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The Makeup of the CCP Elite

96 points by undefined1 6y ago

spamizbad 6y ago
The CCP is terrible but there’s no question intellectually they outclass the United States’ geriatric leadership. Much more STEM too. We love our lawyers and business folk, don’t we?
- bigbubba 6y ago
  I prefer being ruled by incompetent fuckwit lawyers if the alternative is competent genocidal engineers.
  - justicezyx 6y ago
    It's not that Indians were magically disappearing on earth... I don't think your statement is baseless. But you are being emotional and completely dodges the OP's intention: I.e. US leadership have not been as competent in most major domestic areas as Chinese counterpart. BTW: US leadership probably caused more civilian death international than Chinese government's domestic figure. Probably 2-3 orders of magnitude more. Iraq Syria etc. Of course, in the name of spreading democracy and universal human rights. I have no doubt on the sincerity. I just don't think the leadership has the competence to carry out those goals.
    - croissants 6y ago
      > BTW: US leadership probably caused more civilian death international than Chinese government's domestic figure. Probably 2-3 orders of magnitude more. Iraq Syria etc. Going off the conservative estimates, the CCP-led Great Leap Forward killed over 10 million people. 2-3 orders of magnitude more than that is 1-10 billion.
      - justicezyx 6y ago
        I implied to be recent history. Mostly within 20 years. Let's extend to 2 regimes history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas#:~:text=One%20of%20these%20factors%20was,of%20overall%20native%20population%20decline https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indige.... Wow, US and China are among the most evil government in human history! What a surprise... Give me a break, my lad. I am not talking about how morally superior CCP is to US government. Look at the havoc raged by the US leadership. I am fking weeping every night regretting the stupid 12 years I spend at this damn declining country. Cannot we stop the bittering and focus on improving and positive thinking... I never defend CCP in any degree beyond showing the lack of leadership from US. Read my comments, judge for yourself. I don't think a US born person can understand the profound disappointment I am experiencing everyday now. I am comparing US to CCP, that's not what I setup to learn 12 years ago coming to this country...
      - yeetman21 6y ago
        If you want to go back you can count all the natives and slaves killed by the US, going off the conservative estimates the US killed over 100 million people. HOWEVER. The US back then is not the US right now. And the CCP back then is not the CCP right now, so both arguments are quite foolish.
      - WaxProlix 6y ago
        I guess the real question if you want to be scientific-ish about it is, how many more died in the 1959-61 famine than in previous, similar ones? The Chinese region has a rich history of famine going back for thousands of years, so it shouldn't be too hard to do a bit of math. What's interesting is that after this period, there are no more famines (though food scarcity I think is still an issue). So China did something right in its industrialization. Edit to quote from a slate article that was on top of a search: > Over the past 2,000 years, China has suffered almost one famine per year. Severe drought killed as many as 13 million Chinese in the two-year famine beginning in 1876. The 1927 famine killed as many as 6 million. There were significant famines in 1929, 1939, and 1942. from https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/why-does-china-not-have-famines-anymore-capitalist-and-socialist-reforms.html https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/why-does-china-not-have...
  - adultSwim 6y ago
    US has never confronted it's foundations of genocide and slavery
    - deleted 6y ago
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    - chrisco255 6y ago
      Yeah we fought a big war over it 160 years ago. 600,000 people died.
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        Indeed, but even then the US never recognized officially that it perpetrated genocide, and US bills still have the faces of slave holders and slave rapists on them. I guess that for some definitions of confronting that does qualify as "not confronting".
      - oh_sigh 6y ago
        I think it's kinda cute (but mostly sickening) that far left ideologues and far right ideologues can at least come together and agree that the Civil War was not actually about slavery (despite every fact contradicting that view).
        chrisco255 6y ago
        I think the reasons for the elites who initiated the war and the people who actually fought the war were quite different, but that is so often the case in world history.
        sudosysgen 6y ago
        I don't know anyone on the left that thinks that the Civil War wasn't about slavery. That doesn't mean that they think that it wasn't just about slavery - because it wasn't just about slavery, and even less just about the moral issues of slavery. When people say that the US hasn't confronted its legacy of slavery and genocide, they mean things like personality cults of people that owned slaves, institutional racism - that persisted a hundred years after the civil war, not recognizing that there was a genocide of natives, and so on. It's perfectly consistent to say that the Civil War was mainly about slavery (and, of course, also for economic reasons as an extension of that) and to say that the US still hasn't fully confronted its origins of slavery. Also, there is still a lot of people in the US that are sympathetic to the Confederacy, even amongst the government - the Civil War didn't even go all the way.
- HenryKissinger 6y ago
  Shou'en Li's answer to this Quora query[1] is insightful. > In China, if you want to be a leader, you have to start from the grassroots level to accumulate rich government work experiences after ascending nine levels of posts (section chief, deputy division chief, division chief, deputy director of general office, director of general office, vice-minister, minister, deputy-state leader, state leader). With such experiences, you may have the opportunity to become one of the candidates for leadership. [1] https://www.quora.com/How-does-the-Communist-Party-of-China-select-and-groom-a-person-to-be-the-next-paramount-leader https://www.quora.com/How-does-the-Communist-Party-of-China-...
