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County and Township Cadres as a Strategic Group. A New Approach to Political Agency in China’s Local State

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Abstract

Linking up with and critically assessing the recent literature on the local state in China, this article introduces a new framework to understand group behavior and strategic agency in local policy processes. Conceptualizing county and township cadres as a ‘strategic group’, the framework offers a number of analytical tools for better understanding the conditions of effective and ineffective policy implementation. Drawing on insights from development sociology, Bourdieu’s theory of capital formation and the garbage can model from organization theory, against a background of extensive fieldwork in numerous Chinese counties over the last years conducted by the authors, the article intends to theoretically substantiate the current knowledge of China scholars on the nexus between actors and their institutional environment in the Chinese local state.

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Notes

  1. See, for example, Dong Haijun, Xiangzhen ganbu qunti de jiaose shijian ji qi ruoshihua (The practical role of town and township cadre groups and their weakening) in: Shehui (Society) 6, 2005; Chen Zhengjun and Zhang Xiaolin, Xibu diqu xiangzhen ganbu gonggong fuwu nengli tisheng yanjiu (Study on the elevation of public service capacity of township cadres in Western China), in: Zhiyejuan (Profession Circle) 5/2007 (http://www.qikan.com.cn/Article/zyec/zyec200705/zyec20070558.html, accessed 12/3/2010); Li Danlin, Guanyu dangqian xiangzhen ganbu sixiang zhuangkuang de sikao (Considerations on the current ideological situation of township cadres), http://www.zgxcfx.com/Article_Show.asp?ArticleID=4491 (accessed 12/3/2010). Xiao Lihui, Xianwei shuji yanzhongde Zhongyang yu difang guanxi (Relationship between the center and the local level in the eyes of county party secretaries), in: Jingji Shehui Tizhi Bijiao (Comparison between Economic and Social Systems), 4/2008, 145–150; see also, [1].

  2. See [2–4].

  3. Effective policy implementation refers to the outcomes that are consistent with local development goals as laid out in the policy guidelines and work reports of, namely, county governments. It does not mean, however, that these outcomes reflect implementation efficiency, understood as best possible results in terms of resource allocation and administrative capacity.

  4. [7–14] Prebendalism refers to the relationship between the career ambitions of an individual and the people supporting his efforts to acquire an official position; once in office, the favours have to be repaid.

  5. [16] Pieke also demanded that a new anthropology of the state be brought into perspective by “taking into account the complex interaction between higher-level policies, existing institutional arrangements, and the informal relations between current and aspiring holders of posts at various bureaucratic levels” (2004: 533).

  6. Pieke, Contours of an Anthropology of the Chinese State, 520. The author further emphasizes that “the state is not merely a set of institutions existing in society, the state is society. Our starting point here should be that we view the state from the perspective of the people who staff it, studying the state from within in the same way as we study any other aspect of society: as institutions, communities, and networks that are negotiated and ever-changing products of both local and supra-local struggles and cultural practices” (533). Practices resulting from informal relationships (for example, between local cadres and their superiors) and established ways of thinking and behavior (conditioned by clan organization at village level or by the personal experiences of local leaders, for instance), an “entrenched localism” in Pieke’s terms, should be factored into any analysis of political and institutional change in the local state. See also [17].

  7. Compliance is defined as the “extent to which subordinates are disposed to abide by superordinates’ directives and to the extent they do so in practice”, see [18].

  8. This argument is found in Selective Policy Implementation in Rural China, by [19].

  9. For the distinction between manifest and latent functions of policy implementation, see [20].

  10. Evers and Schiel: 9–14. See also [26]

  11. Interests therefore play a crucial role in constituting strategic groups and structuring the beliefs and actions of their members. However, a strategic group is not an interest group in that it is primarily concerned with achieving short or medium term goals, but rather a group that acts as a collective actor in the belief that the group is a major force (which it often is) in a power struggle between all strategic groups within a given society and political system.

  12. Most leading cadres that were interviewed agreed that leading local cadres constitute a group with specific interests. To give but one example: A county party secretary clearly stated, “Yes, leading local cadres constitute a ruling team (zhizheng tuandui) and a professional group which definitely has its own interests.” Interestingly enough, he added: “However, on the other hand we have to figure out whether this specific group interest is also in the public interest and how strong any adverse effect on the latter could be”, Interview, Xifeng County, 06/09/2010.

