Deviation From Policy

In salary terms the 1982 revised incentive structure eliminated the material disincentive to retire for veteran cadres and provided a small incentive for some. Postrevolutionaries still lost 25 to 40 percent of salary after retirement. However, middlemen provided incentives to retire, above those stipulated in official policy, to veteran cadres and postrevolutionaries. At the workplace, middlemen engaged in bargaining with potential retirees seeking a better retirement deal. At the provincial level, governments issued temporary regulations increasing stipends to postrevolutionaries. In both instances, middlemen responded to pressure and passive resistance from older cadres, the targets of the policy, even when doing so deviated from policy. In short, better incentives seemed to be necessary to get cadres to retire. Middlemen proved themselves unwilling or unable to execute policy successfully, given the official incentive structure. They did not enforce compliance so much as induce cadres to comply.

In an economy where goods and opportunities are scarce and the market mechanism inoperative in distributing them, as is true of the People's Republic of China, the power to obtain things is not always strongly linked to cash income. It is linked also to rank and, more generally, to being a member of a workplace.^[46] For these reasons, even a full pension was unlikely to compensate cadres adequately for postretire-

ment losses. Thus the types of benefits potential retirees sought were often different in nature from those the official policy offered.

Although the age criterion provided an objective means of singling out cadres for retirement, middlemen at the workplace did not usually instruct cadres to retire. They engaged in discussions with potential retirees, in the course of which cadres voiced requests to improve their situation in some way. Cadres generally referred to this process as one of "bargaining" (shangliang ). In the description of one retired cadre:

Retirement decisions come from the organization department at the workplace. It has records of how old cadres are who should retire. To get people to retire, the organization department cadres come to talk to you. Cadres bargain with them. They may say: "First you resolve my housing problem or my son's employment problem, and then I will retire." Before the Cultural Revolution, people did whatever the organization told them to do. They went wherever the organization decided they should go. Now, people are not so obedient. The organization has to bargain with them.

Some of the things often bargained for were better housing, a preretirement salary raise, and employment for a son or a daughter. Table 8.3 shows preretirement requests that questionnaire respondents made to middlemen at the workplace. Nearly 85 percent of respondents made such requests. Among them, employment for a son or a daughter was the most common: including those who made more than one request, more than half of all respondents made this request. Providing employment for a son or a daughter was not strictly permissible, but younger cadres interviewed indicated that it was widely practiced. For ordinary cadres especially, with fewer perquisites of position than high-ranking cadres, providing such an incentive could induce early retirement. In Guizhou province, for example, eight thousand cadres had retired early

by the end of 1983. Of these early retirements, more than half involved providing employment for a son or a daughter.^[47]

Yet another incentive middlemen provided to potential retirees was pro forma retirement, which some cadres referred to as "retirement without leaving the workpost" (lixiu bu li zhi ). Essentially this meant that cadres worked regular hours, at the workplace, attending to the same kind of work as before their retirement. It seems not to have been as common as another postretirement practice: reducing work hours and time spent at the workplace and attending to special projects unconnected with regular work. For example, among questionnaire respondents, 21 percent indicated they spent most of their time after retirement doing work for the former workplace and returned to the workplace at least several times every couple of weeks.^[48]

That these efforts served the interests of potential retirees is obvious. However, middlemen also had an interest in providing incentives. Middlemen had an interest in retiring cadres to fulfill campaign quotas to cut staff and promote younger cadres. Even pro forma retirement eliminated cadres from the authorized personnel complement (bianzhi ) and gave workplaces time to find and train replacements. Providing incentives for early retirement was also in the interest of middlemen. Because the practice of lifelong tenure had prevented regular personnel renewal, those directly in line for promotion at middle levels were themselves not young. Part of the campaign to promote younger cadres involved short-

cutting the regular career ladder and skipping over cadres in their fifties. This created a morale problem among these cadres, whose careers were frozen.^[49] Early retirement with a better retirement deal was one way to handle this problem. A postretirement work relation with the workplace was another.

By the end of 1985 more than half of all surviving veteran cadres had retired.^[50] However, more than two million cadres had been recruited in 1950–52. In September 1984 Jiao Shanmin, a deputy head of the Ministry of Labor and Personnel, noted that hundreds and thousands of postrevolutionaries had reached the ages of retirement but were not retiring.^[51] He cited the discrepancy in pensions between veteran cadres and postrevolutionaries as the main problem, stating that pensions for postrevolutionaries were too low and that retirement seriously affected their standard of living. He concluded that the problem was a serious obstacle to rejuvenating the cadre ranks.

