| Since the third plenary session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the working focus of the government gradually shifted to building socialism, and this called for higher requirements of the working capacity and political ideology of the leading cadres. Thus great changes happened to the system of selecting and appointing cadres accordingly so that it can adapt to the transform of the CCP and the transfer of the government work. The optimization of the cadre personnel management is critical to the course of socialist development and socialist democracy. At the beginning of the21st century, the reform of personnel management system for cadres of the CCP and the government has entered a brand-new stage of comprehensively promoting the in-depth development.Under the guidelines of series of public policies concerning the system reform for the management of officials and personnel, such as Outline of deepening the officials and personnel management system reform (2000), Regulations on the work of selection and appointment of leading cadres (2002), and Outline of deepening the officials and personnel management system reform plan for the next decade (2009), the recent three provincial elections of leading cadres during the last decade will be taken as a case to study the effectiveness and progress of the personnel system reform.This article is to track the empirical study on the personnel system reform of provincial leading cadres, which my mentor previously instructed; Compared with the previous ones, this article clearly defines how the samples are selected as well as how the data are processed, and identifies much more comprehensive indicators according to the principles and objectives of personnel system reform indicated in series of policies about the selection and appointment of provincial leading cadres. It tries to build a more scientific and standardized framework for this kind of study.This article takes the recent three provincial elections, i.e. the one during2001to2003, the one during2006to2008, and the current one during2011to2013as the research object. Based on data collected on more than180leading cadres, who are/were the CCP secretaries and governors newly elected (or selected) in China’s31provincial units each time, this article presents detailed analysis on their age, education, gender, career path and so on. Using sophisticated statistical analysis, it studies the electoral process and selecting standards. Then this article tries to figure out if there is any progress in the reform during the past decade, to understand the effectiveness of the selection and appointment system for provincial leading cadres on an empirical basis, and to explore what kind of problems exist in current system.Based on the empirical study, this article argues some main points as below: Firstly, the system reform of the selection and appointment of leading cadres are influenced by both the system and its operating environment, including the political, social and economic environment; although the data and analysis about the recent three provincial elections have shown some improvements, not all of them can be attributed to the changes of the system, while the reforms in social, economic and cultural areas also made some contributions. Secondly, the core issue of the reform is to clarify whom the appointment and dismissal power belongs to. During last ten years, those new provincial leading cadres were mostly appointed by the central committee of the CCP, and the electoral system was actually kind of a failure. Thirdly, the most urgent task for the reform now is to improve institutions that adhere to principles like systematic, organic and operable, and to build up a scientific mechanism, which values rules like competition and democracy to guarantee the exercise of the right to vote, and to promote people’s democracy along with intra-Party democracy. |
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