  13. For more on evaluations at local level, see [28]

  14. These kinds of people with leadership qualities are exactly what the organizational departments at the prefectural and provincial levels try hard to identify. Upper levels are constantly looking for leaders who are able to steer and coordinate local policy processes – cadres who display the ability to detect what Francois Jullien has called “potentiel de la situation” (situational potential), that is, to fully understand the locality they have been transferred to and to work out a developmental strategy oriented towards the given local resources and circumstances. Cf. Francois Jullien, public lecture for managers on efficiency in China and the West, Berlin (Merve), 2002: 31–34. See also, in this context, [30]

  15. By autonomy, we do not mean a kind of self-governance but rather the discretion granted to allow a county to work out strategies for local policy implementation and to develop or maintain a specific identity.

  16. See for example, [31]

  17. Vgl. [32]

  18. For more on this issue: Pieke, Contours of an Anthropology: 529–530.

  19. Interviews, township mayor in Shiquan, 26/08/2011 and Jiangyin Party School, 18/08/2011.

  20. Interview, Policy Research Office of Jiangyin’s Party Committee, 14/08/2011.

  21. See, for example, [56, 57]

  22. For instance, interviewees at county and township levels would often invoke the “suzhi” discourse to describe their relationship with villagers; they consider themselves to be on a civilizing mission. See also [33].

  23. In “Document No. 1” in 2010, the central leadership pushed provinces to take on the direct administration of counties (sheng guan xian). Although this system is not yet practised in all the provinces in China, in many of them, county party secretaries and mayors are now appointed by the provinces. This increases the independence of the party secretary with regard to the prefectural city and affords greater leeway and discretionary power to the county. As the provincial capital is far away, monitoring the work of the county elite is difficult for provincial governments and this secures substantial degrees of autonomy for the county from that level as well. Guo Jia and Wu Qiqiang, Sheng guan xian zheng qiaoran tisu (‘Provinces administer counties’ quietly speeds up), in: http://theory.people.com.cn/GB/11261853.html (accessed 29/11/2010). The document No. 1/2010 is available at http://news.xinhuanet.com/politics/2010-01/31/content_12907829.htm (accessed 29/11/2010).

  24. Interview, Shiquan, 29/08/2011. The same holds true, for example, for Jiangyin County in Jiangsu province. The decision to build up a “happy Jiangyin” in order to improve the living conditions of the poor had to be approved by Jiangyin’s local People`s Congress (PC) but not by the prefectural government or the party committee of superior Wuxi city (Interview, Secretary of Wuxi Party Committee, 21/08/2011).

  25. Interview, party secretary of Shiquan County, 26/08/2011.

  26. Interview, party secretary of Dingnan county, 10/09/2010.

  27. See [34]. See also [35, 36]

  28. See, for example, [37].

  29. Frank Pieke has shown that local cadres’ collective identity and cooperation does in fact transcend county borders due to translocal networks established during periods of joint training and education in local Party Schools. This reinforces our argument that county and township cadres share a common identity, although we argue that their strategic agency is usually limited to the jurisdiction where they work. See [38]

  30. As a rule, this strategic group consists of those leading county and township cadres who are individually evaluated by the Organization Department of the local CCP county branch. This encompasses the members of the county and township party committee, particularly the party secretaries, the county and township heads and their deputies, the members of the Standing Committees of the local People’s Congresses and Political Consultative Conferences, the leading cadres of the various government and party bureaus, and the leaders of the “mass organizations” and their deputies.

  31. The lingdao banzi in most counties consists of the following cadres: the party secretary; the mayor, the secretary for political-legal affairs (zhengfa shuji), responsible for procuratorial, judicial and public security matters; the vice-mayor responsible for industry or rural development; the director of the Organization Department of the Party Committee; the Chairman of the Discipline Inspection Commission; the commander of the local armed forces (wuzhuang buzhang); and the secretary in charge of the work of the Party Committee (dangwei mishuzhang). The lingdao banzi can roughly be equated with the members of the County Party Standing Committee (xian dangwei changwu weiyuanhui).

