Chin. Polit. Sci. Rev. (2018) 3:389–410 https://doi.org/10.1007/s41111-018-0107-1 ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Using the Performance Evaluation System to Combat Corruption: Promises and Challenges Zhen Wang1

Received: 26 November 2017 / Accepted: 18 May 2018 / Published online: 27 June 2018 © Fudan University and Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018

Abstract  Drawing on original fieldwork data, this research examines the effectiveness of the Party’s more open and institutionalized but often ignored anticorruption mechanism—the Performance Evaluation System. I argue that its effectiveness is a mixed bag: on one hand, three prominent features of the current PES show great promise to curb cadre corrupt behavior—anticorruption work’s increasing evaluation weight, its newly assigned status of priority targets with veto power, and its highly quantified evaluation method; on the other hand, the ability of the PES to deter cadre corruption is weakened by challenges that constrain the power of its three embedded incentivizing methods. Keywords  Incentive · Compliance · Evaluation · Implementation · Bureaucracy

1 Introduction Since taking office in 2012, President Xi Jinping has launched a war on deep-seated graft that has punished more than a million cadres and jailed dozens of former senior officials (Aljazeera.com 2017). Its “longer duration and higher reach” (Manion 2016) has revived great interest in examining China’s corruption and anticorruption efforts. Existing scholarly works have centered on the campaign-style enforcement mechanisms (e.g., Wedeman 2005; Zhu et al. 2017), which are “short bursts of intensive enforcement” (Manion 2004, 161). Little is known, however, about how the Party state routinely implements anticorruption measures down to the lowest level of its bureaucratic echelon. * Zhen Wang [email protected] 1



Department of Political Science and International Relations, Middle Tennessee State University, Room 250, Peck Hall, MTSU Box 29, Murfreesboro, TN 37132, USA

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This research seeks to bridge this gap by focusing on the Performance Evaluation System (jixiao kaohe 绩效考核系统, hereinafter PES), a more open and institutionalized but often ignored mechanism that the Party employs to help combat official graft on a regular basis. Chan and Gao (2009) is a rare exception that also studies PES and its function in preventing cadre corruption. But the PES system has undergone immense changes, especially under the Xi administration (e.g., Wang 2018), and thus is long overdue for an updated assessment. To this end, this research examines the current PES, especially its recent changes designed to fight corruption, and evaluates its overall effectiveness in accomplishing this policy goal. I argue that the effectiveness of the PES in preventing corruption is a mixed bag: on one hand, three prominent features of the current PES show great promise to curb cadre corrupt behavior—anticorruption work’s increasing evaluation weight, its newly assigned status of “priority targets with veto power (yipiao foujue 一票否决, hereinafter yipiao foujue targets)”, and its highly quantified evaluation method; on the other hand, the ability of the PES to deter cadre corruption is weakened by challenges that constrain the power of its three embedded incentivizing methods. This research draws on data gathered from original fieldwork conducted in various localities, ranging from prefecture-level cities to villages, of four provinces—Anhui, Hubei, Zhejiang, and Hebei—during the summer months of 2014, 2016, and 2017. The selection of these provinces aims to enhance the generalizability of my findings by increasing the variation of localities in terms of both geographic location and economic development: Anhui and Hubei are centrally located neighboring provinces that are middle performers in economic growth; Zhejiang is an eastern coastal province that has traditionally been one of China’s richest places; located in northern China; Hubei used to boast of strong growth numbers, thanks to its heavy industries such as coalmining and steelmaking, but its economy is currently suffering from the central government policy to reduce overcapacity. Specifically, the research data mainly consist of interviews and government documents concerning local PES solicited from my interviewees. The interviews are in the format of semi-structured meetings guided by similar sets of questions with individual or multiple interviewees. Over the 3 years I conducted over forty interviews with two major groups of people: officials who are either responsible for implementing local PES or are evaluated by the PES, and scholars of local universities and party schools. This article begins with an overview of what the PES is and how it functions as an incentive mechanism to induce compliance from subordinate officials through three major types of incentivizing methods. It then discusses the three important features of current PES that are conducive to the Party’s graft-fighting cause. After that the article proceeds to examine the challenges that debilitate each of the three incentivizing methods. Lastly, the conclusion elaborates on the research findings’ political implications and theoretical importance as well as some policy recommendations.

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2 PES: An Incentive Mechanism The appraisal of government and cadre performance in China has been widely researched (O’Brien and Li 1999; Whiting 2001, 2004; Edin 2003; Heimer 2006; Chan and Gao 2008; Minzner 2009; Heberer and Trappel 2013; Gao 2015; Kinkel and Hurst 2015; Liu and Li 2016). Although scholars have named the system differently,1 its essence is fundamentally similar: an incentive mechanism to motivate cadres to accomplish policy goals set by the Party state. Specifically, the incentive mechanism of the PES is believed to function through three major types of incentivizing approaches—political, economic, and psychological. Political incentives work by linking cadres’ performance results to their career prospects. That is, high performers are presumably more likely to be promoted than low performers (Manion 1985; Kinkel and Hurst 2015, 939). Economic incentives often refer to the practices of rewarding target fulfillment with financial bonuses that might constitute a large portion of cadres’ entire incomes (Edin 2003, 41–42; Whiting 2004, 109–112). In addition to bonus payments, economic incentives can take other forms such as “administrative benefits (e.g., free transportation, entertainment, training, and travel), and other allowances for cadres (e.g., subsidies for housing, health care, retirement, and further education)” (Kostka and Yu 2015, 486) as well as illicit advantages through rent-seeking and embezzling public funds (Wedeman 2012). Also, performance on target fulfillment has a great impact on a local government’s chances of securing projects from its upper-level authorities.2 And these allocated projects are critical revenue sources for local governments. The psychological incentivizing mechanism is much less thoroughly examined in the existing literature compared to the former two types of incentive mechanisms, and is yet to be systemically applied to explain cadre behavior. This is understandable due to the inherent complexity of human sentiments, and hence the difficulty of defining and operationalizing them. However, some scholars do allude to a wide range of emotional impacts that the PES might generate on officials: concerns about social standing and prestige,3 feelings of insecurity induced by evaluation stress (Heberer and Trappel 2013, 1054), pressure from peer ranking and interjurisdictional competition (Whiting 2001; Edin 2003, 40; Zhou 2007; Chan and Gao 2008, 7), shaming and hence self-discipline (Edin 2003, 45; Kinkel and Hurst 2015, 943–947), and so on. The logic is that these various emotions help drive cadres to fulfill PES targets. To sum up, the PES functions as an incentive mechanism to help ensure local compliance with higher-level mandates by linking local cadres’ performance on fulfilling PES targets to their career prospects, material benefits, or feelings such as pressure and pride. Literally, as often described by Chinese officials themselves,

