Conclusion

For a number of reasons, cadre retirement policy was a policy without action implications in 1978–81. Policymakers gave middlemen conflicting signals, reflecting a lack of consensus at the top. Party and government organizations issued documents with different nuances, and the lack of clear Party support for a policy in a Party-dominated issue area was especially important. Also, middlemen were given another policy to execute, the goals of which conflicted with cadre retirement policy. And policymakers did not constrain middlemen to retire cadres with an objective criterion, such as mandatory retirement at specified ages.

In 1982 middlemen took action to retire cadres. A number of factors explain this. Policymakers signaled agreement at the top and, in particular, Party support of retirement. They eliminated conflicting policy demands on middlemen and introduced mutually reinforcing demands by starting up two campaigns, in which cadre retirement was virtually a prerequisite for success. And they constrained middlemen to retire cadres by making retirement at specified ages the general rule. Policymakers also made the policy easier to execute, by increasing incentives for a large proportion of older cadres to retire.

However, in executing policy middlemen took the interests of potential retirees into consideration. They increased incentives to retire—even when doing so deviated from policy. Thus middlemen proved unwilling or unable to enforce policy. Instead, they induced compliance by making retirement more attractive.

The evidence presented points toward a number of conclusions about the choices middlemen make after policymakers formulate policy. These can be simply summarized as choices about taking risks, justifying actions, and using resources. When there is a lack of consensus among policymakers, what middlemen do or do not do is a choice that reflects a stand—and potential political risk. Further, middlemen are in positions of responsibility toward policymakers and of authority over ultimate targets of a policy. This means they must justify their actions to both, with reference to policy. Finally, middlemen have a number of tasks in their issue area at any given time. Anything they do consumes limited resources (such as personnel), and when they face contradictory demands they must choose to use resources on one task or another. Because of these choices they make, middlemen are more likely to execute policy or execute it successfully to the degree that policymakers reduce their risks, constrain their actions, and coordinate demands on them.

However, this does not appear to be enough to ensure successful execution of policy. Middlemen need an attractive policy to execute. Ultimate targets of the policy seem to be, not passive policy takers, but discriminating consumers. Middlemen will find ways to make an unattractive policy attractive, even if this means deviating from official policy. The nature of their deviations is inhibited and shaped by both policy content and the formal structure of authority. The degree of latitude for interpretation in policy and the kinds of actions that appear to be sanctioned by policy affect how middlemen make policy more attractive. And middlemen are limited by their formal authority: thus middlemen in one issue area cannot take authoritative actions that span different areas, but local governments can take such actions.

What does this imply about the actual consequences of the formal structure of bureaucratic authority in the policy process? To begin with, the formal structure is meaningful in a couple of ways. First, the distinction between Party and government organizations has action implications in the policy process. When conflicting signals are issued by policy-makers at the top, middlemen weigh those signals differently. In the extraordinarily Party-dominated issue area of cadre management, Party signals were taken as the meaningful guidelines for action. Second, the officially defined span of authority over issue areas channels how policy is implemented. The ways middlemen deviated from formulated policy were constrained by whether their formal authority was limited to one issue area or extended to many.

In short, formal authority relations matter. But much of the behavior of middlemen cannot be explained with reference to those relations. In particular, the nature of deviations in the course of policy implementation reveals an informal structure of constraints and incentives at the

grass roots. Middlemen proved clearly unwilling or unable to implement what was considered by older cadres to be an unattractive policy. Thus middlemen are keenly responsive to interests of policy targets who have little or no place on charts delineating official authority relations in the policy process. That responsiveness, not represented in the formal organizational design, has a real impact on how policies are transformed into actions.

The actual scope of these generalizations is essentially an empirical matter. However, there are a few features of this case that may restrict its generalizability to other policies. In particular, the tendency of middlemen to provide additional incentives to potential retirees may be quite atypical. Cadre retirement is an unusual policy because of the lack of legitimate precedent for it, the relative absence of risk for targets of the policy in resisting it, and the special resources possessed by these potential retirees.

First, cadre retirement lacked a supportive legacy on which to build. Indeed, Chinese Communist experience attached stigma to exit from office: movement in and out of official position has typically been the result of natural death, political error, or consolidation of personal power from the top. Cadre retirement policy was a new attempt to change a de facto lifelong tenure system that had been in place since the 1950s. This system not only had the legitimacy of habit, but also had been explicitly legitimated as an entitlement of revolutionaries for their role in the Communist rise to power. The notion of cadre, then, was not one of bureaucratic career, but rather one of revolutionary calling. Retirement represented a reinterpretation of what it meant to be a cadre.

In these circumstances, the interests of potential retirees, especially veteran cadres, could not easily be dismissed as illegitimate. Both the magnitude of the change involved and the policy's lack of legitimate precedent were probably influences on the policy process, making it more likely that middlemen would take the interests of potential retirees into consideration. An example of a comparable kind of policy in the same issue area is the elimination of job security for workers and cadres.

Second, and somewhat paradoxically, older cadres could resist retirement and press for an increase in pensions and benefits without major risk. The organization-personnel system is important precisely because it is the system through which the Party controls life chances. Cadre retirement is an atypical problem in this issue area because, to a considerable degree, retirement involves an exit from this system of control. Potential retirees had less to lose in resisting retirement policy, because the outcome was a career end point in any case.

Finally and relatedly, older cadres could draw on resources that targets of other policies might not be expected to possess. This was espe-

cially true of veteran cadres. Most potential retirees were not leaders and, therefore, did not have a lot of power in the usual sense. However, they had years of Party membership, tenure in office, work experience, and networks of contacts. Veteran cadres restored to office also had prestige, because they were associated with the Party's greatest achievement to date—gaining power. As well, they were often victims of the Cultural Revolution and untainted by the policies of that repudiated period. They were symbols of the Party's better face, at a time when the Party was facing a crisis of faith. Given this situation, middlemen could ill afford to provoke the resistance of potential retirees. They could be expected to adopt a less authoritarian and more concessionary style of executing policy.