The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) maintains a system to train, organize, appoint, and oversee personnel to fulfill a wide range of civil service roles in party, state, military, business, and other organizations across the People's Republic of China. The system is composed of the several million full-time, professional staff.
The People's Republic of China is a one-party state under the CCP. The management of cadres is one of the key ways in which the leadership of the CCP controls Chinese society and disciplines the state and the party itself. Personnel must keep allegiance to the CCP and not develop any competing loyalties. To this end, the CCP enforces tight restrictions on the freedom of cadres to affiliate themselves with any other organizations, movements, ideologies, or activities or to practice any form of religion (although this last rule is sometimes not fully applied or can be partly evaded under certain circumstances). Cadres are not always official members of the party, but most of them are, and those who are not are usually limited to much more technical or specialist roles than their party-member colleagues, with little or no involvement in explicitly political matters. Cadres are trained to be not only competent and dependable administrators but also unwaveringly faithful to the party line and to the pursuit of socialism with Chinese characteristics.
Definition The word cadre most broadly refers to the staff that are tasked with the management of state and/or party affairs. Based on the Leninist concept of vanguardism, a cadre is a full-time, professional revolutionary dedicated to the goals of a communist party, who works at the discretion of its leadership. This stands in contrast to ordinary members not involved in the running of the party on a day-to-day basis. The term was first used by the Chinese Communist Party at the 2nd National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in July 1922.
The term in Chinese today generally extends to any person in a position of certain authority or responsibility subject to CCP oversight, whether or not they are members of the party. Professor John P. Burns of the University of Hong Kong defines a cadre as "the managers, administrators and professionals found in all sectors of the economy including enterprises, in administrative bodies including government, and in public service units." The definition of the term has broadened significantly since the first decade of the People's Republic of China, spanning from its highest leadership down to relatively low-level positions.
Personnel in many positions of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and other government-affiliated institutions are also referred to as cadres. These individuals are generally paid by the state. The directors of the central SOEs overseen by SASAC are appointed through the cadre system. The directors of the 50 largest are appointed directly by the Party's Central Committee and are equivalent in rank to ministers or vice ministers.
Typology
At the national level, cadres in China generally are divided into six categories: Leadership and staff of national bodies (e.g. government agencies, National People's Congress, etc.) Leadership and staff of the Chinese Communist Party or officially sanctioned democratic parties and their organs Active-duty military personnel ranking platoon-level or higher (like a political commissar) Leadership and staff of social-political and mass organizations (e.g., the All-China Women's Federation) Professional and technical cadres (according to Zhong 2003, specialists such as "engineers, doctors, professors, and artists") Management personnel in state-owned enterprises or other public institutions.
Leading cadres An additional distinction is made in China between leading cadres () and non-leading cadres. This distinction was first articulated in civil service reforms starting in 1993. Leading cadre status is not dependent on rank, as many high-ranking cadres may nevertheless not be in what is considered a leading position. Leading cadre appointments are governed by the Organization Department of the Chinese Communist Party, whereas non-leading positions are generally managed by the personnel and human resources departments of their respective work units and organizations.
Leading cadres include, in addition to CCP and government officials, state-owned enterprise managers, university leaders, and leaders of people's organizations like the Communist Youth League, the All-China Women's Federation, and the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce.
Organization Department branches at all levels keep a "leading cadre reserve list" () from which capable cadres may be selected to fill leading positions as they become vacant. These lists are maintained by the next-highest level Organization Department (that is, a township-level list would be maintained by the county-level Organization Department, and so on).
While concise statistics are not published, Chan and Gao 2018 estimated that there were roughly two million leading cadres.
History The cadre system is one of the few organs of the party-state which have functioned continuously during the PRC's history.
Pre-revolution The Chinese Communist Party expanded rapidly in the initial years following its founding in 1921. After being driven back to Yan'an during the Long March, Mao Zedong focused on consolidating and expanding the CCP, whose membership had fallen from 300,000 to 40,000. Taking advantage of the Second Sino-Japanese War, which commanded the majority of the ruling Kuomintang's attention, the CCP grew massively over the next several years as it entered Japanese-occupied territory and recruited there. It relied heavily on its Red Army to establish power in these liberated territories and identify outstanding activists for recruitment. By 1939, it controlled over 150 counties with a population of over 100 million.