1   See, e.g., O’Brien and Li (1999, 172) call the system “cadre responsibility system” whereas Chan and Gao (2008, 4) and Gao (2015, 618) refer to it as “the target-based responsibility system.” 2   Interview with township official, Xuan’en 宣恩 county, Hubei, 2 June 2017. 3   See, e.g., Heberer and Trappel 2013, 1054; and Gao (2015, 628–629) discusses the “symbolic values of the title of ‘outstanding.”

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PES results are tied to their “position (位子), money (票子), and face (面子)” (e.g., Legaldaily.com.cn 2011). Relying on its incentive mechanism, scholars have applied the PES to explain local cadre behavior in a variety of issues, such as economic development (Whiting 2001; Bulman 2016), central-local relations (Edin 2003; Whiting 2004), policy implementation (O’Brien and Li 1999; Ahlers and Schubert 2015), and the judicial system (Minzner 2009; Kinkel and Hurst 2015). In line with the existing literature, this research also utilizes the fundamental role of the PES— an incentive system—to analyze the Party state’s efforts to induce local cadres’ compliance with PES targets designed to combat official graft. Moreover, in contrast to the traditional focus on campaign-style enforcement’s sporadic crackdowns on corruption, this research explores the prospects of the authoritarian state employing a more institutionalized incentive mechanism with built-in rewards and punishments to monitor and deter corruption. Some clarification about the relationship between the two types of anticorruption mechanisms—campaign style and PES—is in order before proceeding. Most importantly, despite the distinction in enforcement approaches, both anticorruption mechanisms are under the absolute control of the Party led by its secretive and almighty disciplinary branch (e.g., Buckley 2016; Wan 2014) or the newly established national supervisory commission (e.g., Wong 2017). As is almost always the case with local PES, the unit in charge of evaluating cadres’ and organizations’ performance on anticorruption work targets is the local Commission for Discipline Inspection (纪委). Furthermore, as a result of having the same party boss, it is not clear whether there is any qualitative difference between the two types of anticorruption mechanisms in terms of what kinds of corruption cases they target. One might suspect that the PES mechanism only focuses on “petty corruption” offenses such as using government vehicles for private purposes and holding extravagant banquets.4 But such anti-waste efforts, targeting “unhealthy tendencies in the work and personal lives of members in party and governmental organization” (Zhu et al. 2017, 337), have become an integral part of Xi Jinping’s overall anticorruption campaign. Such empirical examples abound. Most recently, Bohai Bank in Tianjin was heavily criticized by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and subject to graft investigation for mailing gift cards each worth of 168 yuan (about 27 US dollars) to officials at the local Banking Regulatory Commission (Xinhuanet.com 2018). Therefore, under today’s sweeping anti-graft regime, it is increasingly difficult to draw the line between “petty” and “significant” corruption cases in terms of the nature of offenses, be it the problem of eating and drinking or dereliction of duty, the amount of bribe, or the scale of graft.

4

  I thank the reviewer for raising this point.

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3 Using PES to Combat Corruption: Promising Features The PES of the Xi Jinping era demonstrates three promising features that are conducive to the Party’s fight against cadre corruption: increasing evaluation weight assigned to anticorruption work, national adoption of anticorruption work as targets of veto power, and comprehensive quantification of evaluation method related to anticorruption work. 3.1 Increasing Evaluation Weight Assigned to Anticorruption Work One consistent pattern of current PES is the growing evaluation weight assigned to anticorruption work. A comparison of the major targets of a Hubei county’s PES of its townships across 4 years from 2014 to 2017 clearly demonstrates this trend. As Table 1 illustrates, a conspicuous pattern is the steady increase in evaluation weight assigned to the target of “party-building work (dangde jianshe 党的建设),” jumping from 2014’s 15% to 26% in 2015, 27% in 2016, and 35 in 2017. This target consists of several sub-targets whose number and name tend to slightly change from year to year but the content remains more or less focused on four areas of party work: anticorruption, organization building and personnel management, propaganda, and armed forces control. Specifically, one of the most important sub-targets is “building party discipline and clean governance” (dangfeng lianzheng jianshe 党风廉政建 设, hereinafter BPDCG)—the cornerstone of the Party’s anti-graft campaign. As a township deputy party secretary states, anticorruption and party-building work used to be dispensable (keyou kewu 可有可无) but is now the number one priority (di yi wei 第一位).5 At the same time, another noticeable trend is the consistent drop in evaluation weight assigned to the “economic development” target: from 60% in 2014 to 40% in 2017. Especially, the target of “society governance (shehui zhili 社会治理)”, which incorporates a wide range of work, such as “environmental protection (huanjing baohu 环境保护),” “arable land protection (gengdi baohu 耕地保护),” “public security comprehensive governance (shehui zhian zonghe zhili 社会治安综合 治理),” “population control (jihua shengyu 计划生育),” and “production safety (anquan shengchan 安全生产)” (Gong’an PES Leading Group 2014, 2015, 2016), was dissolved in 2017 and its content was integrated into the target of “economic development” that is renamed as “comprehensively build a moderately prosperous society (quanmian jiancheng xiaokang shehui 全面建成小康社会)” (Gong’an PES Leading Group 2017). Therefore, this means that the actual percentage of economic work within the major target of “economic development” should be much lower than 40%.6 Overall, a clear picture emerges—the Party has made combating corruption its top priority.