  32. Zhong Yang, for his part, differs between “promotable” and “terminal” officials. Age limits and minimal education requirements have a significant impact on the career of officials. Promotable officials are young and sufficiently well-educated to be transferred to higher positions, whereas older and less educated cadres face dead-end careers. Zhong argues that the majority of county cadres belong to the second group, whereas most township cadres are promotable officials. This is an important distinction, however, because as members of a strategic group, both terminal and promotable cadres are committed to the protection of the interests of the whole group in terms of political autonomy and the maintenance of their current status and privileges. They are also connected by a specific habitus, a topic which is not fully discussed in Yang Zhong’s study. See [39]

  33. Teng Zhaoyi ren Meitan xianwei shuji (Teng Zhaoyi appointed party secretary of Meitan County), http://www.meitan.gov.cn/Article/zwgk/zwxx/hwdt/201008/10127.html (accessed 18/11/2010), and interview in Meitan county, 31/08/2010.

  34. Shortly after his appointment, the new party secretary, accompanied by the mayor, inspected all the county’s towns and townships in order to prepare for the drafting of a new development plan. Interview, Meitan County, 31/08/2010 and Chaxiang Meitan, the local weekly newspaper of Meitan County, 23/08/2010.

  35. Compliance is usually not founded on immediate coercion, but on the view of group members that compliance is decisive for career advancement, acknowledgement of performance or, at least, the avoidance of punishment.

  36. Interview with a former township party secretary, Qingdao, 20/08/2009.

  37. As March has convincingly shown, groups share objectives, but internal conflicts may also emerge. See [40].

  38. On the difference between locals and cosmopolitans, see [41]

  39. During our interviews with county and township cadres on the issue of upper level inspections and performance evaluation, the importance of ensuring that all documents were in order, that village leaders were properly briefed on what they should say and visiting cadres were “well treated” was stressed repeatedly. Deliberate collusion to deceive these inspection teams has been reported by (among others) Zhou et al. [55]

  40. Interviews with leading cadres at county level in Laixi (07/09/2008 and 21/08/2009); Anju (18/09/2008); Deqing (05/03/2009); Nanfeng (12/03/2009); Deqing (06/08/2010); Meitan (01/09/2010); Xifeng (06/09/2010); Shiquan (23/08/2011); Jiangyin (18/08/2011).

  41. Interviews Sichuan University (23/09/2008); Party Schools of Shandong (22/02/2009), Qingdao (31 08/2009), Sichuan (10/09/2009); Guizhou (09/09/2010); Academy of Social Sciences Shandong (02/09/2009), Sichuan (10/09/2009), Chengdu (23/09/2008; Guizhou University (09/09/2010); Central Party School (14/09/2009).

  42. See [4].

  43. We are, however, fully aware that innovations and implementation outcomes are by no means simply “good” or “bad”. Both good and bad changes occur.

  44. Another factor that strengthens overall group unity, brings about collective strategic agency and thus controls internal fragmentation, is the danger of social instability (shehui bu wending), one of the key indicators in evaluation procedures that has veto status (yipiao foujue) and, in the case of local turmoil or excessive petitioning, annuls all other gains and positive assessments. We have found that township and county officials were usually unanimous when it came to a high priority being given to preserving social stability and ensuring the smooth cooperation of all bureaus and cadres to achieve this goal.

  45. Here, we do not refer to identity as a mere conglomerate of individual or collective identities but rather to the specific identity developed in organizations,with which the members of a group identify and which continues despite changes in leadership and membership.

  46. For instance, the head of a township in Dingnan County, Jiangxi Province, emphasized that one of his major tasks was to secure the quality of leadership of all cadres who had to assume the role of an avantgarde (fahui dangyuan xianfeng zuyong) (Interview, 9 September 2010). The responsibility for leadership was echoed by many other local officials we talked to over the years.

  47. Interview with an official in Xichang prefecture, 04/08/2010. Similar statements have been made by many of our interviewees.

  48. See [42], who describe the changes in the education levels of local cadres up to the mid-1990s.

  49. Zhao Shukai (2006/7) speaks of 1–2 meetings per week at the county seat; Fan Hongmin [46] notes that county party secretaries spend a third of their working days in meetings.

