How does China select officials? (I)

In 2014, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) revised the Stipulations on How to Select Party and Government Officials, 12 years after the original edition was introduced. The revised Stipulations read: "There is a preference to select officials from the reserve staff," altering the old rule that "Party and government leaders should generally be promoted from the reserve staff."

The selection and training of officials was once considered "crucial to the future of the Party and the nation," as Deng Xiaoping put it in the early 1980s, a time when the older batch of leaders failed to appoint a younger generation in time to succeed them.

Amid the pressure, in 1984, the Organization Department of the CPC Central Committee submitted a list of some 1,100 officials in the reserve staff and recommended them for provincial and ministerial leadership. The shortlist materialized years later – almost all the members of the Standing Committee in the 17th and 18th Political Bureau were once names on the shortlist.

But what is little known is that the Organization Department initiated a similar plan in 1964 to select qualifying successors, but the plan fell through due to the Cultural Revolution.

These days, finding suitable successors for the country's leadership is not as pressing an issue as it was in the 1980s, but the CPC face new challenges in putting the right person in the right post. Officials are appointed improperly from time to time, and bribery can occur in elections despite bans.

Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, has reiterated that deepening reform of the Party’s human resource system is fundamental to correcting the unhealthy tendency in official selections and to improving the public confidence in Party and government officials.

Selecting the right officials and placing them in proper positions has long been a crucial task for China, a country with the Communist Party of China as the only ruling party. What challenges does the Organization Department face as it faces pressure to become more transparent and is in the middle of dramatic and constant reforms?

The office building of the Organization Department bears no signs, telephone numbers inside the building are not in public phonebooks, and the caller ID of these phones will not be shown. These are among the most obvious mysteries that cloud the world's largest super HR department.

Situated in West Chang'an Avenue and less than one kilometer from the central government compound at Zhongnanhai, the office building of the Organization Department is serene one. The main complex and its side buildings form a courtyard-style compound. Adding to the serenity is a rooftop garden, which is rarely seen in northern China, a reflection of the architects' ingenious design. The whole compound is in sharp contrast with the boisterous Xidan business district just across the street on the north.

Established almost at the same time as the CPC itself, the Organization Department has formed a strict working system and a unique culture over the past 90 years, being an indispensable, core agency for the governance of the CPC. But even so, the almost-century old agency cannot rest on its heritage because challenges grow with time, some of them are unprecedented.

Some people call the Organization Department "the largest HR department" in the world, for it manages more than 80 million Party members, including some 60,000 in various leading roles nationwide. But the nature of work in the agency, which is both complicated and uncertain, means the Organization Department is beyond the imagination of HR departments in multinational companies.

1. The official duty list

Although the Organization Department is almost a century old, it did not have a standard working protocol until in the mid-1940s. It wasn’t until the 1950s, when the work flow in the agency began to mature.

In October 1948, Mao Zedong wrote to Peng Zhen, then head of the Organization Department, and required him to issue a memorandum to all central agencies in the first formal effort to rectify the organizational workflow in the department.

In the same era, An Ziwen, then the deputy head of the agency, sent his proposal to Mao Zedong and Liu Shaoqi, in which he said the CPC should "follow the example of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in establishing a duty list system" regarding the management of officials.

Under the Soviet plan, all people with leading roles in the Party, government and social groups were subjected to a registration system, which proved useful in promoting, demoting and replacing officials. The organizational departments of corresponding local Party and government authorities were responsible to conduct preparatory reviews, make suggestions and finally approve the appointments.

In 1952, Liu Shaoqi said: "Every official, from the lowest to the highest level, should be subjected to a supervision agency. We call this system the official duty list."

Three years later, in January 1955, the CPC completed its first such list – the List of Officials and Duties under Central Administration. This list covered all the officials who undertook roles higher than a mayor or its equivalent at that time. Officials on this list were all under the supervision of the central authorities, and were hence referred to as “centrally administered officials.”

This practice was soon implemented by all ministerial and provincial authorities, which in turn, made their own official duty lists. This marked the establishment of the organizational management structure of the Party and government.

An unnamed veteran official who used to work at the Organization Department summarized the procedure, saying the official management system in China had two highlights – that the Party manages officials, and that the management is carried out through the official duty list. Specifically, the organization departments at different levels manage their own lists in accordance with their own jurisdiction.

"There hasn't been any major change to this system so far," said the official.

2. Levels of downward jurisdiction

Over the past decades, there have been several major modifications to the jurisdiction scope for each list. In 1984, the central authorities decided that the organization departments of each level of the Party and government authority will only supervise "one level of officials downward," a revision from the earlier "two levels."