5

  Interview with township official, Tangshan, Hebei, 19 June 2017.   I was only able to secure a portion of the county’s 2017 PES that does not contain the more specific evaluation table where there is a detailed breakdown of evaluation weights for each sub-target. But nevertheless, this should still be a safe statement. 6

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Similarly, the 2015 PES of Kaiping 开平district 7 of Tangshan 唐山 city (Table 2) indicates that work related to party building (12%) and anticorruption (30% of the “Five evaluations” target) adds up to 42% of the entire evaluation weight and is much higher than any other type of work, be it economic development or environmental protection (Kaiping District Party Committee 2015). In sum, these examples from two provinces suggest that the increasing weight assigned to anti-graft work is meant to raise the awareness of its importance among local elites to stay away from corruption offenses. 3.2 BPDCG Elevated to yipiao foujue Status Another promising factor lies in the fact that since Xi Jinping took office, local governments have gradually adopted BPDCG as one of the priority targets with veto power in PES.8 Changyang 长阳 county of Hubei province, for example, in its 2015 PES of townships and functional departments explicitly lists five types of work as yipiao foujue targets: BPDCG, population control, public security comprehensive governance, production safety, and fixed-asset investment (Changyang County Party Committee 2015a, b). It is important to note that the anticorruption work target has existed in local PES for quite some time. The central government first released the official policy of incorporating BPDCG into the overall evaluation of leading local cadres’ performance in 1998 (Chinese Communist Party 1998) and later amended the policy in 2010 (Chinese Communist Party 2010). Local governments began implementing this central policy at a varying pace, with Shaanxi 陕西 local governments, for example, starting in 2000 (Chan and Gao 2009, 99) whereas a Hubei township in 2009 (Nanping 南平 County Party Committee 2009). However, the BPDCG target does not gain the veto power status nationwide until after the sustained anticorruption campaign under the Xi administration. Consider Lixin 利辛 county, Anhui province. Its PES yipiao foujue targets did not include BPDCG as late as 2013 (Lixin Party Committee 2013). The existing literature suggests that failure to fulfill yipiao foujue targets would automatically discredit one’s overall performance regardless of how well one has worked on other targets. This highly punitive nature of yipiao foujue targets, so the logic goes, compels officials to fulfill such targets at all costs and thus local governments prefer to designate essential work as yipiao foujue targets to ensure completion of such work (O’Brien and Li 1999; Edin 2003; Minzner 2009). And this helps explain why local cadres have religiously pursued work related to family planning and social stability, two types of work that are traditionally designated as yipiao foujue targets nationwide (O’Brien and Li 1999). For instance, reporting on the drama of Chen Guangcheng 陈光诚, the blind anti-population-control activist who fled to the American embassy in April 2012, The Economist (Economist.com

7

  Kaiping district carries the same administrative rank as a county does.   Interview with municipal official of government general office, Fuyang, Anhui, 19 June 2014.

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Table 1  Gong’an 公安 County PES of its townships, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 Source: Compiled from Gong’an PES leading group (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017) Target

2014 (%) 2015 (%) 2016 (%) 2017 (%)

Economic development (jingji fazhan 经济发展)

60

49

42

Society governance (shehui zhili 社会治理)

25

24

22

N/Ab

Party-building work (dangde jianshe 党的建设)

15

26

27

35

Comprehensively deepen reform (quanmian shenhua gaige 全面深化改革)c

N/A

N/A

2

10

Comprehensively govern the county by rule of law (quanmian yifa zhi xian 全面依法治县)d

N/A

N/A

5

10

Unique and innovative work (tese chuangxin gongzuo 特色 创新工作)e

N/A

1

2

5

40a

Care should be taken when comparing PES across time as local governments more often than not make minor changes to the format of PES every year, such as renaming and regrouping targets. Due to such changes to the county PES over the 4 years, the targets in this table have to be rearranged based on the contents they entail for the purpose of comparison

a

 The target of “economic development” is renamed as “comprehensively build a moderately prosperous society” in 2017

b

 This target was dissolved in 2017 and its content was integrated into the target of “economic development” c

 This target was not created until 2016

d e

 This target was not created until 2016

 This target was not created until 2015

2012) attributes the human-rights abuses to the Party’s cadre evaluation system that rewards local officials who meet higher priorities, the most important of which are maintaining social stability, achieving economic growth and enforcing population control, even if they break the law. Therefore, the newly assigned yipiao foujue status indicates that anticorruption and party-building is viewed as work of high priority by local governments, and thus shows promise to curb cadre graft. 3.3 Quantification of Evaluating Anticorruption Targets Current PES exhibits one more promising feature to combat cadre corruption—the comprehensive quantification in measuring and evaluating targets related to such work. This results from local governments’ continuous effort to quantify all targets over the past three decades, even for those that are traditionally considered not amenable for quantification.9 The target of BPDCG clearly illustrates this gradual but steady change over the years. In a township’s 2009 PES of villages, the target of BPDCG consists of four categories of work that are very loosely defined. One category of work, for example, dictates that village cadres must “support the actions of 9   Kinkel and Hurst (2015) discuss a similar issue of the “hyper-quantified conditions” in the judicial cadre evaluation system.

