contents

Each personnel dossier includes official forms, documents, and materials. Most are ones that each individual has provided, and the rest is either evidence collected or opinions rendered by the organization.^[13] The most frequently included forms are one's Summary Career History (jianli piao ), Promotion to Cadre (for newly appointed ones), Cadre Registration (when assigned to a new

[8] A director of the dossier bureau of the State Council started his career as a code operator in 1927. Renmin Ribao , 7 January 1980.

[9] Wang, Renshi Dangan , 75.

[10] Zhengming , no. 3, 1980, 74.

[11] Zhonggong Zhongyang Zhuzhibu Yanjiushi, ed., Dangde Zhuzi Gongzuo Wenda (Beijing: Beijing Renmin Chubanshe, 1984).

[12] Guangxi Ribao , 10 August 1975.

[13] Ibid.

unit), and Application for Party Membership. Supporting materials also appear. The formats of these documents vary, although they all have columns for certain specific kinds of information.^[14]

The contents of most of these forms overlap. As is the case with those distributed by most bureaucracies, spaces are provided for such data as name, age, sex, birthplace, family origin, dates of employment, cultural level, and party membership. Party members must describe when, where, and by whose recommendation they first joined the party, also explaining whether or not the spouse is a party member and what position he or she holds.^[15] A closely detailed explanation can be provided, if necessary. In addition, each cadre must give an account of the economic conditions of their families, in detail, before and after liberation. They also have to specify their family background (jiating chusheng ), for until recently this was regarded as the most crucial factor in personnel management. All classifications are based on what a cadre's father did between 1946 and 1949 (or, for veteran cadres, on when they participated in the revolution). Those who were adopted are required to write the occupations of their legal parents rather than that of the natural parents, although the natural parents' background is also taken into consideration. The justification for this rule is that family upbringing directly influences one's political attitudes.

For family background, the regime provides detailed categories based on economic as well as political criteria for all Chinese except ethnic minorities.^[16] Though the detailed official categories may be thorough, they are not sufficient to cover China's complex reality. Moreover, there has always been a strong incentive to make one's family background look as good as possible. Even Zhang Chunqiao's description of his father changed from "small staff" to "middle peasant," "handicraft worker," and "medical doctor" in different forms.^[17] Detailed explanations of one's family background may be included on the form or they may assume the freer style of autobiography. In addition to writing about their families, each

[14] "Central Document, No. 10, 1977," Zhonggong Yanjiu 14(7–8) (July–August 1980):80, 165, 172, 163.

[15] Ibid., 80, 165, 172, 163.

[16] For further details on the categories, see Richard Klaus, Class Conflict in Chinese Communism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).

[17] "Central Document, No. 10, 1977," 167–69.

cadre must also write about their own status, based on what they have done since becoming economically independent.

After the section about family background and personal status, most forms require people to list their "key family members." There are detailed regulations on who constitutes a key family member. Both parents and children are regarded as key family members, whether or not one is living with his parents. But if a woman is married, her parents are relegated to mere "key social relations," and her parents-in-law are considered the key family members.

People must also write about their key social relations. Close friends, classmates, colleagues, and relatives who are not key family members are in this category, whose definition is hazy compared with that of key family members. A cadre has great latitude about whom he lists; but if he leaves someone out—particularly someone who has once been politically active—the organization may question him if suspicion arises.

Most official forms also include specific questions about whether a person or a family member has ever been arrested, jailed, or executed by the CCP. If so, the person filling out the form is unlikely to go far in the party. More information is required about the one who was arrested, jailed, or executed. Did he ever "join a reactionary organization or reactionary military and surreptitious religious organization? What position did he hold? Present relations? Any references?"^[18] Last, theform asks for a brief statement about the compiler's career background, including academic training. Each school attended and each place of employment must be given with references and addresses.

After filling out all the official forms, one must write a detailed autobiography (zizhuan ), which covers the writer's life from the age of seven on, in particular, focusing on such politically relevant activities as demonstrations, publications, and any association memberships. The autobiography is expected to reveal how its author's thought has developed, but it must also include all political relationships. Discussion of friends is not needed except in a political context.^[19]

[18] Ibid., 164.

[19] For an example of autobiography, see Guancha Zhe , January 1980, and Zhongguo Chingnien Bao , 9 February 1980.

