Policy Without Action Implications

From June 1978 through 1981, top Party and government organizations issued more than twenty documents regulating various aspects of cadre retirement. These organizations include the Central Committee and the State Council, as well as the Central Organization Department and the Ministry of Labor and Personnel. However, middlemen took little action to retire cadres in this period. Indeed, in the view of those for whom the policy can be expected to be most salient, those charged with executing policy and the cadres who were the policy's immediate targets, the post-Mao cadre retirement policy dates from 1982, not 1978. Why did what seems, from the flow of official documents, to be a policy not have action implications?

Before exploring this question, it is important to establish that the documents do, in fact, seem to articulate a policy to retire cadres. Taken as a whole, they combined proclamations of general principles with concrete measures that elaborated a comprehensive cadre retirement system.^[20]

The documents established eligibility standards and pensions for three retirement statuses: regular retirement (tuixiu ), "special" retirement (lizhi xiuyang , usually abbreviated to lixiu ), and semiretirement to advisory (guwen ) and honorary (rongyu ) positions. Rank and revolutionary seniority determined eligibility for the different statuses and pension levels. Revolutionary seniority was measured as participation in the Communist revolution before four strategic turning points in the military struggle for power: 7 July 1937, the end of 1942, 3 September 1945, and 1 October 1949. Higher status and bigger pensions were allotted to higher-ranking cadres and those who had joined the Communists earlier rather than later. Eligibility standards and pension levels for special and regular retirement statuses are summarized in table 8.1. The vast majority of veteran cadres surviving in 1978–81 had joined after the defeat of the Japanese in 1945. These veterans of the civil war between the Com-

munists and the Guomindang numbered 2,190,000 in 1980.^[21] Most were eligible only for regular retirement status.

Veteran cadres in positions of leadership at and above the county level whose health prevented them from performing normal duties of office but who were still able to do some work could semiretire to advisory or honorary positions.^[22] This was termed retirement to the "second line" (di er xian ).^[23] Evidently, the second line was introduced to permit cadres to transfer leadership duties gradually and continue to play a role while

taking into account their age and health. But of all aspects of the cadre retirement system elaborated in 1978–81, this status was least explicitly articulated. For years after their introduction in 1978, the actual role of cadres on the second line remained unclear, even to those who had designed the system.^[24] Documents never defined the role of cadres in honorary positions. They defined the role of advisers, but in very general terms. Advisers were to engage in investigation and study, maintain familiarity with the overall situation, help leaders originate and develop ideas, provide counsel, and transmit to younger generations the Party's traditions and style of work as well as their personal experience and knowledge.

Documents established special retirement status for some veteran cadres in poor health and unable to continue work. Before 1978 the term lizhi xiuyang , literally "leave of absence for convalescence," had referred to a practice of permitting veteran cadres to retire from office temporarily, on full salary, to convalesce. The practice dated from 1958.^[25] When the term lixiu was revived two decades later as a special form of permanent retirement, it retained its earlier connotation of privileged status and its provision of full salary.^[26]

Cadres who did not meet the standards for special retirement could retire with regular retirement status, on less than full salary. Special retirement and regular retirement became retirement to the "third line" (di san xian ). Standards for regular retirement included age guidelines, generally fifty-five for women and sixty for men, but no rank guidelines. Standards and pensions for cadre regular retirement were the same as those established for worker retirement. Only age guidelines differed, and those only for women.^[27] Pensions for regularly retired cadres ranged from 60 to 90 percent of salary, depending on period of recruitment to service. Veteran cadres were eligible for 80 or 90 percent of salary, while postrevolutionaries were eligible for 60 to 75 percent.

The documents issued in 1978–81 not only detailed arrangements for pensions but also outlined provisions on health care, housing and relocation subsidies, participation in political study, access to informa-

tion, and leisure activities. They discussed broader issues as well, such as how to promote respect and concern for retired cadres in society at large.

The articulation in official documents of a policy to retire cadres was buttressed by a thoroughgoing critique of the cadre lifelong tenure system, conducted in a wide range of periodicals, mostly in 1980. Critics associated lifelong tenure in the span of world history with economic backwardness and political autocracy, claimed no support for lifelong tenure in the Marxist classics, and found lifelong tenure directly or indirectly responsible for a number of serious defects in the exercise of power in communist systems generally and the Chinese system in particular.^[28]

Why did what seems to be a policy to retire cadres not have action implications for middlemen? First, policymakers at the top had not reached a consensus on cadre retirement policy, and they communicated their ambivalence to middlemen in a number of ways. Party documents and government documents differed in nuance: the Party organization did not express unambiguous support for a policy to retire cadres in 1978–81. And because cadre management is a particularly Party-dominated issue area, it is not surprising that the lack of clear Party support for retirement blunted any action implications of government documents. Second, policymakers gave middlemen another policy to execute, one that conflicted with cadre retirement. Middlemen had a legitimate alternative to retiring cadres. And finally, cadre retirement policy contained no stipulations such as mandated retirement ages that could serve as objective measures of success or as constraints on middlemen to execute policy.