13

13 10 30

12 10 30

Party-building work (dangde jianshe 党的建设)

Safety and rule of law (pingan jianshe yu fazhi jianshe 平安建设与法制建设)

 This major target consists of five sub-targets that focus on government reform and anti-corruption work

a

Five evaluations (wu pingjia 五评价)a

15

Urbanization and ecological environment (chengzhen jianshe yu shengtai huanjing 城镇建设与生态环境)

12

20

28

33

Economic development and project construction (jingji fazhan yu xiangmu jianshe 经济发展与项目建设)

Neighborhood communities (%)

Townships (%)

Target

Table 2  Kaiping District PES of its townships and neighborhood communities, 2015 Source: Compiled from Kaiping District Party Committee 2015

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discipline and inspection units and of other law enforcement authorities; and timely report any problems within villages that are against the law or disciplines and cooperate with investigation.” Another category of work stipulates that “party cadres must not participate in activities such as ‘using drugs, gambling, prostitution’ and so on” (Nanping 南平 County Party Committee 2009). As a township head commented: “Before the 18th Party Congress, the evaluation of party-building work was not only scant but vague and loose (wuxu 务虚).”10 However, the 2013 PES of the same township operationalizes the BPDCG target in a much more concrete and quantified fashion. For instance, cadres receive two points for timely updating the village affairs bulletin board and one point for recording minutes for working meetings of democratic supervision committee and discipline inspection team (Nanping County Party Committee 2013). These are mundane but highly specific tasks that are amenable for enforcement and thus are easy to hold cadres accountable if they fail to hit the targets. Similarly, when evaluating BPDCG, a county’s PES of townships for 2015 and 2016 are so detailed that every possible graft offense is clearly outlined and assigned a point deduction, as small as 0.15 point (Gong’an PES Leading Group 2016). For instance, “if found … consuming alcohol during lunch time on workdays or using public funds for leisure travel… leading cadres lose 0.5 point every time; cadres of party committee (banzi chengyuan 班子成员) lose 0.3 point every time; and average cadres lose 0.2 point every time…” (Gong’an PES Leading Group 2015). Targets are often seen as more important and more likely to be carried out by cadres if they are easy to measure and quantify than targets that are difficult to do so. O’Brien and Li (1999), for example, claim that local officials’ selective implementation of unpopular central directives but not popular ones is partly because in PES unpopular policies such as population control and revenue collection are quantified and therefore are easier to be monitored by upper level governments whereas popular policies like fee limits and forbidding corruption are difficult to quantify and enforce.11 Moreover, Chan and Gao (2008, 6–7) assert that functional targets are not as important as common or core targets mostly because functional targets are “relatively vague, abstract, and non-quantifiable.” In a nutshell, as Zhou (2007, 49) states, cadres’ implementation bias is unavoidable as long as there are quantifiable and non-quantifiable targets. Accordingly, earlier BPDCG work described in ambiguous terms is inherently difficult to measure or monitor and therefore is bound to be ignored by local officials. In contrast, recent PES documents demonstrate that local governments have gone to great lengths to quantify BPDCG work by delineating the very specific tasks involved for every target; crafting concrete evaluation instructions for each particular task; and spelling out the points to be added or deducted for successful performance or failing to fulfill each task. This highly detailed and quantified feature of

10

  Interview with township government head, Huangshantou 黄山头, Hubei, 18 June 2016.   O’Brien and Li (1999, 170) enumerate what constitutes popular and unpopular policies in one paragraph. 11

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BPDCG work is easier to be enforced and, therefore, helps address the problem of cadre corruption.

4 Using PES to Combat Corruption: Challenges Despite the three promising attributes discussed above, however, the PES also faces challenges that seriously constrain its ability to materialize its graft-fighting potential. As mentioned previously, the PES functions as an incentive mechanism through three major types of incentivizing approaches—political, economic, and psychological. But my research identifies challenges that weaken the effectiveness of each one of the three approaches, the result of which will compromise the ability of the PES system to combat corruption. 4.1 Political Incentivizing Method One of the most important presumed incentive methods of the PES is through political careers. The assumption is that high performers on PES work targets are rewarded politically with promotion and low performers are subject to demotion or removal. My research, however, finds that despite the Party’s reform efforts to better motivate local cadres to perform, there is little consistent evidence that demonstrates the systematic integration of PES results into decision-making regarding cadre careers. This reality is largely due to two factors: the structural limitation of the personnel system at the local levels, and the Party’s reluctance to sanction cadres of poor performance. Although some scholars have touched upon these two factors in China’s personnel management system, my research focuses on how these two factors affect the incentivizing mechanism of the PES related to cadre career. First, as the existing literature suggests (Burns and Zhou 2010, 15), the extremely compressed formal career ladder in grassroots bureaucracy, especially at the county and township levels, leads to very limited promotion opportunities. My research finds that this constraining career reality remains largely intact today at local governments and cadres are clearly aware of the glass ceiling.12 One township deputy party secretary confessed, “I do want to return to a position in the county because it is quieter and easier there. But there is no opening in the county as nobody wants to come down [to the township].”13 As a result, this structural career limitation has greatly dampened the enthusiasm of local cadres to perform. Some reforms are underway to overcome this structural constraint. One such reform is “unifying position and rank” (zhiwu yu zhiji bingxing zhidu 职务与职级 并行制度) that was enacted in January 2015 (Chinese Communist Party 2015). This new policy is to allow local cadres below the county level to enjoy the same benefits associated with certain ranks after specified years of service even if they are not in 12   Interviews with standing deputy county government head, township deputy party secretary, and village party secretary, Xuan’en, Hubei, 2 June 2017. 13   Interview with township official, Zhengzhuangzi 郑庄子, Hebei, 19 June 2017.

