CAREER MOBILITY AND THE COMMUNIST POLITICAL ORDER

All ruling communist parties have allocated career opportunities to the loyal in an effort to promote conformity and discipline within their ranks and among their subjects. Yet little is understood about how these political reward mechanisms operate. I offer a model of selective political screening and incorporation, using survey data from urban China to demonstrate the existence of two distinct career paths that lead to a divided elite. One path requires both educational and political credentials and leads to administrative posts with high prestige, considerable authority and clear material privileges; the second path requires educational but not political credentials, and leads to professional positions with high occupational prestige but little authority and fewer material privileges. This division of the elite and the relatively small magnitude of administrators' material privileges reveal some striking vulnerabilities in China's political institutions to the growth of a market economy.