different
values compete and compromise. Under this model, values are differentiated, autono-
mous, frequently conflicting, and affiliated to outside and independent branches of
government. The struggle of these branches for supremacy in civil service often guar-
antees value coexistence rather than reconciliation. The alternative harmony-oriented
model relies on an authoritative center to balance rather than just mediate the values.
Values are not institutionally demarcated by external forces and are not necessarily
conflicting. It doubts the capacity of a fragmented system to create equilibrium from
outside, but emphasizes the potential of value engineering and reconciliation. Neither
model is always superior or inferior. Civil service designed under the first model may
suffer inaction, while the second model may create systematic bias. As two ends of one
spectrum, their relative advantages also result in their relative weakness. In reality,
civil service systems in the United States and China constitute two typical examples of
the two models, reflecting their starkly different political culture and systems. In the
following we apply this value approach to analyze civil service reform in China.

The 2005 Civil Service Law

The Evolution Toward the CSL

Civil service reform was initiated in 1980 when Deng Xiaoping proposed four
General Principles of cadre team building as revolutionary, young, knowledgeable,
and professional. Reformers, believing that the Party’s micromanagement over the
bureaucracy had harmed the latter’s administrative capacity and thus the Party’s
138 Review of Public Personnel Administration 32(2)

political legitimacy, wanted to establish a relatively autonomous bureaucracy. In his

Report to the 13th National Congress of the Party in 1987, Zhao Ziyang proposed to
divide officials as political and career civil servants. Political civil servants would be
elected and managed according to the Constitution and the Organizational Law.
Although they would be recommended by the Party for appointments, only those with
party membership should be supervised by the Party. Career civil servants should be
managed according to the forthcoming civil service laws. The 13th Party Congress
decided to abolish party groups in governmental agencies, revoke party organizations
with governmental functions, and prohibit cadres of party committees from supervis-
ing governmental agencies.
Such a reform plan reflected the political reform tide in the 1980s to separate the
Party from government (dang zheng fen kai) and to introduce rule of law. Reformers,
with an inclination to admit value conflicts, tended to create a limitedly divided value
representation system. In consequence, the Ministry of Personnel was established in
1988, aiming to take over personnel management from the Organizational Department.
Party groups in some ministries were abolished since 1987. Yet the resulted disobedi-
ence of the bureaucracy in 1989 incurred the worry of its political loyalty, leading to a
3-year stalemate in civil service reform and a restoration and expansion of the nomen-
klatura (Burns, 1994; Chan, 2004). The conflict-oriented model was abandoned.
Officially, “division of labor” replaced “separation of functions” in defining the party–
government relation.
The following two decades demonstrated a gradual shift to the harmony-oriented
model. In 1993, the State Council issued Provisional Regulations on State Civil
Servants (PRSCS), with a narrow focus on scientific management. It, for the first time,
systematically prescribed basic civil service institutions like entrance exams, training,
appraisal, promotion, compensation, retirement, occupational rights and obligations,
and rewards and punishments. State civil servants were defined as the employees
of state administrative agencies. This definition had an intention to improve profes-
sionalism by excluding the vast sector of public services like the hospitals, schools,
universities, and research institutes. Furthermore, except for acknowledging “adher-
ence to the Four Basic Principles,”1 the PRSCS did not mention the Party in its text,
giving an impression of keeping a distance to politics.
Being hailed as a pathbreaking progress, the PRSCS was still an incomplete make-
shift that left crucial issues untouched. As a decree issued by the Central Government,
it did not cover the employees of the Party, the People’s Congress, the People’s
Consultative Conference, the Court, the Procuratorate, and the official mass organiza-
tions. Although these employees were in fact managed according to it (can gong), such
a dual-track system created much discretion in its enforcement. The PRSCS did not
differentiate political and career civil servants. More importantly, it avoided clarifying
the role of the Party in personnel management. This neglect was certainly not acciden-
tal. The ideal of an autonomous bureaucracy did not fade away in the early 1990s,
while the Party, despite its determination, was still unsure of the manners and effects
in exerting political leadership. Since a major step of reform looked necessary after
Jing and Zhu 139

