Political Promotion Of Chinese Deputy Mayors: The Importance Of Career Starting Point

The political promotion of Chinese official is of great attention in the academic world. Numbers of achievements have already been gained and they have certainly made great contributions to this field. Nevertheless, the prior empirical research mostly focuses on the chief leaders of party and government, and there is no systematic attempt to analyze the political promotion of deputies such as deputy governors or deputy mayors. In addition, there is little literature which can successfully make the “informal relationship” quantization. Therefore, previous studies always employ the method of the qualitative analysis.This paper takes prefectural-level divisions’ deputy mayors as object of study.And the official starting point including the starting level of official career and the time taken to become deputy section level cadre is proposed to characterize the“informal relationship” behind officials.Based on the comparative analysis between meritocratic bureaucracy theory and factional politics theory, this paper argues that the factional politics theory can perfectly explain the political promotion of sub-departmental-level officials while the meritocratic bureaucracy theory cannot. And then based on the informal dimension which is the core of factional politics theory, this paper analyzes the effect of career starting point on the deputy mayors’ promotion from two angles: the starting level of official career and the time taken to become deputy section level cadre and theoretically proves pivotal role of career starting point on the deputy mayors’ promotion.After that, this paper uses the data of 297 prefectural-level divisions’ deputy mayors in office at the end of December 2008 to carry on empirical research on the promotion of them over a six-year period. The empirical results of LPM model and Logit model show two solid results. The higher the starting level of official career is,the greater probability of promotion happens. And the longer it takes to become deputy section level cadre, the lower probability of promotion happens. These results strongly prove the pivotal role of career starting point on the deputy mayors’ promotion. Finally, the further research shows that the cadres born grassroots are not value by the authorities. Their probabilities of getting promotion are much lower than those of cadres who are not born grassroots.