Zhang Quanjing, former head of the Organization Department (October 1994 – March 1999), said: "In the past, heads of provincial departments, heads of national bureaus and mayors, in addition to provincial governors and ministers, were also under central supervision. But the Organization Department later delegated some of the jurisdiction to local authorities, with its own role being managing only provincial and ministerial heads."

This round of delegation reduced the number of centrally administered officials to 4,200 from the earlier 13,000, which amounted to quite a relief for the daily operation of the Party's central agency.

The shrinkage effort was in part due to the sudden reemployment of a large batch of veteran officials in the wake of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), during which they had been persecuted and ousted by the Gang of Four. For these veteran officials, there had to be a proper pension plan, which had yet to be established, according to one person familiar with the matter.

The surging number of officials overloaded the entire Party organization system. Statistics show that in the early 1980s, the number of officials who held leading posts at or above national bureaus across the State Council reached 1,415, several times more than in the early 1950s.

After 1984, the list of centrally administered officials went through a few more changes, featuring the re-centralization of the jurisdiction once delegated to lower levels, in a bid to prevent local authorities from power abuse in terms of excessive appointments of officials. At the end of the 1980s, the jurisdictions of all levels of organization department were starting to normalize.

The British newspaper the Financial Times once used a comparison to illustrate the scope of the CPC Organization Department’s jurisdiction. It said that the U.S. company GE has 750,000 employees on its direct payroll, the world's largest staff size. This number is even larger than the entire headcount of the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Marine Corps combined. In addition, another 500,000 retailers and 1.5 million workers live on the orders from GE. But when compared with the CPC’s Organization Department, the HR work of GE is just negligible.

In an attempt to visualize the scale of the Organization Department, the FT story created an imaginary department in Washington D.C. that would have equivalent functions.

According to the FT, this imaginary U.S. agency would be responsible for appointing all the state governors and vice governors, the mayors of all major cities, directors of all federal agencies, the CEOs of the top 50 U.S. companies including GE, Exxon Mobile, Wal-Mart. Furthermore, the U.S. agency would oversee the appointments of editors-in-chief of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the presidents of all the major broadcasting networks, and the presidents of prestigious universities such as Harvard, Yale, in addition to the leaders of long-standing foundations and think tanks.

3. Officials on the reserve staff

Since the official duty list was put into use, China's central authorities started to consider institutionalizing the training of reserve officials. In 1953, the CPC Central Committee set up a system to maintain reserve officials, following the example of official duty list. Hence, training reserve officials became a constant assignment for the Party's organizational agencies at all levels.

In 1964, Mao Zedong put forward the issue of nurturing successors, and the Organization Department responded to the requirement, initiating the “successor plan,” although the scheme was later interrupted by the Cultural Revolution.

But the importance of developing a leadership of succession was once again reiterated, as Chen Yun, a senior Party member who once headed the Organization Department during the Yan'an Period (December 1937 – March 1944), noted that keeping an echelon of officials for the leadership was to ensure that the Party's cause had successors from one generation to another.

Following Chen's suggestion, the Organization Department established the Bureau of Young Officials, which was specifically responsible for appointing and placing reserve officials.

Like their older colleagues, young officials are also administered by means of a similar list. The bureau's ex-chief, Li Zhimin, said that the number of young officials on the “list” already surpassed 100,000 in 1985, among whom, a total of 1,054 reserved for provincial leaders candidates had come to the attention of the Organization Department, whereas the rest were administered locally.

Noticeably, those who are on the List of Reserve Officials are unaware of the fact that they are on the list. This is different than how the Official Duty List is maintained.

4. Interviews and informal discussion

There are various ways to inspect officials, but an old method – by interviewing them – has proven to be the most effective, and it still is the most important method of inspecting officials.

Wei Jianxing, former head of the Organization Department, once described how such inspections took place. He said that knowing officials well was a "professional requirement" for staff working in the Department. Although there were various approaches, none could replace the method of "personally contacting officials and talk to them," he said.

Another retiree from the Organization Department added that "conducting a certain number of interviews is a primary requirement in official appraisals."

According to this person, the appointment of a ministerial chief involves up to one hundred interviewees. "Interviewers should go to all the past workplaces of a potential candidate to conduct interviews with the major associates of the candidate."

Even now, "interviews with the organization department" are always a fairly major and serious matter. Whatever a candidate says, how he/she acts – including a slight gesture and facial expressions – at an interview, may become the basis for the appointment or elimination.

During the interviews, candidates may also be asked to randomly write something, such as a list their favorite books or a brief self-evaluation. Apart from interviews, informal discussion is another traditional way of assessing an official, the advantage being that multiple candidates can be placed together for comparison. For example, if one candidate manages to impress the interviewers with some catchy phrases, he may have a better chance of future promotion.

To be continued