years of deliberation, the incremental reform mentality led to the PRSCS as a partial
solution. Consequently, comprehensive cadre personnel management of the Party
continued. Since late 1989, a vice head of the Organizational Department would
assume the head of the Ministry of Personnel, which was left the authority to manage
nonleading governmental officials. Major regulations on public personnel manage-
ment, especially those on leading cadres, such as the 2002 Ordinance on the Selection
and Appointment of Party-Governmental Leading Cadres, were issued by the Party,
covering both civil servants and other cadres.
In comparison, the Outline to Deepen the Cadre Personnel Institution Reform,
issued by the Central Party Committee in 2000, provided comprehensive guidelines
for cadre personnel reforms. The Outline emphasized three principles: (a) The four
General Principles of cadre team building and a dual emphasis on virtue and talent;
(b) Party manages cadre; and (c) Rule by law (yi fa ban shi). These principles coin-
cided with the aforementioned three values and demonstrated a keen intention to
reconcile them. While the Outline mandated coherent leadership of the Party over
party-governmental cadres, enterprise cadres, and science and technology cadres, it
demanded specialized management institutions. Besides its promise to introduce
flexibility, competition, and exit mechanisms, it required improved rule making and
adjudication to prevent bureaucratism, nepotism, and corruption. The Outline gave
priority to building democratic and regular procedures, such as democratic recom-
mendation and appraisal, poll, quiet period before office taking, competition-based
selection and election, tenure system, probation, and resignation. The Outline gave a
strong signal that civil service reform should follow a route of party-led
rationalization.

The Value Compromise in the CSL

The 2005 CSL, as a law enacted by the Standing Committee of National People’s
Congress, legally recognized the cadre personnel management practices since 1989.
Compared to the PRSCS, the CSL expanded the scope of civil servants as the persons
assuming public powers, covered by administrative personnel posts (xing zheng ren
shi bian zhi), and compensated by public money. This definition effectively included
employees of all branches of government and the Party-mass organizations. In fact,
the Law replaced “state civil servant” in the PRSCS with “civil servant.” In its text
the CSL highlighted both the “Party manages cadre” principle and the principle of
scientific management, ending a decade-long “dual track” system (Zhang, 2010).
Despite a seeming “return to cadre personnel management,” the CSL affirmed the fact
that the Party had always been “the source of both civil service empowerment and
control” (Chan & Li, 2007).
The CSL represented a formal adoption of the harmony-oriented model in man-
aging civil service. Besides the model’s fundamental compatibility with China’s
integrated political system, several contextual factors explained this serious legal
step. First, the political and instrumental values assigned to the bureaucracy have
140 Review of Public Personnel Administration 32(2)

experienced growing convergence. The one-party system and its long-term focus on
pragmatic goals have in effect depoliticized the bureaucracy and isolated it from
unscrupulous political intervention. Political loyalty of the officials is best mani-
fested by their activeness and performance in handling the challenges like China’s
reentry into the WTO in 2001, rampant corruption and distrust of the government,
citizens’ burgeoning right awareness, and emergence of complex social issues, rather
than by proactive involvement in politics like that during the Cultural Revolution.
Political leadership serves economic development, and vice versa. Other factors,
like the shifting characteristic of Chinese politics from class-based ideologies to
guanxi-based clientelism (Oi, 1985), and the emergence of bureaucratic fragmenta-
tion (Zhao, 1992), limit the strength and harm of political intervention.
Decoupling, as a detachment between adopted formal structures and real activities
(Meyer & Rowan, 1977), explains the selective imposition of political leadership and
its mild influences. Despite a consistent emphasis on political rightness, civil service
reform since the early 1990s never seriously retreated from a focus on rationalized
management. Politicians are aware that there is limit to political intrusion in profes-
sional issues and refrain from taking destructive actions. Meanwhile, gaps between
formalities and contents in adopting rationalized management often exist. Announcing
a reform often symbolizes effective leadership as an alternative to action (Dong,
Christensen, & Painter, 2010; March & Olson, 1983). The mere attraction of attention
helps claim credits and legitimacy, and avoids confronting internal power discourse in
cadre personnel management. The logic of confidence and good faith, as suggested by
Meyer and Rowan (1977), looms large in China’s civil service reform that features
celebrations of superficial success as well as easy neglect of failures.
Third, the CSL’s juxtaposition of values also reflected the increasing confidence
and experiences of the Party in controlling the bureaucracy. A unified political leader-
ship did not necessarily constrain rationalized management. As Wilson (1887, p. 202)
argued more than one hundred years ago, “the desire to keep government a monopoly”
led to enthusiasm “in discovering the least irritating means of governing.” The large-
scale downsizing and structural reforms in 1993 and 1998 demonstrated the capacity
of the political leadership in shaping the bureaucracy. Such capacity was also strength-
ened by China’s continuous economic growth and fiscal affluence. Between 2000 and
2007, China’s annual growth rate of fiscal revenues was 18%, affording discretionary
funds to compensate the losers of the reforms, for example, by sending laid-off civil
servants to universities for postgraduate studies.