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official positions that traditionally carry such ranks. For example, serving 15 years can automatically bump up an official of vice-section level (fuke ji 副科级) to the section level (ke ji 科级) even if he or she does not possess an official position of section level. Apparently, this new policy is designed to target the problem of limited positions in local governments, especially below the county level, in order to better motivate officials to work. Most importantly, this policy stipulates that for every “excellent” (youxiu 优秀) status gained for an annual PES evaluation, the official can reduce the service time by 6 months before he or she is eligible for promotion to the next rank level. Take the above same example to illustrate how this stipulation works: If the same vice section level official has received an “excellent” status for doing a great job in fulfilling the work targets of the PES for the year, he or she would only need 14 and a half years to rise to the section level and start enjoying its associated benefits, such as increased salary. Likewise, if rewarded “excellent” for twice, the official would cut his or her time to the next rank level to 14 years instead of fifteen. This stipulation is sure to add more weight to the evaluation results of PES and strengthen the incentivizing mechanism of the system. During my field research, many township officials at various localities of Hubei province spoke highly of the new policy of “unifying position and rank” and how it had made the PES ever more important in achieving a higher rank and a higher salary.14 It is very important, however, to point out that this reform does not change the fact of limited positions at local levels. As the policy of “unifying position and rank” stipulates, after a cadre receives an increase in political rank, he or she enjoys the salary and benefits of the non-leadership position (fei lingdao zhiwu 非领导职务) associated with that rank (Chinese Communist Party 2015). Although non-leadership positions carry the same material benefits as leadership positions (lingdao zhiwu 领导职务), they do not have the decision-making power or influence attached to leadership positions. Therefore, with respect to cadre motivation, an increase in political rank and the associated material benefits still cannot compare to a promotion in official position. But nevertheless, this reform policy has helped strengthen the economic incentivizing effect of the PES by tying performance results to material benefits associated with political ranks. Another recent reform to alleviate the structural challenge of limited career path facing grassroots cadres focuses on expanding the opportunities to assume township leadership positions. As a township official in charge of organization work reveals, in 2016 the central government enacts a new policy during township level leadership changes around the country. This policy mandates that every township must recruit at least one person into its leadership positions from “three categories of people” (sanlei renyuan 三类人员)—personnel working at township public institutions (shiye danwei 事业单位), college graduates working as village officials (daxuesheng cunguan 大学生村官), and village party secretaries. More specifically, persons chosen from these three categories of personnel must meet three requirements: having

14   Interviews: county official, Gong’an, 16 June 2016; township official, Yangjiachang 杨家厂, 16 June 2016; township official, Xuan’en, 2 June 2017.

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graduated from high school, being less than 45 years old, and having worked in the position for three consecutive years.15 Last but not least, the eligible candidates must pass the evaluations of the Organization Department before they can be assigned to township leadership positions.16 This new policy is clearly designed to better motivate grassroots cadres, especially those at the village level, by increasing their prospects of moving up to township-level leadership positions. Traditionally, village cadres are not part of the official bureaucratic corps and thus have little chance of rising through the ranks of the Party’s career hierarchy. As a result, villages have often posed challenges for policy implementations when upper level governments cannot effectively incentivize village cadres to comply. As a township official confesses: We don’t have an effective mechanism to rein in the villages. They don’t have to listen to you. Yes, you can have a meeting with the village cadres; you can scold them; you can remove them; you can hold another election or you can appoint a new cadre. But once in the position, can he/she get the job done? Changing the cadres too often does no good to the village. This is one lesson of our many years of working at townships… To be honest with you, to do a good job [as a township leading cadre], you must first immerse yourself into the villages. You first have to make friends with village cadres before you can implement your work downward. This is because villages and village cadres don’t listen as well as our government units (jiguan 机关) do. For example, they are not like my subordinate section chief who will do anything I ask him/her to do. They have their own opinions and personalities. You have to delegate your work in line with how they think. In other words, it’s all about how to get them to listen to you and get the work done.17 These words reveal the reality of poor personnel control of village cadres due to their lack of status in the bureaucratic hierarchy. How effective the new policy of helping the “three categories of people” move up to the township cadre corps will be in tackling this problem remains to be seen. In addition, it is very important to note that unlike the “unifying position and rank” reform, this new policy does not clearly specify how PES results would affect village cadres’ prospects of moving up to township leadership positions. Although eligible candidates must pass the evaluations of local Organization Departments as the official policy states, it is unclear to what extent and how these evaluations take into consideration of the candidates’ PES performance. In sum, the central government has started to implement major reform policies to tackle the lack of motivation among local cadres caused by the shortage of official positions in grassroots bureaucratic structure. The “unifying position and rank” policy aims to compensate local cadres through political ranks and material benefits and nicely ties PES results to these potential benefits. But this policy still cannot offer these cadres the same amount of power and influence that only comes with an official position title. The other reform policy to encourage “three categories of

15

  Interview with township official, Nanping, Hubei, 13 July 2016.   Interview with township official, Nanping, Hubei, 13 July 2016. 17   Interview with township official, Zhengzhuangzi, Hebei, 19 June 2017. 16

