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Elite selection in China has drawn significant attention given the importance of the country. Instead of relying on qualitative assessments from historical and personal insights, this study utilized machine-learning techniques to evaluate the promotion prospects of Chinese elites. By incorporating over 251 individual features of 18,179 officials from 1982 to 2020, I built up an ensemble model to calculate the promotion probabilities of the previous Politburo members of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Methodologically, this study finds that the machine-learning predictions yielded approximately 20% higher accuracy compared to the classical model, which employed the generalized linear model with theoretically identified variables. Moreover, this paper offers valuable insights into Chinese politics by highlighting that Xi Jinping's selection of central officials has diverged from historical patterns, while his decisions on provincial promotions do not exhibit notable differences from those made by his predecessors.

The Chinese Communist Party has been surprisingly successful in carrying out its plans in the face of various challenges in the post-Mao era. Compared to their central counterparts, the operating patterns of local institutions in tackling such difficulties have been less examined. This paper aims to fill this gap by exploring the party's management of provincial standing committees (PSCs). As the highest level of local collective leadership, the PSC essentially sets the agenda for the province. Using a new database of PSC members from 1980 to 2016, this study provides a systematic illustration of the historical composition of provincial collective leadership. Instead of making drastic changes, the party has subtly shifted the roles of provincial leaders: it has redefined the role of the vice party secretary, adjusted the number of posts in the provincial government, and raised the level of professionalism.

This paper addresses the question of how bureaucratic incentives affect economic performance in China at the provincial level. This paper develops a novel model to measure promotion incentives of the Chinese provincial standing committee members from 1995 to 2015. Using machine learning to incorporate over 200 variables of individual features, this paper derives a predicted probability of political advancement (i.e. prior likelihood of promotion) as a proxy to evaluate officials' career prospects. The empirical results show that Chinese provincial governments are likely to generate higher economic growth rates when composed of a greater proportion of officials facing intense competition in the promotion tournament. On the other hand, a higher proportion of provincial leaders whose careers are at a dead-end or on a fast track has no effect on the local economic development. Contrary to popular belief, better economic performance stem mainly from the career incentives of the rank-and-file standing committee members, not from those of the supreme leaders of the province, such as the party secretary and the governor.

A growing literature shows robust evidence that patronage by high-level politicians greatly enhanced officials' chance of promotion in the largest one-party dictatorship in the world, China. There have been few works on whether patrons' exits, even when they were retirements, had an impact on followers' career prospects. This question concerns the core theoretical issue of whether factional ties are self-reinforcing mechanisms. That is, patron–client relationships were only useful for patrons if they knew that clients would suffer if they fell from power. This mechanism creates strong incentives for clients to engage in political struggle on behalf of their patrons, regardless of the patrons' monitoring capacity. We control for a range of unobserved heterogeneity and show that patrons' exits from the political elite had a significantly negative impact on clients' chance of promotion and also diminished their chance of retaining their incumbent positions.

AbstractThe literature on faction suggests that patrons in the party may recruit faction members on the basis of a broad range of shared traits and experience. Some scholars argue reasonably that with increasing specialization of officials, factions are increasingly dominated by those with shared work experience in a set of bureaucracies. Although this trend may be true in general, senior leaders may still recruit those with whom they share birth place and school ties into their factions. To investigate this, we first derive four reasonable ways of measuring factional ties as suggested by the literature. We then explore the factional recruitment strategy pursued by each reform-era (1978–present) party secretary generals of the CCP by evaluating the measures of factional ties which predicted their clients' promotions to full Central Committee membership. Our results show that Hu Yaobang, Jiang Zemin, and Xi Jinping pursued broadly based factional recruitment strategies, while Hu Jintao recruited faction members mainly from work colleagues. We further uncover signs that the party institutions may allow deposed secretary generals some measure of influence over promotions even after their political demise. At the same time, strict retirement rules on lower level officials gave rise to a cohort effect that gave the general secretary greater influence over the promotion of alternate Central Committee members to the full Central Committee during their first term than in subsequent terms.