The Post-2005 Developments

The 2005 CSL paved a way for an accelerated process of rationalization empowered
by a unified political leadership. A close look at the developments in four important
reform areas reveals rather complex patterns of interaction between political, manage-
rial and legal values.
Jing and Zhu 141

Table 1. Competition in Central Agency Recruitment

Applicants Recruits Recruitment rate Top ratio

2010 1,401,845 15,526 1.1% 4,723:1
2009 800,000 13,566 1.7% 3,592:1
2008 640,000 13,977 2.2% 4,407:1
2007 535,574 12,724 2.4% 2,014:1
2006 365,000 10,282 2.8% 322:1
2005 310,656 8,400 2.7% Na
2004 181,488 7,900 4.4% Na

Source: Adapted from multiple Internet sources.

Recruitment
The CSL stipulates a two-stage competitive examination in recruiting nonleading civil
servants at or below section chief level (ke ji), including those transferred from state-
owned enterprises or military force. Table 1 shows the intensifying competition.
A major recent change in recruitment was the qualification requirement on grass-
roots working experience.2 Since the Ministry of Personnel started pilot exams in
1989, the emphasis on knowledge and IQ has overwhelmingly favored fresh univer-
sity graduates. Human capital in governments was significantly enhanced.3 The grow-
ingly elite-oriented bureaucracy posed a threat to the Party’s mass line. In Hu Jintao’s
report to the 17th National Congress of the Party in 2007, he warned the deteriorating
grassroots governance and called for promoting excellent cadres at the grassroots level
and the front line of production to enrich party-governmental agencies.
Besides a quest for bureaucratic representativeness, openness, and political patron-
age, the new emphasis was also justified by the merit principle. Overemphasis on
exam performance had led to a modern Ke ju zhi and seriously hindered cadres from
understanding complex public affairs, making and implementing policies, and adapt-
ing to specialized work.4 This is especially harmful for central agencies that make
national policies. Furthermore, direct recruitment of students to central, provincial,
and municipal governments reduces the upward mobility of grassroots civil servants
and demoralizes these “street-level bureaucrats” (viz., civil servants employed by
county and township/street governments) that account for about 60% civil servants.
Such congruence of values induced quick actions. Provincial and central recruits
with grassroots working experience reached 50% in proportion in 2008. In 2009, it
rose to be 70% for central agencies and 60% for provincial agencies. In Shanghai,
municipal agencies have stopped recruiting fresh university graduates since 2008.

Position Classification
Position classification is the precondition for specialized personnel management.
Article 14 of the CSL lists three categories: comprehensive management (CM),
142 Review of Public Personnel Administration 32(2)