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people” to join township leadership positions is designed to target village cadres’ career constraint and hence their lack of motivation to comply with township authorities on policy mandates. However, this policy says little about whether or how PES results would be integrated into final decision making. Therefore, despite the intent to overcome the structural constraint, these reform efforts are yet to demonstrate a strong link between cadres’ PES performance and their career prospects. The second major obstacle to a systematic application of PES results to cadre career decisions is the Party’s deep reluctance to punish cadres of poor performance, especially through the career means. Some existing works have already pointed out this unique feature about China’s PES in that negative evaluation results do not necessarily translate into sanctions, but they tend to focus on explaining the rationale behind the Party’s reluctance of sanctioning lower level cadres. For instance, Heberer and Trappel (2013, 1055–1056) point to higher level government’s reluctance to de-motivate local agents, whereas Gao (2010, 69S–70S) articulates that because higher level authorities are aware that some targets conflict with others, they are unwilling to harshly penalize subordinates’ unsatisfactory performance. In contrast, the emphasis of this research is on how this feature has enfeebled the presumed political career incentive mechanism of the PES. To begin with, many officials explicitly state that there are no disincentives designed to punish poor performers and that the current PES system focuses on rewarding good performance rather than sanctioning bad one.18 As one city official of Anhui province in charge of PES work claims, “Basically, there is no punishment. When we publicize the [PES] results (and it’s the same for the provincial government when it publicizes its [PES] results about us), we only list the first eighteen agencies. We don’t mention the rest of them since we only praise the good performing ones; we don’t name someone and criticize (dianming piping 点名批评).”19 Another city official of Hubei province asserts that “there are rewards, but no punishments. If other people have been given rewards and you haven’t, that already represents punishment.”20 Furthermore, in the comprehensive document of a county’s PES evaluation method of its subordinate townships as well as county party and government units, there is no mention of consequences for evaluation results, be they rewards or punishments (Changyang County Party Committee 2016). Moreover, when official PES documents do articulate the sanctioning method for poor performance through political career means, the language tends to be very vague. Take Gong’an county, Hubei province, as an example. Its PES documents for 2014 and 2015 both state that “for townships that rank among the lowest two for two consecutive years, the county party committee will adjust (tiaozheng 调整) their leadership group (lingdao banzi 领导班子)” (Gong’an PES Leading Group 2014 [2015]). The wording in the county’s 2016 PES is slightly different, but the vagueness remains unchanged: “For the township of the highest ranking for two

18   Interviews: PES official, Fuyang, Anhui, 19 June 2014; official, Yichang, Hubei, 8 July 2014; PES official of Changyang, Hubei, 8 July 2016. 19   Interview with PES official, Fuyang, Anhui, 19 June 2014. 20   Interview with municipal official, Yichang, Hubei, 8 July 2014.

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consecutive years, its members of the leadership group will be given priority for important positions (youxian zhongyong 优先重用); for townships that rank among the lowest two for two consecutive years, their leadership group will be dealt with according to relevant cadre management regulations” (Gong’an PES Leading Group 2016). Apparently, the obscure language used in the document suggests that no institutionalized rules are in place to link cadres’ PES performances to their political careers, regardless of promotion or demotion. In addition, while some localities’ PES officials acknowledge the practice of adjusting cadres’ positions as a result of their poor PES performance, they also admit that these practices are rare or have been halted because of concern for damaging cadre morale21 or disrupting the grassroots cadre corps which is already very difficult to fill due to stringent personnel management requirements such as age and educational degree.22 For example, in the 2012 PES of Nanping township, Hubei province, the section on “results application (kaoping jiezhang 考评结账)” includes four stipulations, with the last one clearly stating: “The last three villages will be publicized and criticized (tongbao piping 通报批评); the party secretary of the lowest ranked village for consecutive 2 years will be removed from the position (mianzhi chuli 免职处理)” (Nanping County Party Committee 2012). By 2013, however, this statement has disappeared in the township’s PES (Nanping County Party Committee 2013). Likewise, some officials report that their county has very recently started linking PES results to career decisions, but that the officials who have been subject to political rank reduction are not key leading cadres (zhuyao lingdao 主要领导; i.e., party secretaries and township heads) but officials of vice-section level (fuke ji), and that after 1 year probation they have the opportunity to regain their original ranks.23 In sum, these findings suggest that for various reasons the Party is deeply reluctant to sanction the poor performance of cadres and particularly, the leading cadres. As a result, it is not surprising that in both official documents and practices of PES one can hardly detect any unequivocal and consistent evidence of penalties for poor performance, let alone negative career changes. Overall, there is scant empirical evidence to support the traditional assumption about the PES and its embedded political career incentive mechanism.24 The structural constraint on local cadres’ prospects to move up the career ladder and the Party state’s disinclination to punish poor performance continue to be the stumbling blocks for a systematic integration of PES results into the personnel decision making on cadres’ political career, be they rewards or sanctions.

21

  Interviews with PES official, Gong’an, Hubei, 12 June 2016 and 1 June 2017.   Interview, county Organization Department officials, Lixin 利辛, Anhui, 12 June 2014. 23   Interview with township officials, Huangbi’ao 黄避岙, Zhejiang, 12 June 2017. 24  I thank the reviewer for alerting me to China’s high incidence of obtaining political promotion through bribery. Some scholars have addressed this particular type of corruption (e.g. Zhu 2008) and it further supports my argument that the effectiveness of the PES’s political incentivizing approach is much weaker than commonly assumed. 22