According to Chen Yeping, writing in 1983 as the prospective Central Organization Department head, there was consensus among top leaders on the principle of a cadre retirement system. However, leaders dis-

agreed on the urgency of replacing old cadres with younger ones. In a series of speeches beginning in 1979, Deng Xiaoping argued that generational succession was a very urgent matter and that younger cadres should be apprenticed while taking on main responsibility, with older veterans providing guidance as required. Deng's opponents on the issue contended that generational succession could be taken more slowly and that veteran cadres could exercise primary responsibility for a number of years.^[29]

This ambivalence among policymakers probably accounts for the difference in priorities reflected in Party and government documents and the failure of the Central Committee and the Central Organization Department to demonstrate clear support for a policy to retire cadres. Not until February 1982 did the Central Committee issue a partner document to the many State Council initiatives on cadre retirement.^[30] The strongest Central Committee show of support for cadre retirement in 1978–81 was a general resolution, passed in February 1980, to abolish the de facto lifelong tenure system for cadres.^[31]

Party documents on cadre retirement contained a message that effectively replaced the policy to retire cadres with a policy to restore to power veteran cadres who had been purged or demoted during the Cultural Revolution. Probably the first document on veteran cadre work issued by a Party organization in 1978–81 was a February 1978 Central Organization Department statement of views on veteran cadre work.^[32] Its main content was the importance of restoring veteran cadres to power. It stated that those able to work were to be assigned suitable work as soon as possible. Those with long experience in positions of leadership were to be assigned main positions of leadership. Indeed, the document instructed subordinate organization departments to promote the core role of veteran cadres in modernization. As an example of the scope and nature of restoration, the party journal Hongqi publicized the work of the organization department of Hunan province. In Hunan, of the surviving cadres managed by the provincial Party committee before the Cultural Revolution, 98 percent were assigned positions ranked equivalent to or higher than their former positions. The rule adopted was this: so long as

they are able to work, they are assigned work; those unable to work are permitted to retire upon request.^[33]

In principle, restoration of veteran cadres as a strategic short-term policy was not inconsistent with retirement. The younger generations of cadres the regime sought overall to promote included most who had been recruited and had risen under the influence of radical leftist standards thoroughly discredited by the end of 1978. Policymakers sought the cooperation of veterans in selecting and training suitable successors. This was not simply a task of recruiting qualified managers of modernization, but one of weeding out those whose politics were suspect in the changed political climate.^[34] In practice, however, veterans restored to power did not actively create the conditions for their own retirement by preparing successors.^[35]

Finally, even the government documents that established a cadre retirement system did not clearly impel middlemen to execute policy. The main reason is their failure to set objective criteria for decisions on retirement. In turn, there were no such criteria to evaluate the performance of middlemen or to constrain them to retire cadres.

If retirement is defined as an explicit direct relationship between old age and employment, then government documents introduced neither the principle nor the practice of cadre retirement in 1978–81. Retirement-age guidelines were set for regular retirement status, but these determined eligibility for benefits and in no sense mandated retirement at specified ages. More to the point, old age was not intrinsically a reason to retire cadres. Retirement was for those whose state of health precluded performing normal work. Documents acknowledged that old age generally brought with it some decline that could affect the ability to work, but the rationale for cadre retirement was two vague intervening variables: state of health and the ability to work normally. Old age per se was not linked to retirement until 1982.

It is instructive here to compare the language in the first and most comprehensive post-Mao government document on cadre retirement

with a document on worker retirement issued at the same time.^[36] The State Council Temporary Measures on Arrangements for Aged, Weak, Ill, and Disabled Cadres applied to cadres whose "age and state of health preclude continuing normal work." The document on worker retirement applied to "old workers and workers who have lost the ability to work because of illness or disability." Cadres meeting standards specified "could retire." Workers meeting standards specified "should retire." Even the title of the document on workers, the State Council Temporary Measures on Worker Retirement, suggests the contrast. In 1980 the State Council did issue a document stating that cadres who were unable to work "should retire."^[37] Yet that document applied to cadres for whom no retirement-age guidelines had been set. And even with the stronger language, inability to work normally rather than old age per se was given as the reason for retirement.

Yet another contrast is provided in a government document protesting the pro forma nature of some worker retirements, with formally retired workers remaining employed at their posts.^[38] No comparable protest was contained in documents on cadre retirement in 1978–81. Also, workers who did not retire according to regulations were to have their salaries stopped.^[39] No comparable arrangement existed for cadres.

One retired cadre summed up the situation in 1978–81 in the following way: "It was very difficult to distinguish who should retire from who should not retire. If it is too flexible, it is the same as not having it at all." Without age guidelines as the basic decision rule for retirement, decisions could be made only through case-by-case deliberation on the applicability of vague subjective standards to particular cadres. These standards were open to interpretation and did not constrain middlemen to retire cadres.