The Elusive Pursuit of Incentive Systems: Research on the Cadre Management Regime in Post-Mao China

This essay reviews recent scholarship on four key components of the post-Mao party state’s cadre management regime—nomenklatura system, cadre performance evaluation system, bianzhi, and the Party school system. This review suggests that findings of each group of studies are clouded by a great deal of uncertainty due to the complexity and secrecy of the Chinese bureaucratic structure and politics, and that this uncertainty thus challenges the confidence level of research applying these findings to explain cadre behavior. The review also detects a common disconnect both within and among these groups of studies that has prevented a more accurate understanding of the workings of the cadre management regime. This review serves to catalyze rethinking of the dominant theory of how control and incentivizing mechanisms of the personnel management institutions can predict individual behavior. Based on these findings, future research should start thinking seriously and creatively about how to overcome the challenge of obtaining data on the cadre management regime amid an increasingly conservative political climate within the country, exacerbated by strained U.S.-China relations. Moreover, intellectual cross-fertilization both within individual groups of scholarship and among them is needed to fully capture the intricate dynamics between control mechanisms of the bureaucratic apparatuses and cadre behavior.