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4.2 Economic Incentivizing Method With the political career incentive method being largely insufficient, local governments have primarily relied on financial means to help motivate its subordinate agencies and cadres to fulfill PES work targets. Although the existing literature suggests that the rather egalitarian base pay differentials constrain the incentivizing effect of the PES (Burns and Zhou 2010, 15), my research notices two consistent trends indicating an increasingly effective role of the PES’s economic incentive mechanism. First, throughout the interviews I conducted, the majority of cadres responded positively about the incentivizing role of financial bonuses attached to PES. That is, individual cadres as well as work units are rewarded for good performance with monetary payments. Also, both the amounts of such payments and the differentials among cadres of different performance rankings have been increasing.25 For example, officials of a county in Ningbo 宁波 city commented: There is a base bonus per point [of PES results]. The final amount that each work unit receives is its total [PES] points multiplied by both this base bonus and the number of officials at the unit. Then each work unit must design its own evaluation methods to further divide this received bonus amount staff of its different offices. There must be differentials. Even distribution is not allowed. … The difference between individuals of the best and the worst performance could reach more than 10,000 yuan. This [difference] is rather large because our salary is less than 200,000 after all.26 Second, some local governments have substantially raised the base salaries for village cadres, village party secretaries in particular, to target their weak drive to perform due to their missing position in the official bureaucracy.27 For example, an official of a Hubei township informs that as part of the province’s “bellwether project” (lingtouyang gongcheng 领头羊工程), the salary for its village party secretaries reached 39,000 yuan in 2015 and was of similar level to that of township level cadres.28 However, the official also notes that the salaries for other village cadres still lag far behind this standard.29 This pay gap at the village level between party secretaries and other cadres implies that more financial resources need to be channeled into the rank and file of the Party apparatus before the PES’s economic incentivizing mechanism can have wide-reaching impacts. Despite the above two promising trends of the effectiveness of the PES’s financial incentivizing mechanism, my research also finds that this mechanism faces great challenges in localities that are experiencing economic problems. Tangshan is such 25   Interviews: PES official, Gong’an, Hubei, 12 June 2016 and 1 June 2017; county official, Gong’an, Hubei, 15 June 2016; township official, Xuan’en, Hubei, 2 June 2017; township officials, Huangbi’ao, Zhejiang, 12 June 2017. 26   Interview with township officials, Huangbi’ao, Zhejiang, 12 June 2017. 27   Interviews: township official, Nanping, Hubei, 13 July 2016; township and village party secretaries, Xuan’en, Hubei, 2 June 2017. 28   Interview with township official, Nanping, Hubei, 13 July 2016. 29   Interview with township official, Nanping, Hubei, 13 July 2016.

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a noticeable example. As a municipality that is under central government pressure to undergo overcapacity reduction in steelmaking industries and close down coal factories to clean up the environment, Tangshan has witnessed a sharp decrease in its tax revenues and local governments can barely pay the full salaries of their staff, let along allocating bonus payments for PES.30 Indeed, for Kaiping district of Tangshan, which carries the same administrative rank as a county does, neither its 2015 comprehensive PES (Kaiping District Party Committee 2015) nor its 2017 PES of the target of “comprehensively deepen reform” (quanmian shenhua gaige 全面深化 改革) mentions a word about monetary rewards (Leading Group 2017). No wonder cadres are frustrated with local governments’ lack of funding support for PES. As one official comments sarcastically, “At Tangshan, for the target of environmental protection, the highest-ranking county or district is rewarded 1.5 million yuan and the lowest-ranking one is punished to pay 1.5 million. So basically it doesn’t cost [the government] anything.”31 It is even more difficult to motivate village leaders to do their job at the economically challenged localities. As one township official puts it bluntly, “the current salary for village party secretary (村支书) and committee director (村主任) is only 1200 and we withhold 20–25% of it as performance reward until the end of the year. But 20% of 1200 is really not that much. Even if you don’t give it to them, they won’t bug you for it and they still get the 80%. So you basically have little control over the village level.”32 Furthermore, the fierce anticorruption campaign has weakened the effectiveness of PES’s economic incentivizing mechanism in two major ways. First of all, under the high pressure of the anti-graft campaign, local leaders in some localities are reluctant to assign money for PES reward bonuses because they are afraid of being accused of squandering public funds.33 More importantly, the ongoing anticorruption campaign has also reduced the economic incentivizing effect of the PES when many of the material benefits that are traditionally associated with civil service jobs, both legal and illicit, have been stripped away. Specifically, Xi’s policies of “eight rules” (ba xiang guiding 八项规定) and “anti-four work styles” (fan si feng 反四风) have targeted the use of government cars, using public funds for banquets, entertainment and travel and even subsidies for housing (e.g., Zhu et al. 2017, 340). Offenses against such policies are investigated and routinely publicized on the website of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, and are often announced by the state television broadcaster—the “CCTV.” Guilty officials are subject to various party disciplinary actions.34 As a result of serious implementation of such policies, during my field research in summer of 2016 it was very common to see parked cars at government and party agencies covered in dust and posted with an official notice of “seal” (feng 封). These cars were waiting to be auctioned. At the entrance gate

30

  Interview with township official, Zhengzhuangzi, Hebei, 19 June 2017.   Interview with township official, Zhengzhuangzi, Hebei, 19 June 2017. 32   Interview with township official, Zhengzhuangzi, Hebei, 19 June 2017. 33   Interview with county official, Gong’an, Hubei, 9 June 2016. 34   For a recent example, see, Xinhuanet.com (2017). 31