The CCP's territorial growth necessitated more members to serve as cadres, and the party accordingly relaxed somewhat its membership restrictions on intellectuals, former left-wing Kuomintang officers, and others not of a purely working peasant background. Peasants and laborers, while forming the core ideological base of the CCP, were largely illiterate and uneducated, and thus not well suited for the work of some higher-level cadre positions. Consequently, at the county level and above, the majority of cadres were composed of educated individuals. In contrast, branch and district Party cadres were overwhelmingly composed of local laborers and peasants, who knew local conditions well and could better form relationships with the community. Still, despite the need for some educated cadres, during the Civil War era, the CCP focused mainly on recruiting peasants for guerrilla warfare. Thus, among the cadres, ability to lead and command fighters was generally more important than ability to manage occupied areas.
After the Surrender of Japan and the resumption of active hostilities in the Chinese Civil War, Party membership continued to swell as it further advanced against the Kuomintang, reaching three million members by 1948. Much of this growth was driven by the occupation of Manchuria following Imperial Japan's withdrawal; the CCP dispatched 100,000 troops and 20,000 cadres to establish control over the territory. While nationwide data does not exist on the breakdown of cadre versus non-cadre membership, it appears that a large number of CCP members were considered cadres at that time.
By the end of the Civil War, the Chinese Communist Party had established an organizational structure capable of governing itself and the non-CCP people and organizations it oversaw in occupied territories. Its focus, however, had been warfare, as opposed to statecraft, administration and economic development, and thus it soon faced a serious administrative manpower shortage.
Mao-era cadres The Communist Party at the founding of the PRC faced an acute shortage of qualified personnel to fill the over 2.7 million public positions needed to govern the country. By 1955, the CCP had established a system of appointments to fill positions modeled closely after the nomenklatura system of the Soviet Union. Due to the high demand for manpower, the CCP was forced to rely on former Kuomintang officials to fill many of these positions as low-level, non-party cadres, which helped alleviate the shortage by 1952. By 1956, in part due to the Three-anti and Five-anti Campaigns, most of these former officials had been dismissed.
The government of China in its early years also drew upon intellectuals (those with a high school or above education) to fill the gaps in its cadres. Older intellectuals were viewed as more susceptible to influences of bourgeois ideology, but their specialized skills make them useful. Younger intellectuals (new graduates around the time of the founding of the People's Republic) were similarly useful, and could claim they were less influenced by bourgeois thought than their older predecessors. Even so, Mao's eventually grew suspicious of this group, and he eventually initiated the Socialist Education Movement in 1963 to purge perceived intellectual reactionaries from cadre ranks.
"Old cadres"—those who had joined the CCP before the founding of the People's Republic—maintained an outsize influence on governance in the years following 1949. They occupied the leadership positions of party committees at all levels, but were largely uneducated and lacked the administrative or other specialized skill of their ex-Kuomintang counterparts. Broadly speaking, party loyalty took precedence over educational background for the promotion of cadres to high-level administrative positions in Maoist China. A college education did not become necessary to attain such positions until after the death of Mao.
The Seven Thousand Cadres Conference took place in Beijing in 1962.
In 1965, there were 9.3 million government officials classified as cadres. During the Cultural Revolution, the general disorganization of the CCP and China limited any effective use of the system. Appointments to leadership positions became highly irregular, and the Central Organization Department was not mentioned in Chinese press at all from 1967 to 1972.
Unlike contemporary cadres, cadres in the Mao era could not leave a government job to enter private business or to seek voluntary transfer to a different region or office. Few cadres left their positions voluntarily—doing so was almost always involuntary.
Reform era cadres
Following the death of Mao Zedong and the sidelining of Hua Guofeng, China began to embark upon a series of systemic economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping. By 1980, efforts began to re-institutionalize the cadre system after the discord of the Cultural Revolution, so that the CCP would be able to effectively carry out the modernization of China. These efforts particularly focused on a strengthened ideological education of cadres to reinforce understanding of their own role in the mass line connecting the people and the CCP.
That year, Deng called for a rejuvenation of the system via promotion of "revolutionary, younger, more educated, and more technically specialized" cadre. These priorities were described as the "Four Cadre Transformations" and resulted in promotions of engineers and intellectuals to official positions. Regulations following the Four Cadre Transformations included establishing a cadre retirement system, age limits for leading cadres, and new recruitment and promotion rules. The CCP also implemented the "third echelon" policy. The policy sought to promote a total of 135,000 younger officials at all levels to prepare for the retirement for the impending retirement of older leaders in 1985.