professional-technical (PT), and administrative law enforcement (ALE). Recent

reforms have first focused on professionalizing PT and ALE categories by shifting
their functions from administrative decision making to technical operations and
policy implementation. A merit-based professional ranking and compensation system
is expected to introduce a stable and permanent bureaucracy immune to a high-
powered incentive for positional promotion.
Pilot experiments were first carried out in 2000, when public security agencies in
Guangdong, Anhui, Fujian, Inner Mongolia, and Chongqing began to establish PT
position system. Such a system was adopted nationwide for legal medical experts,
legal appraisers, and action technicians in the public security system in 2004. In 2008,
the State Administration for Industry and Commerce and the State Administration of
Taxation began position classification for ALE staff. As the only pilot city, in 2010
Shenzhen classified about 24,000 staff into a 7-rank AEL category, covering 69% of
its civil servants.
Position classification was also empowered by Party’s consistent emphasis on flex-
ible management (Lam & Chan, 1996b). By removing the majority of civil servants
from the GM (guan) track, flexible employment and exit mechanisms become possi-
ble. Article 95 of the CSL stipulates that contracted-based appointment (pin ren zhi)
can be used for highly professional or accessorial positions, with an intention to abol-
ish life tenure, incorporate external talents, integrate job markets, and enhance bureau-
cratic responsiveness. In 2008, the China Securities Regulatory Commission, Pudong
New District, Shenzhen Municipality, and Wenzhou Municipality were approved for
pilot tests. After openly recruiting 53 contract-based civil servants since 2007,
Shenzhen will expand the annual recruits to 1000 for the AEL category in 2010. In
2008, Pudong New District recruited five such civil servants in financial planning and
economic analysis.
Ironically, a pursuit of a modern bureaucracy and an aspiration for New Public
Management tenets coexist in this reform area. This explains the difficulty in carrying
out the reforms under conflicting views on job security, compensation, and pension
benefits. The reform can be politically hazardous when governments are fiscally
strained or objective standards and transparent appraisal procedures are absent. Similar
reforms in public service units (shi ye dan wei), such as those in Shenzhen in 2006, led
to employee dissatisfaction, protests, and subsequent suspension.

Compensation
Cadre compensation under the planned economy featured a fundamental emphasis on
equality. Before 1993, civil servant income included basic wage, position wage, rank
wage, seniority wage, and subsidies, whose standards were nationally unified. Since
the 1993 tax assignment reform, local governments were allowed to offer subsidies to
their employees. Fiscal decentralization proliferated local subsidies, resulting in
income imbalance between civil servants and other social groups, and between civil
servants in different regions and agencies. In 2004 civil servants in Shanghai received
Jing and Zhu 143

Table 2. Average Income of Civil Servants in Shanghai, 1995-2004

Year Wage income (RMB) Nonwage income (RMB) Total income (RMB)
1995 8,719 (48.2%) 9,367 (51.8%) 18,086 (100%)
1996 9,939 (46.4%) 11,501 (53.6%) 21,440 (100%)
1997 11,120 (41.7%) 15,556 (58.3%) 26,676 (100%)
1998 12,803 (42.7%) 17,213 (57.3%) 30,016 (100%)
1999 15,222 (45.1%) 18,536 (54.9%) 33,758 (100%)
2000 17,374 (46.1%) 20,321 (53.9%) 37,695 (100%)
2001 18,500 (40.6%) 27,019 (59.4%) 45,519 (100%)
2002 20,445 (37.6%) 33,864 (62.4%) 54,309 (100%)
2003 20,438 (33.5%) 40,643 (66.5%) 61,081 (100%)
2004 22,529 (33.8%) 44,042 (66.2%) 66,571 (100%)
Source: Shanghai Municipal Government (2005).

36 kinds of allowances, subsidies, and bonuses whose collection and distribution

lacked basic fiscal control. Agencies with revenue collection functions could offer
high income just like profit-making enterprises.
The lopsided income structure, as shown in Table 2, signals the government’s
incapacity to balance competing values. Chapter 12 of the CSL requires the state to
regularly compare the wage of civil servants and comparable enterprise employees
for purpose of wage adjustment. While such a comparison is technically difficult due
to China’s burgeoning yet chaotic markets, a major issue is that given working skills,
the public sector in general has a relatively compressed wage distribution than other
sectors. This compression, subjective as it can be, is often deemed as bureaucratic
privileges by lower classes. Historically, fear of the social backlash made wage
adjustment slow and insufficient, creating a strong incentive for the bureaucracy to
seek nontransparent nonwage income, sometimes through nonlegal or illegal ways
(Jing, 2008).
In 2006 a wage reform was introduced to simplify wage structure to include only
position wage and rank wage. Only in 2008 was the sunshine income reform intro-
duced to cope with the messy subsidies. The reform tried to (a) cancel illegal and
nonlegal subsidies; (b) merge the subsidies; and (c) impose fiscal disciplines on
retained subsidies. Since policies were made and implemented locally, the regional
income gap remained intact, while the gap in a given jurisdiction was shortened more
or less.
Technical complexity and employee disincentive only partially explain the limited
sunshine reform. Officials’ income has always been a sensitive issue. No local govern-
ments publicized employees’ income information before and after the reform, for fear
of engendering social discontentment. Likewise, although asset and income declara-
tion of leading cadres to the Organizational Department has been adopted for years,
publicization of such information faces insurmountable resistance. In 2008, Aletai
Prefecture, a rural area in Xinjiang Province, took the lead to publicly disclose the
144 Review of Public Personnel Administration 32(2)

