Manufacturing meritocracy: Adult education, career mobility, and elite transformation in socialist China

Comparative mobility research has described decisive shifts toward meritocratic selection and bureaucratic technocracy in state socialist societies. This line of research has ignored the distinctive political processes underlying the observed associations between educational and occupational attainment. Building upon recent research on socialist career mobility, this study revisits this long standing issue by analyzing the impact of adult education on historical patterns of career mobility and elite selection in socialist China. I argue that the Chinese Communist Party has transformed its revolutionary elite into a modern bureaucracy not by imposing meritocratic standards and recruiting from the already-educated, but by systematically providing continuing education to its current and future elites. Through careful study of historical documents and in-depth analysis of life history data from a national representative sample, I compare the opportunity structure, educational return, and social impact of the regular and adult educational system. Unlike the regular educational system, access to adult education has been politically sponsored with a strong bias toward party members and officials. As Party loyalists are more likely to attain adult education and as those who finish adult courses are more likely to be promoted into leadership positions, adult education has played a leading role and has been largely responsible for the observed effects of education in career processes. The effects of adult education as a system of elite training have persisted in the reform period, fostering an institutionalized and stable mobility regime characterized by strong political particularism and Party sponsorship. This system generates mobility outcomes that look meritocratic on the surface, but which are politically manufactured and governed by Party politics. Such a system has enabled the Party to maintain and legitimize its political and ideological control on the one hand, and to modernize the regime's industrial economy on the other. The political manufacturing of meritocracy eludes standard research programs in comparative mobility. It comprises an alternative development of modern education-based meritocratic institutions that we have only begun to explore.