| A new method of quantitative elite analysis is followed that goes beyond recruitment and mobility analysis to include analysis of careers, especially "workfield" changes that appear to respond to shifting development demands. China's leadership policy of trying to keep top leaders flexible through diverse job assignments is shown to have been fairly effective in keeping leaders from devoting large proportions of their careers to single organizations or single workfields. One apparent result has been increased policy flexibility.; North and Pool's description of the Chinese elite as typical symbol manipulators and educators with declining social status is not accurate for the post-1949 period. Waller and Donaldson's description of the Chinese elite as one that did not become technical and managerial specialists identifies an accurate contrast with the CPSU elite, although Waller's argument that they failed to change significantly since the Jiangxi Soviet is inaccurate. While the personnel list did not change much at the top, and expansion of the elite did tend to include people of similar early experiences, their work skills and their use of organizational tools was flexible to accomodate changing needs of modernization. Their joint argument that the elite was holding back more talented technicians and managers in order to preserve their own anachronistic, utopian and revolutionary ideals because they "lacked appreciation of the problems of administering a complex industrializing society" is disproven. Their Neo-Weberian argument that the CCP must adopt a strategy like that of the CPSU to effect industrialization is also disproven.; The findings of Chamberlain, White, Falkenheim and Teiwes regarding urban and provincial elites in China as highly flexible and responsive to changing modernization goals are supported by the national elite data presented here. Whitson's attempt to use Allison's models to explain military elite behavior emerges as a most fruitful direction for future research. Whitson's hypothesis that military regions are probably the most powerful level of military decision-making, however, does not seem consistent with the present data which suggest instead a shifting locus of authority as policies changed to accomodate contradictory goals in changing circumstances. Paul Wong's conclusions, using a different elite sample and a different classification scheme, that no one elite group of specialists or generalists dominated the Chinese elite, is confirmed. While Wong was primarily concerned with recruitment as a device for maintaining elite flexibility, the present data show that flexibility was maintained among elite members both before and after recruitment to the CCP Central Committee. |
