China's Trapped Transition_ The Limits of Developmental Autocracy - Minxin Pei [111]
Surveys of the party’s officials found that appointments and promotions within the party depend more on personal relations with superiors than on merits or qualifications. About two-thirds of officials being trained at a municipal party school revealed in a survey that their promotion depended solely on the favors of their superiors; only 5 percent thought that their individual efforts could help gain career advancement. 96 In a survey of 1,159 officials in the northeastern city of Ha’erbin in 1997, 52 percent identified “personal connections determine cadre appointments” as the main factor in the selection of cadres.97 The results of a survey of 1,230 officials in Anhui in 1998 provided additional confirmation. When asked about the reasons for demotion of incumbent officials, 59 percent thought such unlucky officials “lacked patrons above,” and 41 percent thought that they did not “entertain or give gifts.”98 Unavoidably, such patronage has generated widespread resentment within the party. Of the 13,821 party members in Sichuan surveyed in 1997, 40 percent complained that the CCP’s system of selecting cadres “lacks democracy and popular support,” and 18 percent thought that “it docs not enable the emergence of outstanding talents.”99
The CCP also suffers from a chronic inability to cleanse itself through the expulsion of unqualified members and removal of incompetent or corrupt officials. According to the deputy minister of the CCP’s COD, the party’s own sampling showed that about 5 percent of the party members—or 3 million—are unqualified, but the party expels only a small number of the members it considers unqualified.100 Another figure, disclosed by the CCP’s COD, indicated that the CCP removed 473,000 unqualified members from the party from 1989 to 2000, averaging almost 40,000 a year. Thus, only about 1 percent of the unqualified members arc forced to quit the party each year.101 Revealingly, unqualified members have the characteristics normally associated with careerists and opportunists: most of them are younger than thiry-five, have a college or college-equivalent education, hold official appointments in the government and SOEs, and fail to participate in the party’s activities or pay party dues.
The party appears to be less able to remove such elements today than before, however. In 1950, for example, about 4 percent of CCP members “exited” the party through expulsions and forced resignations. In 1999, only 0.05 percent of the CCP members exited the party.102 The mechanisms of removing incompetent CCP officials are equally dysfunctional. Official data show few incompetent officials are dismissed. From 1995 to 1997 in Ha’erbin, only 1.43 percent of the local cadres were demoted, fired, or forced to resign.103 In Jillin province, from 1994 to 1997, only 199 officials (at the county-level and above) were demoted or fired, accounting for only 2 percent of the officials. 104 Zeng Qinghong, head of the CCP COD, publicly disclosed that, from 1995 to 2000, only 366 cadres at the department/bureau (ting and ju) level were “adjusted” (demoted or removed) and about 10,000 cadres at the level of division (chu) had their jobs “adjusted” due to incompetence. They accounted for less than 1 percent of the total number of officials at those ranks.105
The CCP’s organizational decay has led to widespread cynicism within the party’s ranks. A survey of nearly 12,500 party members in Sichuan in 1997 showed that 55 percent of them had insufficient or no confidence in the government’s ability to improve its system of demoting and removing cadres.106 Another survey of 1,100 government officials in Changsha city in 1997 yielded similar findings: 31 percent lacked confidence in a good system of promotion and demotion of officials; 14 percent thought many of the officials in power were incompetent and their replacements might be no better; and 58 percent said that all the noise about reforming the cadre system was just talk.107 Even more disconcerting than a dysfunctional system of promotion and demotion of party officials