annual income of cadres at or beyond deputy division level qfu chu ji). In 2009,
Chongqing required leading officials in courts and procuratorates to disclose such
information on designated web sites and local news papers. The weak political com-
mitment led to a fragmented reform free of external oversight.

Leadership Selection and Promotion

Leading cadres are the core of civil service. Article 7 of the CSL confirms the prin-
ciple to select cadres with virtue and talent (de cai jian bei). Article 33 specifies the
criteria of cadre appraisal as virtue, capacity, diligence, performance, and integrity.
Compared to the PRSCS, integrity is newly added in response to the rampant cor-
ruption that has seriously challenged the traditional means of cadre selection and
promotion that featured a secret process dominated by the first party secretary.
Recent reforms are comprehensive, making competition, democracy, and transpar-
ency their keywords. Article 45 of the CSL allows internal competition (jing zheng
shang gang) for leading positions and open competition (gong kai xuan ba) for nonlead-
ing positions, below the bureau level (ju ji). The Outline of the Plans to Deepen the
Cadre Personnel Institution Reform between 2010 and 2020, issued in 2009 by the
Central Party Committee, further stipulates mass participation in nominating cadre can-
didates, accountability in recommending cadre candidates, internal competition, and
open competition. In 2007 and 2008, 30 vice bureau–level positions in Shanghai, like
the vice head of the Bureau of Civil Affairs, were opened for external and even global
application. In early 2010, Chongqing restaffed police cadre positions between deputy
section level (fu ke ji) and division level (zheng chu ji) through internal competition.
Nationwide, between 2005 and 2009, about 30,000 leading cadres were promoted
through open competition, and about 280,000 through internal competition.5
These reforms represent a systematic political rejuvenation effort to serve all major
values, and that’s where value incompatibility is most obvious. As aforementioned, the
rule-based management is not pursued by making credible laws and regulations, but
by proliferating Party policies and directions. Overlapping governmental and Party
documents create loopholes, confusion, and unenforceable accountability. Without
differentiating political and career cadres, the emphasis on democracy and competi-
tion can impede a stable and professional civil service. Similarly, the higher priority
assigned to virtue rather than talent (yi de wei xian) may affect career civil servants in
a negative way. Although a claim of administrative democracy serves a thirst for legiti-
macy, the new procedures may change nothing but delay appointments and incur extra
administrative costs. Besides some apparent progress, anecdotal stories often reveal
insider’s advantages or the decisiveness of superordinate leader’s intention. It is yet to
examine to what extent real competition and participation is there and to what extent
people with political loyalty and professional competence, the Chinese version of
“pure hybrids” (Aberbach et al., 1981), are singled out.
We generalize the above discussions in Table 3, in which political, managerial, and
legal values are represented by PV, MV, and LV.
Jing and Zhu 145

Table 3. Value Relations in the post-2005 Civil Service Reform

Reform achievements
Reform area Coverage Maturity Impact Value relations
Recruitment National High Medium PV and MV both empower
the reform despite different
purposes.
Position Pilot project Low low PV and MV both empower
classification the reform with competing
purposes and means.
Compensation National, Medium Medium LV empowers the reform,
fragmented shadowed by competing PV
and MV.
Cadre selection National Low Low PV, MV and LV all empower
and promotion the reform with competing
purposes and means.

Note: PV = political values; MV = managerial values; LV = legal values.