The finished autobiography is scrutinized by the small group to which the person belongs as well as by the party committee. If satisfied with the content, the committee will include the autobiography in the dossier. However, everyone is required constantly to supplement his autobiography. For example, if something of political significance happens to a key family member or if a sister emigrates, then this change should be reflected in the personnel dossier. A supplement to the existing dossier may be ordered by the organization when a minor mistake is discovered or when an individual volunteers information out of a guilty conscience.^[20] All these materials are arranged in the order specified by the guidelines of the central organizational department.^[21] Only the department has the authority to put materials into the dossier; individuals cannot collect materials or demand that the department put any particular piece of information into their dossier.^[22]

Maintenance

Although in the past, ultimate authority over personnel matters lay with the party committee, the actual management of the files was handled by the organizational department of the party and the personnel bureau of the government. Staff members working in both organs were usually party members, and quite often they held positions in both organs concurrently.^[23] A party secretary or standing committee member normally supervised personnel work. When the party committee was small, one deputy secretary was in charge of personnel management. Thus, unlike a personnel unit in an American organization, which is considered a staff department, both the party's organizational department and the government's personnel bureau have substantial influence over personnel matters. Consequently, the personnel bureau draws sharp criticism whenever there is any political relaxation.

Following the principle of managing the cadres in a "unified, level-by-level, and field-by-field" fashion (see chapter 14), the party committees at the various levels keep the dossiers on the cadres

[20] Wenhui Bao , 27 October 1957.

[21] Wang, Renshi Dangan , 133–38.

[22] For instance, testimony by other people certifying one's starting date of revolutionary work is not allowed in the dossier. Ibid., 10.

[23] Barnett, Cadres , 46–65.

over whom they have personnel authority. Generally speaking, the party unit at one level has authority over the dossiers of the high-ranking cadres belonging to the next lower unit. Thus, the dossiers of the highest provincial and municipal leaders are kept in the organizational department of the Central Committee. The provincial organizational departments manage the dossiers of the cadres over whom the provincial authority has jurisdiction. The county party committee is the lowest unit that is allowed to maintain personnel dossiers.^[24] This elaborate division of jurisdiction within the hierarchy is designed to prevent any cadre from keeping his dossier under his own jurisdiction, while making it easy for those who make personnel decisions to have access to the information.

Although it is unclear how authority is divided between the party's organizational departments and the government's personnel bureau, it seems that the division of power between the two depends on the cadre's rank. The organizational department of the Guangdong provincial party committee maintains dossiers for leading cadres (above grade 12) of all organs directly under the provincial government. The personnel bureau of the provincial government keeps dossiers for middle-echelon cadres—those between grades 12 and 18 (between division chief and section chief)—of all the organs directly under the province. According to one informant, the personnel bureau of Guangdong provincial government maintained about 5,000 dossiers at the time of the CR. The cadres below grade 19 have their dossiers kept in the personnel section or the organizational department of the bureau level. The same principle may apply to the units below the provincial level.

At each unit, except probably in small enterprises, dossiers are kept in a specially designated dossier room. One person is accountable for approximately every 1,000 dossiers. To be allowed to work with dossiers, a person receives close scrutiny of his political reliability and party spirit.^[25]

On the dossier's outer envelope are written the person's name, dossier number, sex, unit, birthplace, date of birth, family background, individual status, date of first engaging in revolutionary

[24] Zhonggong Zhongyang Zhuzhibu Yanjiushi, ed., Dangde Zhuzi , 279.

[25] Wang, Renshi Dangan , 57–62, 110–32.

work, status, position, and address. Each dossier is given a serial number, the first two digits specifying the field to which one belongs, and the other digits assigned by seniority. Files are organized according to serial number. In order to facilitate retrieval, each personnel department maintains a directory arranged according to the number of strokes in the last name. In addition to normal updating of dossiers, custodians are required to check the serial numbers once every six months and to index them annually.^[26]

Before the CR, there was a well-established set of rules to access dossiers, and these rules have recently been reinstated.^[27] Two people must carry out any investigation of a political problem in the personnel dossier. In order to have access to the dossier for cadres above section chief, both of the investigators have to be party members, and at least one must be of a higher rank. If the cadre being investigated is below section chief, one investigator can be a nonparty member, although this is very rare. When a party committee wishes to check a dossier held by another unit, it has to write a letter of introduction for its investigators. The letter specifies the investigators' ranks and positions and whose file they are authorized to see. After registering with the persons in charge of the dossier, the investigators leave the letter, which is later added to the dossier. Questions raised about the contents of a dossier are also put into it.