  50. In Suining, for instance, urban cadres had to go to the villages regularly for joint garbage collection. A very common practice embedded in different campaign slogans is the so-called ‘assist the village’ (baocun) system that obliges township and county cadres to take care of a selected village and regularly spend time there in order to talk to village officials and villagers about problems of all kinds, explain upper level policies and help to implement projects. In Laixi, for instance, the party school attempted to foster a shared identity among its cadres by means of joint military training and visiting prisons. In the latter case, the aim was to convey a message to all cadres of the consequences that could befall an official found guilty of corruption.

  51. Interviews carried out in the party schools of Shandong (22/02/2009), Qingdao (31/08/2009), Sichuan (10/09/2009) and Guizhou (09/09/2010), and in the Central Party School (14/09/2009).

  52. See, for example, Kipnis [33].

  53. Interview, Anju, 17/09/2008.

  54. Interviews on 5 September 2008 with the party secretary of Mizhi County, Shaanxi province; 2 September 2009 with an official of the Evaluation Bureau of Yulin City, Shaanxi Province; 9 September 2010 with a township head in Dingnan county, Jiangxi province, among many others.

  55. See, for example, [47]

  56. In our interviews, leading local cadres often explained their policy preferences by pointing at these factors. The party secretary of Shiquan, for instance, explained his commitment to the socially weak by referring to the education of his mother (a Buddhist), who had worked extremely hard to raise her four small children after the early death of her husband. He had set up an education program for the children of labour migrants who had been left behind, a social housing program for the poor, and a special health care system for the rural areas.

  57. Extrinsic incentives can easily become coercive, for example, leading cadres repeatedly failing to be evaluated as “excellent” run the risk of stagnating careers or even the end of their career altogether. As a matter of fact, regular cadre evaluation and the nomenclatura system do intensify the political dependency of local cadres on their superiors whereas dependency on social constituencies is rather weak. Negative performance assessments and demotion reflect ineffective policy implementation and, in this sense, point to a dysfunctional incentive structure.

  58. For more details on the program and its implementation in rural China, see [49, 50].

  59. See http://www.pbcti.cn/main/show.php?id=799938 (accessed 19/11/2011).

  60. See [53]

  61. As pointed out in the introductory section of this article, we are not so much concerned with analyzing the reasons for different outcomes of policy implementation as with clarifying the nexus between strategic (group) agency and local policy processes.

  62. In that sense, factions are sub-groups which have to be brought into line in order to preserve systemic coherency and stability. Either the core leadership group (lingdao banzi) or higher echelons will enforce coherence in order to ensure effective policy implementation.

  63. Details: [54]

  64. We do not elaborate on other possible strategic groups in this article. However, the way that strategic agency plays out and the success of local policy implementation at county level can be strongly influenced by alliances formed between different strategic groups, for instance, local entrepreneurs and officials. We have come across these alliances in Nan’an and Jinjiang counties, Fujian province, and will continue to explore these intricate relationships in future field studies. Moreover, future research should ponder whether cadres at prefectural/city and provincial level might also constitute strategic groups.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for East Asian Studies, University Duisburg-Essen, 47048, Duisburg, Germany

    Thomas Heberer

  2. Department of Chinese and Korean Studies, Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies, Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, Wilhelmstr. 133, 72074, Tübingen, Germany

    Gunter Schubert

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Data for this article stems from an ongoing research project on “County and Township Cadres as Strategic Groups in China’s Political System”, jointly conducted by the authors and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Fieldwork for this project has been undertaken annually since 2008 with qualitative interviews so far conducted in different counties located in the provinces of Fujian, Guizhou, Jiangsu, Jiangxi, Shaanxi, Shandong, Sichuan and Zhejiang. We are more than grateful to many colleagues who have commented on earlier versions of this article, most notably Anna L. Ahlers, Björn Alpermann, Christian Göbel, Linda Celan Li, Li Lianjiang, Kevin O’Brien, Graeme Smith, Stig Thøgersen, René Trappel, Susan Whiting, Zhou Xueguang and Yang Xuedong.

Thomas Heberer and Gunter Schubert current research focuses, in close cooperation, on the strategic behavior and political autonomy of county and township cadres in China’s local governance. The authorship of this article is jointly shared. The order of the authors is alphabetical.

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Heberer, T., Schubert, G. County and Township Cadres as a Strategic Group. A New Approach to Political Agency in China’s Local State. J OF CHIN POLIT SCI 17, 221–249 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-012-9200-8

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