Discussion and Conclusion

This article introduces a value-based approach to the study of civil service reform in
China. Extending Rosenbloom’s theory, we propose a value framework that links civil
service values to the basic political system. While a conflict-oriented model fits the
separation of powers regime, China’s integrated political system tends to favor a
harmony-oriented model under which the unified political leadership of the Party
constitutes the source of value generation and the center of value reconciliation. This
essentially blurs the boundaries between values and impedes their differentiation.
Value balancing features a pragmatic process of internal trade-offs. Both the authority
and burden of balancing is left to the coordinating center that claims to transcend
special interests and tunnel vision.
The value approach provides a vantage point to understand China’s civil service
reform. Despite China’s consistent desire to balance the values, we identify a paradig-
matic shift of China’s civil service reform from a conflict-oriented model to a harmony-
oriented model. While such a shift was first induced by the changed path of political
reform, a series of contextual factors emerged to justify the legalization of such a
model by the 2005 CSL. Abandoning the conflict-oriented model in both its prereform
version and its western version, civil service in China has been on a track of accelerat-
ing rationalization under a unified political leadership.
So has China found its way to synthesize these values? Our analysis suggests a
limit to the harmony-oriented model. While China’s political system avoids institu-
tionalizing the conflicts between values, its institutional base of value reconciliation is
far from mature. Contingent on the issues, different values may have varying patterns
of combination and interaction. They may jointly or singly empower the reforms, and
146 Review of Public Personnel Administration 32(2)

may converge or diverge in different aspects or stages of a reform. When values con-
flict, inertia and implementation deficits appear exactly like the western democracies.
Biased priorities assigned to these values often explain the failures of both the Chinese
bureaucracy and its reform.
This article leaves further directions for future studies. A fundamental issue is to
explore the limit of a unified system to accommodate competing values. While a
check-and-balance system is subject to fission, an integrated system is subject to
entropy (Hirschman, 1970). Historically, degradation of a unified system, especially
due to corruption, proved to be an inescapable disease that could ruin the regime’s
capacity of value balancing and led to unrestrained disasters and system collapse. A
big question for civil service reform in an integrated system like China is how institu-
tional innovations can be induced or tolerated to engender “creative destructions” and
self-rejuvenation forces. As can be found that the supportive contextual factors of a
harmony-oriented model are all dynamic and the equilibrium clung to these factors is
weak and unreliable. Further differentiation of values is unavoidable. Decoupling is
not viable when the system’s slack diminishes and the bottom line of any value is hit.
A unified system may also be efficient in making terrible blunders. These situations
are all real and can be more real as the reform deepens. Besides other methods of
inquiries, we recommend comparative studies between China and Asian countries like
Japan, South Korea, and Singapore that share common cultural roots and similar mod-
ern history. By comparing China with countries located in between regarding their
forms of political system, the proposed value-framework may be further tested and
enriched.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the Major Program of the
National Social Science Foundation of China (10zd&009).

Notes
1. The Four Basic Principles are socialism, proletarian dictatorship, Marxist–Leninism and
Mao Zedong Thoughts, and Party’s leadership.
2. Grassroots working experience refers to a 2-year working experience outside the civil ser-
vice or at its grassroots level.
3. The proportion of civil servants with a college diploma or beyond rose from 30% to 86%
between 1992 and 2007. Data are from the talk by Yin Weimin, the Minister of Human
Resources and Social Security, on March 3, 2009, available at www.gov.cn.
4. Ke ju zhi was the state exam institution to select governmental officials in ancient Chinese
dynasties (Jing, 2010). It was blamed for the pendantic nature of the Chinese bureaucracy.
Jing and Zhu 147

5. The data are from a talk by Li Yuanchao, the Chief of the Central Organizational Depart-
ment, on Dec 13, 2009.

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Bios
Yijia Jing is professor and assistant dean of School of International Relations and Public
Affairs, Fudan University. He researches privatization, governance, civil service, and adminis-
trative reform. He is director of Center for Collaborative Governance Research at Fudan
University and editor in chief of Fudan Public Administration Review. His recent articles are
published on Public Administration and Development and Public Administration Review.

Qianwei Zhu is professor and chair of the Department of Public Administration, School of
International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University. He researches public administra-
tion theories, human resource management, and civil service reform. He has authored and
coauthored 5 books and more than 40 journal articles.