China's Organized Meritocratic Governance System

Discussion

Leon Liao:

"Daniel Bell matters not because he offers some simplistic defense of the Chinese system, but because he identifies a problem long neglected by Western political theory: politics is not only about voting rights and procedures, but also about who has the ability to govern a modern state that is vast in scale, structurally complex, and oriented toward long-term goals. His concept of political meritocracy is not fundamentally about justifying elite privilege. Its core significance is that it brings the quality of leaders and the mechanisms by which institutions select them back into political theory. Political systems certainly require legitimacy, and they also require procedures. But if they entirely evade the question of governing ability itself, then in the end the most difficult problems of state governance will be handed over to those most skilled at campaigning, fundraising, and messaging.

Once this question is placed back in the Chinese context, the institutional differences become extremely concrete. China’s political ascent does not take the form of nationwide public campaigning, nor does it operate as a race centered on media exposure, social mobilization, and fundraising capacity. It is instead an extraordinarily long chain of organized promotion. A more reliable statistical measure is not “starting from an ordinary clerk,” because the first jobs of many senior Chinese leaders were not clerical posts in the formal sense. They were often sent-down youth, factory workers, teachers, engineers, technicians, or basic-level local officials.

If one uses the more verifiable measure of “from the beginning of one’s working career,” the seven current members of the Politburo Standing Committee took, on average, about 44 years from their first job to their first entry into the Standing Committee.

Xi Jinping began working in 1969 and entered the Standing Committee in 2007; Zhao Leji began in 1974 and entered in 2017; Wang Huning began in 1977 and entered in 2017; Li Qiang, Cai Qi, Ding Xuexiang, and Li Xi all entered in 2022, while their first jobs began in 1976, 1973, 1982, and 1975 respectively.

That time span alone shows that China’s highest-level politics is not produced through a sprint of ten or fifteen years. It is much closer to an organized mechanism of selection, one that operates across levels, across positions, across regions, and through prolonged observation over decades.

If one looks at the structure of their careers, this pattern of organized selection becomes even clearer. At least five of the current seven Standing Committee members followed very typical paths of long-term local Party-state experience.

Xi Jinping’s career spanned Shaanxi, Hebei, Fujian, Zhejiang, and Shanghai.

Li Qiang worked for many years in Zhejiang’s local system before moving on to Jiangsu and Shanghai.

Zhao Leji’s main rise took place in Qinghai and Shaanxi.

Cai Qi spent many years in Fujian and Zhejiang before later moving to Beijing.

Li Xi accumulated long experience in Gansu, Shaanxi, Shanghai, Liaoning, and Guangdong.

Ding Xuexiang’s path was somewhat different, moving primarily from the Shanghai local system into the Central General Office.

Wang Huning is a rarer type: he moved from Fudan University’s academic world into the Central Policy Research system, and then into the Standing Committee.

In other words, China’s top governing team was not selected through nationwide campaigns, television debates, or fundraising networks. It was identified gradually through local governance, organizational systems, policy research, and long-term observation.

Another feature of this system is its clear preference for long career records rather than a “fast track.” Cheng Li’s research on provincial leadership shows that:

The average age of provincial Party secretaries is about 57.9, while the average age of governors and vice governors is about 51.6.

At a minimum, this suggests that reaching the top of provincial leadership usually comes only after decades of cadre experience, not as the result of short-term political mobilization. More importantly, a large-sample study of Chinese officials from 1994 to 2017 by researchers at Peking University’s National School of Development and others found that promotion speed at different levels is not simply positively correlated in the sense of “the faster, the faster.” On the contrary, the system exhibits a clear seniority effect; the authors explicitly state that they found systematic evidence running counter to the fast-track hypothesis. This means that cadre promotion in China is not simply about identifying the brightest or most eye-catching figures early on. As one moves higher, the system places greater emphasis on step-by-step observation, accumulated seniority, and minimizing the risk of misjudgment.

In other words, China’s top governing team is not selected through nationwide elections, television debates, or fundraising networks, but gradually identified through local governance, organizational systems, policy research, and long-term evaluation.

It is not difficult to understand why this system of organized meritocratic governance emerged in China. China is a country of enormous scale, extreme regional diversity, and highly concentrated governance objectives. A country like this would find it difficult to steadily advance infrastructure construction, industrial policy, poverty alleviation, regional coordination, energy transition, and supply-chain restructuring if it relied entirely on short-cycle political mobilization. The strength of the Chinese state apparatus lies in its ability to push these tasks down layer by layer, maintain a relatively stable continuity of policy, and use long-term organizational selection to move those more suited to handling complex governance problems into higher positions. For that reason, the formation of top-level Chinese political leaders resembles the making of long-trained state managers far more than the rise of political entrepreneurs who prevail in a campaign market.

But China is still not an idealized meritocracy, because it is not a fully open, fully transparent system in which people rise purely on the basis of ability. Who is judged to be capable, what counts as political achievement, which deviations can be tolerated, and which mistakes are treated as political problems are all defined and certified by the Party organization. Ability, seniority, execution, and governing experience matter, but so do political reliability, organizational discipline, and line consistency. That is where the real issue lies. The strength of the Chinese system is that it treats state governance as a professional activity requiring selection, training, and long-term accumulation. Its risk is that this organized meritocratic mechanism may gradually become closed, that seniority may outweigh ability, that loyalty may outweigh problem-solving, and that risk aversion may outweigh creative governance. China’s institutional challenge cannot be captured by asking simply whether it “has meritocracy.” The real question is whether this system can continue to identify people who can actually solve problems, rather than increasingly identifying those most adapted to the internal logic of the organization."

(https://leonliao.substack.com/p/meritocracy-and-plutocracy-the-real)