Policymakers had fixed pensions for postrevolutionaries at 60 to 75 percent of salary in 1978, and these had not been changed in 1982. The 1982 increase in pensions for veteran cadres had exacerbated the difference between veteran cadres and postrevolutionaries. In addition, beginning in 1982 there was considerable propaganda on veteran cadre retirement, which very likely increased awareness of that difference. Not surprisingly, there was resentment among postrevolutionaries. As one postrevolutionary explained: "We are all working together—then this distinction. Of course, to distinguish between special retirement and regular retirement is not unreasonable. These veteran revolutionaries deserve some special treatment. But why must it be so much? People are upset not with the distinction itself, but with the size of the gap." Postrevolutionary questionnaire respondents too revealed their dissatisfaction with the difference. As is indicated in table 8.4, 71 percent of postrevolutionaries (18 percent of veteran cadres) considered it unreasonable (bu heli ).

Workplaces in the public sector considered here do not themselves finance the retirement of their cadres. Middlemen at the workplace could not take the initiative to actually increase cadre pensions. Most of the

financial burden for retirement is borne by local governments. Throughout 1986 twenty-five provincial governments adopted measures to increase pensions for postrevolutionaries.^[52] The measures adopted, often called temporary regulations, technically did not revise central regulations on retirement. Rather, they provided subsidies or additional maintenance stipends (shenghuo butie ) from provincial budgets for regularly retired cadres.

It is interesting to consider the case of Beijing, a provincial-level municipality and an anomaly in the local revision of cadre retirement policy. The municipal government of Beijing did not issue regulations to increase pensions for regularly retired cadres. Some interview subjects offered as an explanation the view that proximity to the national government meant that Beijing was more likely to act according to official policy. However, middlemen at workplaces in Beijing had their own way of dealing with this issue: they postponed the processing of the retirement of postrevolutionaries, in the expectation that policymakers at the top would soon ratify the informal changes in policy made by virtually all provincial governments. As with other informal deviations, postponement constituted a way of "taking into consideration" (zhaogu ) the interests of targets of the policy. One retired cadre described the situation at the end of 1986 as follows:

[Retirement] has been postponed ... because of the dissatisfaction among cadres about differences in material benefits between special retirement

and regular retirement. Cadres who do not meet the standards for special retirement are dissatisfied about accepting a smaller pension than cadres who do meet these standards. Thee is no question or complaint about veteran cadres deserving the title of veteran revolutionaries and some honorary status, but there is grumbling about their extra material benefits. So the workplace is putting off processing cadre retirement, because there is a sense that the policy will probably change soon, and the workplace wants to show consideration for the cadres who do not meet special retirement standards but are at the age of retirement. New regulations may come out soon. People are waiting.

Policymakers may have unwittingly sanctioned the deviations by middlemen at the workplace and by the provinces. For example, middlemen could view the concern about low pensions for postrevolutionaries that Jiao Shanmin voiced in 1984 as granting legitimacy to the provincial subsidies. Providing a better retirement deal was consistent with a policy guideline to take into account the special needs of veteran cadres, especially in matters of general well-being.^[53] And policy guidelines on the role of veteran cadres in training successors and those on promoting an active postretirement role for veteran cadres seemed to support a continued relation with the workplace after retirement.^[54] The blanket exclusion from promotion of all cadres in their fifties was officially criticized, but guidelines suggested that even those in good health should step down if younger, better-qualified candidates for office were available.^[55] Even providing employment for a son or a daughter was not entirely without a basis in official policy. It was a corruption of the principle of employment substitution (dingti ), which, under certain circumstances, allowed the workplace to hire one son or daughter of a retiring worker. Employment substitution was not applicable to cadres, however.^[56]

Nonetheless, these were, in fact, deviations—not simply permissible interpretations and adaptations of official policy. In September 1983 the Central Committee sharply criticized the extension of employment substi-

tution to cadres and placed stringent restrictions on its application, even among workers.^[57] The stipend increases for postrevolutionaries were treated somewhat differently. They were clearly viewed as a violation and an irregularity, but in the end policymakers took the local government measures as a signal to review the policy. The State Council issued a report in early 1987, pointing out that the subsidies had created a heavy financial burden on the state and that departments were studying the matter to recommend policy revisions. It asked the localities to take into account the financial burden and the adverse effect of the increases on building a cadre retirement system. However, policymakers did not explicitly demand a repeal of the increases.^[58]