| The object of the current research is to study Chinese official’s daily behavior. By conducting surveys and in-depth individual interviews with the officials at five levels of Chinese governments, this dissertation attempts to explain the characteristics and patterns of civil servants’ daily behavior from the overall, procedural, and concrete perspectives, so as to observe and reflect on Chinese governmental operation in more detailed ways, in more visible fields and from a more practical aspect. The core points of my dissertation include:civil servants’ daily behavior can be categorized into three types:writing, meeting and inspecting. Historically, power field determined the types of official’s behaviors; and realistically, current power field determines the characteristics of official’s behaviors, in which "power field" is defined as a system with particular value structure, organizational structure, and operation of powers.My dissertation attempts to tackle the following three groups of questions:1) what do officials do every day? Put it differently, from the aspect of daily behavior, what public activities are civil servants engaged in everyday? And how do we describe, conceptualize and categorize them?2) Why do civil servants involved in daily public activities in this manner? How did the patterns of civic servant’s daily behavior form and get fixed?3) What are the characteristics of current civil servants’ behavior? And why this?The findings of my dissertation are presented as follows:First, government officials at all levels share a strongly homogeneous behavioral pattern, which means that high officials and grassroots officials have similar behaviors. At all levels, officials’daily activities include writing, meeting, and inspecting (as well as receiving inspection), which consists the most important part of their job. Regarding writing, civil servants use it to interact with other people, other things, and other writings. They try their best to seek the balance among literariness, politicalness and administrativeness, which, unfortunately, can hardly be achieved. The meetings including the decision-making meetings, coordination meetings, execution meetings, communication meetings and symbolic meetings. For different types of meetings, participants have different preferences and motivations. To organize meetings, officials need to consider the cohesion among political, administrative and technical aspects. The behaviors of inspecting, reception and visiting also have a homogeneous pattern. The three types of behaviors have distinct characteristics. Quantitatively, they keep growing; functionally, behavioral deviation, which means deviating from the original function or practicing completely opposite function, is observed. The behavioral deviation is exemplified as writing meaningless words, being locked in constant inefficiency and false inspections. These features characterize almost all civic servants’ work.Second, the study of the history of writing, meeting and inspecting shows that these three types of behaviors are determined by the power field in history, and they have the inevitability. The organization and evolution of public activities depends on the design of political organizational structure, the pattern of political power relations and the core value of political culture. Civil servants" behaviors serve the purpose of peculiar political values, structures and organizations. The written words carry the substance of public power and are one of the factors to realize power by shaping the legitimacy of power, realizing the regularization of power, and recognizing the rationalization of power. The written words make the prerequisite of the functioning and expansion of hierarchical structure. Meetings represent the operational way of power and are the main symbol of legitimacy. There exist a natural connection between meetings and hierarchical organizations, which is specifically demonstrated in modern parliamentary and party politics. Inspecting, reception and investigating also develop in the course of the division of public powers in hierarchical structures, closely connected with the official-oriented organizational structure and political culture. Thus, there are inseparable relationships between civil servants and their activities of writing, meeting and inspecting.Third, the current power field determines the characteristics of current official’s behaviors. The current power field, on the one hand, like the traditional power field, legitimizes, rationalizes and regularizes power, and also facilitates the expansion and consolidation of hierarchical structure, on the other hand, involves new features. The first feature is the constraint of power centralization which includes social and inter-government centralization. The second is the bureaucratic involution, namely, with the unstoppable expansion of personnel, organizations and management scales, the bureaucratic structure fails to achieve optimization. The third is the cultural inertia including the official-oriented culture, movement style management and the heavy impact of "Guanxi". These three new features contribute to the rules of current officials’behaviors:1) the boss-is-always-correct rule, namely, higher officials’will dominates the lower officials’behaviors;2) the significance-of-number rule, namely, it holds that the quantity rather than the quality of the work truly matters;3) The inertia rule which specifies the importance of culture among official circles. All the listed three feathers influence the characteristics of civil servants’behaviors.Finally, my dissertation also discusses the possibility of behavioral improvement. My study indicates the universal inefficiency permeating the civil servants’daily activities. Given the current political field, it is possible to improve to some extent the manner and efficiency of officials’behavior in term of technique. However, in the long run, only by periodically reforming the power field could the efficiency of civil servants’activities be achieved and the government be well functioning.
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