Investigators are allowed to see dossiers of those specified by the letter only in the designated dossier room. No mechanical duplication of a dossier is allowed except for a simplified version of the dossier. When part of a dossier is copied, it is verbatim; no summarizing or paraphrasing is allowed. The person in charge of the dossier must authenticate every page copied and the entire package.

Control over copied materials is strict because they can enter the dossiers of others as supporting evidence. To ensure proper control, the regime authorized each unit maintaining dossiers to set up more detailed regulations.^[28] As for lending dossiers, "as a rule, a dossier cannot be checked out. But under special circumstances, it can be lent with approval [of the party committee]. However, lend-

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid., 32–34.

[28] Ibid., 33, 43.

ing should follow strict registration, and those borrowed should be returned within the due date."^[29]

A personnel dossier always follows a person when he is transferred. In the early 1950s the transferred cadre could carry his own dossier in a sealed envelope. This practice allowed many people to change the contents in order to secure a better job. Thereafter, all dossiers were required to be sent out only through "confidential transportation," and now only cadres in organizational departments above the county level may carry them.

Investigation and Assessment

The two most important functions of the party committee were the investigation of the contents of a dossier (shencha ) and the assessment (jianding ) of a cadre's performance in both work and politics. Three occasions precipitate an investigation. First, anything questionable in the autobiography requires further investigation. Second, the reexamination of a cadre's dossiers occurs when the organization receives accusation letters (jiancha xin ). Before the CR, this kind of letter would not automatically have initiated a full-scale investigation unless the charge was serious and the letter was signed by the sender. However, during the CR, any suggestion of wrongdoing, either in an anonymous letter or in an oral accusation, frequently brought about an investigation. The present leadership is ambivalent toward an anonymous letter; on one hand, it admits that fear of reprisals leads people not to sign letters, but, on the other, it warns that malicious people often use the method to lay "false charges."^[30]

The third occasion for investigation is a political campaign. Then, the personnel bureau or organizational department examines dossiers carefully, selecting ones with problems and reporting them to the party committee,^[31] which decides whether a cadre's problem is serious enough to make him a target. The same method was used in the last party rectification campaign of 1984–86, which intended to punish former radicals for what they did almost twenty years before.

[29] Zhonggong Zhongyang Zhuzhibu Yanjiushi, ed., Dangde Zhuzi , 281.

[30] Dangde Shenghuo , no. 8, 1983, 37; no. 8, 1984, 10.

[31] Qingdao Ribao , 14 September 1957.

To find falsification, investigators look for inconsistencies, particularly in the many versions of a cadre's autobiography. Any inconsistency is cause for investigators to suspect that a cadre has deliberately falsified his dossier. Discrepancies are entered in the dossier and dealt with during the next political campaign.

If a case requires further evidence, the party committee may decide to send out its own investigation team. In this case, the regulations stipulate that at least two people (sometimes three if they need to travel a long distance) must be dispatched together. Otherwise, any evidence collected is inadmissible. The investigators, who are usually selected from personnel agencies, ensure the reliability of information collected from witnesses.^[32]

After returning to their respective units, the investigators write their reports, including corroborating testimony from witnesses, and submit them to the party committee. If the discrepancy between the new findings and what is reported in the personnel dossier is not serious, the committee will not make a case immediately, but the entry noting the discrepancy remains. In the next campaign, the party committee will try to verify the materials again.

During the CR, the Red Guards nominally followed the same procedure, quite often using the pretext of investigation for sightseeing trips. Due to an emphasis on "class struggle," suspicion on such trivial matters as class background resulted in sending out numerous investigation teams. As one observer argued, China must have wasted enormous amounts of money and energy on these trips. Moreover, most of the investigators merely collected evidence to support already-formulated conclusions.^[33]

Apart from investigations, the party committee regularly assesses a cadre's work competence and political performance. The assessment can be made: (1) at the end of each year, (2) when the cadre is transferred to a new unit, or (3) at the end of each political movement. During Mao's era, the assessment focused on and emphasized political qualifications rather than functional work competency.^[34]

Standard procedure for making an assessment requires, first,

[32] For a documentary example of this kind of evidence, see "Central Document, No. 10, 1977."

[33] Zhengming , no. 9, 1983, 55–56.

