Career Advancement as Party Patronage: Sponsored Mobility into the Chinese Administrative Elite, 1949–1996

Abstract

Core features of mobility regimes are obscured by models common in comparative research. Party patronage in China is apparent only in the timing of career events. Elites are chosen from among party members, but only some are eventually chosen. Those who join the party while young enter a career path that includes sponsorship for adult education and more likely promotion. While the party’s preference for youth from “red ” classes has yielded to one for prior education, party sponsorship endures. Because patronage blurs distinctions between politics and merit, it confounds interpretations of returns to individual attributes. Although interest in the subject has surged following recent changes in the world, research on stratification and mobility in communist states has a long history. Most of our attention is now trained on the consequences of these distinctive economic institutions and their recent transformations, but the role of political institutions—in particular, ruling communist parties—is a subject of equally vital importance. Despite decades of comparative mobility studies based on survey data from these regimes, analysis of the role of politics in career processes is still in its infancy. This is 1