Players And Organizational Context
Cadre retirement policy aimed to retire nearly 2.5 million surviving veteran cadres, revolutionaries who had joined the Communists during the wars of 1924–49.[10] It also aimed to replace an existing de facto lifelong tenure system for cadres with a regular retirement system. Consequently, veteran cadres were the immediate but not the only targets of retirement policy. Postrevolutionaries, those who had become cadres after the Communist victory in 1949, were also affected. Among them were 2,353,000 cadres who had been recruited in 1950–52,[11] many of whom were in their fifties when cadre retirement policy was introduced. These two groups, veteran revolutionaries and cadre recruits of the early 1950s, constituted the most important targets of cadre retirement policy.
Middlemen in the cadre retirement policy process are defined here as people and organizations charged with executing the policy formulated at the top. These range from local governments that promulgated local regulations on cadre retirement to functionaries at the lowest level of the workplace who were charged with processing retirements. Their actions make more sense in the context of two features of the formal structure of authority: the differences between territorially based organizations and functional departments, and the exceptional Party domination of the issue area in which cadre retirement falls.
In the case studied here, as in many other issue areas, authority is formally structured in two separate hierarchies of territorially based organizations and two functional hierarchies. Both kinds of hierarchies have organizations at the top in Beijing and down to the county level. There are two of each kind of hierarchy because at each level are parallel Party and government organizations.
The key differences between the territorially based organizations and the functional departments are the span of authority and the nature of authority relations. The authority of territorially based organizations, the Party committees and governments at the various levels, extends to more than simply the cadre issue in territory at and below their respective levels.[12] This span of authority over many issues is reflected in the relation between a territorially based organization and the functional department responsible for cadres, in the Party or government hierarchy at any given level: the functional department is subordinate to the territorially based organization in a "relation of leadership" (lingdao guanxi ), the most authoritative type of linkage between Chinese organizations. The relation between territorially based organizations at different levels of the hierarchy is also one of leadership. By contrast, the authority of functional departments spans separate, broadly defined issue areas which in principle do not overlap. The relation between superior and subordinate organizations in the functional hierarchy dealing with cadres is one of "professional guidance" (yewu zhidao ), a relation more circumscribed than that of leadership.
Cadre retirement is one issue within the area defined as part of the organization-personnel "system" (xitong ). This system is virtually solely responsible for all cadre work—which includes recruitment, staffing, training and education, various forms of assessment, and maintenance
of personnel dossiers.[13] The main Party organizations in the system are the organization departments at the various levels; their government counterparts are the personnel departments.[14]
Barnett in 1967 identified the system as the most important of the key "watchdog" mechanisms for ensuring Party leadership.[15] More recent studies concur with this view. The post-Mao trend in many issue areas has been toward a retreat of Party organizations from routine work, along with a decentralization of authority and the granting of more autonomy to government organizations in the conduct of administrative work. In the organization-personnel system, authority has been substantially decentralized. However, Party organizations continue to dominate even the day-to-day work.[16]
Within the organization-personnel system, the issue of cadre retirement is particularly important and, perhaps as a consequence, particularly dominated by the Party. This is revealed most clearly in the elaboration of structures to manage cadre retirement.[17] These are indicated in figure 8.1.
The importance of cadre retirement is evident in the status of veteran cadre departments at the provincial, prefectural, and county levels: the departments are not subordinate to the organization departments at the respective levels, but rather are equal to them in bureaucratic status. The organization departments relate to parallel veteran cadre departments by giving professional guidance. The Party committees exercise direct leadership over veteran cadre departments. Only at the top level is the Veteran Cadre Bureau a subordinate department of the Central Organization Department.
Party dominance is indicated by the virtual absence, until about ten years after the first regulation on cadre retirement was issued, of specialized structures for cadre retirement in the government hierarchy, except at the top level. As late as 1986, government organizations usually attended to cadre retirement work by assigning responsibility to one leading cadre in each of the personnel departments at the provincial, prefectural, and county levels. These cadres worked in coordination with the Party veteran cadre departments parallel to their personnel departments.[18]
Institutional arrangements for cadre retirement at the workplace have tended to depend on workplace size and the number of retired cadres. National and provincial departments have either bureau-level veteran cadre departments or division-level departments under the organizations (usually the organization department) responsible for cadre work. Smaller and lower-level workplaces do not usually have specialized structures for cadre retirement. Rather, this work is carried out by the Party and government cadres or organizations responsible for cadre work.[19]
What did this context mean for middlemen in the cadre retirement policy process? Those at the workplace were responsible for implementing a large number of policies in the organization-personnel system, and cadre retirement represented only one task among many. Those tasks were not always mutually complementary; in cases of policy conflict, middlemen had to choose which policies to implement and which to ignore effectively. Many factors determined how middlemen responded to this choice. Party domination of cadre management dictated greater
Fig. 8.1.
Formal Structure of Authority in Veteran Cadre Work
attention to signals from Party organizations than to those from their government counterparts. The interests of policy targets also came into play. In making choices about transforming policies into actions, it made sense for middlemen to consider the relative difficulty of their tasks. Obviously, policies that challenged vested interests would not meet with ready compliance. Thus middlemen could be expected to prefer to implement more-appealing policies over less-appealing ones. Cadre retirement disturbed what was seen as the norm in bureaucratic careers, and it deprived cadres of positions and income. For these reasons and others,
many cadres were inclined to resist retirement. Further, immediate policy targets were generally those with the most seniority at the workplace. Virtually by definition they included those with the most clout, whether that was reflected in official position or not. These interests of policy targets made cadre retirement policy difficult to implement easily. Resistance of policy targets made it an unappealing policy for middlemen too.