Functional Systems and Coordinating Points

Formal organization charts of the Chinese political system showing the three main bureaucracies, as well as academic studies of the functional systems that cross bureaucratic lines, still tend to leave mysterious the actual working relations among bureaucracies, systems, and units. During the 1980s new information about the details of this leadership system revealed attempts to institutionalize horizontal coordination mechanisms to overcome the inherent tendency of the vertical hierarchies to produce uncoordinated or even conflicting demands and policies. There were informal personal ties and professional communications, of course. But

at least in the mid-1980s there were also "comprehensive coordination points" (zong.kou zi ) and subordinate coordination points (kou ) intended to integrate related functional systems and subsystems so as to create general policies and to effect coordinated policy implementation.^[5]

This coordinating system was referred to as gui kou , that is, administration according to fixed or specified coordination points (kou could be translated more literally as "channels" or "gates"). This xitong and kou system was replicated further down the line, in the provincial and municipal leadership setups.

There was a pyramidal structure to this coordinating system, such that from bottom to top, there were tiers of organs and groups that had an increasingly broad scope of responsibility and weight of authority. Presumably, as a policy problem was kicked up the pyramid because of either urgency or controversy, it was more apt to be considered in a comprehensive, strategic context. The tiers of coordination points might be envisaged as these:

1. Paramount leader (zuigao lingxiu ) with ultimate overall authority, who had the strongest (sometimes sole) influence over divisions of responsibility within the Politburo.

2. Politburo standing committee members plus select elders who were responsible for coordinating all major policy decisions. With the leader, they decided who among them would oversee each of the handful of penultimate policy arenas. They had to answer both to each other and to the paramount leader.

3. Party leading small groups or committees that oversaw each of the main policy sectors (related functional systems). Each was headed by one or two Politburo standing committee members, although the actual work might be coordinated by a deputy head or a secretary-general.

4. Administrative offices or departments (in the Central Committee, State Council, and army) that channeled policy information and recommendations upward and decisions downward to appropriate implementing organs. These usually would be headed by members of the Secretariat, the State Council standing committee, or the Military Commission, and might also be Politburo members.

[5] Editor(s) of the "Current China's Economic Management" Compilation Group, Zhonghua renmin gongheguo jingji guanli dashiji (Chronicle of the Economic Management of the People's Republic of China; hereafter referred to as Chronicle ) (Beijing, China Economics Publishers, 1986), a major source of information for this chapter, used these terms, as have Chinese officials and scholars, but without precise definition of their meaning and usage. Doak Barnett informed me that in the summer of 1988 he was told by Chinese officials that these terms were no longer in use, at least at the State Council level.