Reforming the cadre personnel system in China, 1979-2019: The dynamics of institutional and instrumental factors

In the Reform and Opening-up period after 1979, the Chinese central authorities changed the cadre personnel system (CPS) through reforms of the civil service and other significant actions to modernise public management. This research aims to address the question of how the central authorities reformed the written CPS rules in the period 1979-2019. The institutional and instrumental perspectives serve as the theoretical framework for understanding the practices of rule makers in changing the written CPS rules. Path dependence is the central concept in the former perspective, and bounded rationality in the latter. The OPA (Old Public Administration), NPM (New Public Management), and post-NPM reform types are helpful for examining how the development of the rules reflects more broad reform trends. The data consist of more than 200 party-state rules dealing with CPS sourcing, layoffs, working time, wages, training, promotion, mobility, and evaluation practices throughout this period. The CPS reforms are analysed as a complete historical event with hundreds of rule-changing actions performed by the central authorities – in particular by the CCP leaders, the CCP’s central agencies, and the State Council’s ministries. It will be shown that each top CCP leader puts forward specific political principles to guide the overall CPS evaluation, which in turn dominates the entire CPS rule reforms. Deng Xiaoping introduced NPM principles into this transformation process, and Jiang Zemin built upon that institutional basis. Hu Jintao altered the priority from NPM to post-NPM principles. Xi Jinping massively implemented rules in which postNPM principles dominated. The most radical changes took place around 2012, as Xi put more weight on post-NPM than on NPM principles. Consequently, the CPS reforms followed a pattern of layering institutional change where successive rules and principles partly supplemented the previous ones and partly challenged the OPA-characterised rules with NPM and post-NPM features in a complex process of institutionalisation, de-institutionalisation, and re-institutionalisation. Each central leadership formulated new objectives for CPS reforms in a particular historicalinstitutional context, and achieved them by adopting new rules with NPM and even post-NPM characteristics. These new rules were rational instruments aimed at improving the original institutional conditions, which had been based on older rules vi with OPA characteristics. This dissertation contributes to current research in four ways: first, it links the historical-institutional context and trajectory of CPS rules, manifested in the path dependence idea, to the actions of the political leadership, as reflected in the bounded rationality idea. Second, it extends the traditional focus on government departments, as a data source for China’s public personnel analysis, to party-state written rules. Third, it analyses China’s CPS reform with the help of the institutional concept of layering. It argues that the coexistence of an even more complex set of different CPS rules, inspired by the OPA, NPM and post-NPM types, represents a dynamic and hybrid layering process. Finally, it highlights that legal rationality, rule compliance, and other OPA elements are the basic characteristics of CPS reforms. It thereby supplements the analysis of performance management to be found in previous studies.