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of these agencies, there was usually a sign of welcoming short-term public parking with a phone number attached for filing complaints. Additionally, even office space is targeted by Xi’s policies. Officials either have to relocate to smaller offices35 or their current office gets remodeled in order to fit the specific stipulations on size.36 A township cadre pointed me to a large built-in closet in his office and mentioned with a sarcastic tone that it was later added in so that the size of the room could meet the policy requirement.37 Whether these policies are reasonable is debatable, but it is clear that these new anti-graft policies are strictly enforced down to the grassroots levels and that officials are losing the traditional benefits, be they legitimate or not, associated with a government job. When the job itself loses appeal, the PES is destined to have a hard time motivating cadres to perform well regardless of which incentivizing mechanism is at work. In sum, compared to the largely absent political career incentive mechanism of the PES, its economic incentivizing method shows more promise in driving cadres to fulfill PES work targets. This is consistent with the findings of some existing works (e.g., Kostka and Yu 2015). But my research also finds that even this relatively better functioning incentive approach faces serious challenges posed by diminishing local government revenues in some localities and the immense pressure from Xi’s anticorruption policies. 4.3 Psychological Incentivizing Method In line with some existing research findings, my study also identifies a psychological aspect of the PES’s incentivizing mechanism at work, as my interviewed cadres overwhelmingly report shame and embarrassment as the most important disincentivizing factor to not perform well. These psychological effects stem from a variety of sources associated with the PES. While scholars have discussed the factor of internal circulation of result rankings (e.g., Edin 2003; Kinkel and Hurst 2015), my research also identifies the following three stress factors. First, many localities have established the formal rule of holding meetings, referred to as “appointment for accountability” (yuetan wenze 约谈问责) (e.g., Xiangshan County Party Committee 2017) or “admonition talk” (jiemian tanhua诫 勉谈话) (e.g., Kaiping District Party Committee 2015), between leading local cadres and the individual officials held responsible for the poor performance results of a functional department or a lower level government. Not surprisingly, cadres fear being summoned for such meetings.38 Second, a rather new PES practice adopted by some localities has been especially stressful for leading cadres—“collective and open evaluation of work presentations (jizhong gongkai shuzhi ceping 集中公开述职测评).” Gong’an county, for example, since 2014 started to require the heads of its functional departments as well as 35

  Interview with county party school official, Xiangshan, Zhejiang, 9 June 2017.   Interview with township official, Zhengzhuangzi, Hebei, 19 June 2017. 37   Interview with township official, Zhengzhuangzi, Hebei, 19 June 2017. 38   Interview with municipal official, Jingzhou, Hubei, 3 July 2014. 36

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the two leading cadres (i.e., party secretary and government head) of its subordinate townships to orally present the highlights of their work39 for the year during the last weekend of December. During the two-day ordeal, these cadres are organized into different groups based on the nature of their positions. That is, heads of functional departments are in one group, township party secretaries in one group, and township heads in another. Then the groups take turns to present. The presentations must utilize PowerPoint slides and are capped to 5 min. Cadres are notified 10 s before the time limit and the microphone will be turned off if presentations go overtime.40 The process is televised.41 Once each group finishes all its individual presentations, the county’s leading cadres along with other major officials evaluate and rank the presentations based on a certain formula and results are announced right away. This means that cadres are openly compared to their counterparts within each group in front of their upper-level bosses, peers from parallel jurisdictions, and subordinates under their own authority. Clearly, the many unique features of this PES practice have imposed an enormous amount of pressure on leading cadres as so much of their face (mianzi 面子) is on the line.42 Third, leading cadres also worry about how they are perceived by their subordinates. Ordinary cadres tend to resent their leaders for poor performance when they are not satisfied with the awarded PES bonus. And this is especially the case when there are considerable differentials in bonus payments based on rankings.43 Knowing this, leading cadres strive to fulfill PES targets because they do not want to be perceived as incompetent or less competent than their better-performing peers. In sum, the above stress factors seem to generate a strong psychological mechanism that ties cadres’ inherent desire to outcompete peers and to not lose face to better work performance. However, for the particular task of tackling corruption, is this psychological mechanism powerful enough to disincentivize cadres from corrupt behaviors? In particular, when political and economic incentives are lacking, could affective forces alone incentivize cadres to steer clear of corrupt behaviors? It is beyond the scope and capacity of this article to directly answer this question. But the large number of officials who have fallen from grace due to graft allegations seems to suggest that the effectiveness of the PES’s psychological incentivizing mechanism is rather limited.

5 Implications and Conclusion In line with Xi Jinping’s vow to combat cadre corruption, the current PES system possesses three promising attributes: increasing evaluation weight assigned to partybuilding and anticorruption targets, nationwide designation of anticorruption work 39

  Interview with township official, Nanping, Hubei, 13 July 2016.   Interview with township official, Nanping, Hubei, 18 June 2016. 41   Interview with township official, Yangjiachang, Hubei, 16 June 2016. 42   Interviews: county PES official, Gong’an, 12 June 2016 and 1 June 2017; township official, Yangjiachang, 16 June 2016; township official, Nanping, 18 June 2016. 43   Interview with township officials, Huangbi’ao, Zhejiang, 12 June 2017. 40

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as a priority target with veto power, and quantification of evaluating anticorruption work. However, the three major incentivizing mechanisms of the PES system are far less effective as expected due to various challenges. As a result, the overall effectiveness of the PES as a graft-combating institution becomes much limited. This finding paints a rather bleak picture of the prospects of battling corruption through a regular and institutionalized means under an authoritarian regime, thus challenging the long-term ruling legitimacy of the Communist Party. The findings of this research have implications beyond the particular issue of combating corruption. As discussed, the PES is essentially an incentive system designed to increase local compliance with higher-level government and party policies through various incentivizing methods. Therefore, the more or less structural challenges that have been identified to constrain the PES’s incentivizing effect are highly likely to compromise policy implementation in other issue areas as well, such as environmental protection or poverty alleviation.44 The broad generalizability of the findings adds more weight to the importance of this research, theoretically and empirically. Despite the challenges, the findings of this research also suggest that there are ways for the Party to improve the incentivizing effects of the PES. Specifically, local governments should systematically link evaluation results to cadres’ political career by expanding grassroots bureaucratic positions and seriously sanctioning cadres of poor performance. In addition, the central government needs to subsidize the PES reward bonuses for economically disadvantaged localities as well as providing lawful and adequate official benefits under the high pressures of the anticorruption crusade. The substantial changes that the PES has undergone throughout the years indicate a Party personnel management system that is capable of reinventing itself to rein in the massive cadre corps. Therefore, it is rash to doubt that the Party would one way or another implement the much needed reforms to adapt to its new political priority and thus secure legitimacy.

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44   I greatly appreciate the reviewer for pointing out this study’s potential for greater generalizability and hence more important contribution to the literature.

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