[34] Wenhui Bao , 10 August 1957.

that each individual write his own assessment, detailing salient points and focusing on his own political performance and attitudes, strengths and weaknesses, achievements and mistakes. Second, the self-evaluation is read and discussed in a small group, which consists of colleagues who know one another very well.^[35] Third, on the basis of the self-evaluation and the small group's report, the party committee writes an evaluation that is added to the dossier. Sometimes the evaluation has to be approved by an upper-level party committee. Assessment materials make up a large portion of the dossier.

Those being evaluated have a pretty good idea of the contents of the assessment. They know what they have written and what suggestions were made in the small group discussion. Cadres sometimes have access to the summaries of assessments made by the organizations. They were required to sign their names on the organizational assessment, and they have the right to reserve opinion on that portion with which they disagree. The assessment becomes effective only when the units and those evaluated sign together.^[36] Despite this rule, many cadres complain that "party organizational assessment about cadres is surrounded by mystery."^[37] During the CR many units stopped making assessments, and in places where they continued, coercion replaced objectivity. Recent regulations have revived the old practice of requiring the signature of the person being assessed.

Administrative control over the personnel dossier was well institutionalized in pre-CR China. The dossiers were strictly regulated, and there were at least well-established administrative practices, if not uniform rules, regarding the types and processing of information that went into the dossiers. These guidelines also applied to the maintenance and investigation of dossiers, as well as to rendering organizational judgments on the contents and on each individual cadre's performance. Thus, the dossier provided the party with accurate information on each cadre, enabling it to carry out recruitment and promotion in an orderly and justifiable way.

[35] For a detailed description of the small group operation, see Martin Whyte, Small Groups and Political Rituals in China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974).

[36] Renmin Ribao , 10 August 1957.

[37] Wenhui Bao , 27 October 1957.

The pre-CR personnel management practice, however, had several serious weaknesses, which subsequent politics magnified. First, there was no external mechanism to stop the party from abusing its authority in the area of personnel management. Whatever restraints there were, they were internal ones, whose effectiveness depended on goodwill. For instance, each cadre was granted the right to appeal to the upper echelon of the bureaucracy. But this right was generally ineffective in guaranteeing a fair review opportunity for the cadre because, as many Red Guard newspapers asserted, the upper echelon of the bureaucracy frequently showed more sympathy to the lower level than to an individual cadre.

Second, the heavy reliance on personal testimony—in contrast to the Western judicial practice of attaching importance to material evidence—and the lack of strict rules with regard to the admissibility of evidence and its interpretation offered even more room for abuse. The Chinese practice of interviewing those who knew the investigated person and using their testimony in written form as evidence reflected in part the cultural tradition and in part technical backwardness in dealing with material evidence. The effectiveness of this practice as an investigation method largely depended on an assumed mutual trust and a consensus on what was right and wrong among the people involved in the process. When the CR shattered the consensus on fundamental values, the practice degenerated to producing a large number of false charges and framed-up cases.

Third, the Chinese emphasis on "confession," which was epitomized in the official slogan, "lenience to those confessing, but harsh punishment to those refusing," contained a seed of abuse and excess. The notion that people would honestly confess their mistakes also indicated the utter lack of philosophical distinction between public and private domains, a distinction that led in the United States to the Fifth Amendment, granting the individual the right to refuse self-incrimination. As was the case with witness testimony, confession can work as an effective mechanism for justice only when all the participants share common criteria for right and wrong. When the official criteria changed during the CR, coercion, torture, and other types of physical punishment were widely used to force the purged to "confess" their crimes or to

write accusations against others. A family member, relative, or other acquaintance was subject to the same abuse.^[38]

Fourth, the principle of double jeopardy has never been firmly established in China. Even a case over which the party committee had rendered a final conclusion could be reopened when new evidence—reliable or not—became available. Many people were persecuted several times for the same reason.^[39] As a result, there has been enormous pressure for reversals of past decisions and for the rehabilitation of victims, particularly when policies have changed with new leadership. By discrediting the organizational legitimacy of the party, the CR gave rise to demands to reverse previous decisions. One group of political leaders at the top level could then utilize such demands for their own political gain. As a result, the Chinese people are justifiably worried that if any drastic policy change occurs, what is regarded as virtue today—in Chinese a "red-color dossier"—will turn out to be a liability—a "black-color dossier."