  - oh_sigh 6y ago
    That sounds like the system's ideal - but is that how most people become, say, deputy state leaders? Or can you pay your way in, advance through nepotism, or blackmailing, or mutual corruption, etc?
    - eunos 6y ago
      One reason why Chinese bureaucrats are constantly rotated and not allowed to serve in their homeland is to prevent those.
- itsthetruth 6y ago
  2 social credits have been added to your account
- bassman9000 6y ago
  How is it a good thing to have more efficient dictators?
  - burnte 6y ago
    China isn't ignoring climate change, understands geopolitics, learns from it's mistakes, etc. The US is falling behind in all of those areas.
    - ghostcluster 6y ago
      China isn't ignoring climate change in their rhetoric. What they are actually doing is building record amounts of coal power plants, right now, this year. https://www.wired.com/story/china-is-still-building-an-insane-number-of-new-coal-plants/ https://www.wired.com/story/china-is-still-building-an-insan... The US' greenhouse emissions peaked years ago and have been in steady decline. China is the #1 emitter, #1 coal consumer, and building record amounts of new coal domestically. And not just in China, but all over the developing world through their Belt and Road program.
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        This is true, however these plants are being used quite rarely and are instead base load. Chinese emissions per capita and per dollar are falling, and total emissions seem to have plateaued, so I'm not sure that really qualifies as ignoring it. Same in the developing world, while some kinds of fossil fuels for baseload generation is necessary so long as nuclear is taboo, they are on track to never even get close to the level of emissions per capita of the US, and indeed plateau in total emissions soon. Of course, you can make the argument that this isn't enough. That being said, for places stricken by poverty, it's certainly a hell of a lot more effort than the US that doesn't even deign join the Paris Climate Agreements.
        pueblito 6y ago
        > This is true, however these plants are being used quite rarely Hence the need for more of them at record pace? Ridiculous
- mkj 6y ago
  Where's the mention of more STEM? (I was hoping it might have some details, but can't see it)
- deleted 6y ago
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- dnautics 6y ago
  Let's not forget that Wilson was a Princeton Professor and Hoover was an engineer. (Wilson appointed KKK members to his cabinet, screened a white supremacist film in the white house, invaded and occupied the soviet union for two years; hoover treated society as a machine that he would "tweak the knobs to try to optimize" - we all know how that turned out) And Coolidge, a lawyer, was arguably the "least bad" president of the 20th c (didn't invade any countries, re-desegreated the federal workforce).
  - c1ccccc1 6y ago
    Just to clarify for those reading this, Wilson studied political science and history, and went to law school. He wasn't a "STEM" professor.
    - dnautics 6y ago
      Parent comment had three parts. First part was about intelligence in general, second part drew attention to stem in particular, third part was about lawyers and businessmen. I structured my response with deliberate parallelism.
HenryKissinger 6y ago
> Among the 19th CC elite, there are only 19 Tsinghua undergraduates and 37 Peking University undergraduates out of 1021 elite. The other top grantors of undergraduate degrees to the Chinese elite include Renmin University, Nanjing University, the Central Party School, and the National Defense University. The majority of the CCP elite graduated from one of the over one hundred lesser known universities in China. Although in recent years, many have pursued graduate degrees, fewer than one hundred have obtained their master degrees from Peking U, Tsinghua, or Renmin, whereas 132 of the elite obtained master degrees from the Central Party School. Even among the elite born after 1962, only a small share obtained bachelors or masters from Peking, Tsinghua, or Renmin. That's surprising, given the geographic concentration of the birth place of CCP elites outlined later in the article. What does this tell us about upward mobility and meritocracy within the CCP?
- nickff 6y ago
  Well, looking at it from a game-theory perspective: It might just mean that you have to be #1 in your local communist party to move up to the regional one, and you have to be #1 in the regional one to move up to the national one. Your chances of qualifying for each round up are inversely proportional to the number of people you're competing against, and their abilities. In such a system, you're better off going to (or staying in) a more remote city in a more remote province, as the competition will be weaker, and your absolute ability is irrelevant. If this view is correct, you'd expect that the assembly would be representative of a broad spectrum of regions, but that the upper rungs of leadership would be occupied by individuals from the most populous and richest areas. This appears to be the case (from what I understand).
  - wavefunction 6y ago
    I am not exactly well-versed in Chinese culture but it seems like locals would have an advantage over carpet-baggers given my paltry understanding of guanxi.
    - hawkice 6y ago
      It's worth considering the ancient history of viewing all central governments (including all the Emperors) as essentially being carpet baggers you can ignore if you're physically far enough away from them. So, this is the carpet-bagging elite.
woah 6y ago
Interesting that their map seems to include Taiwan, although it is marked "NA", and no representatives come from there
- Supermancho 6y ago
  The US tells the world that it subscribes to a 1-China policy (taiwan and others are recognized as part of China in theory) but militarily defends it as an ally against China. Taiwan does not participate in the CCP directly.
  - gurkendoktor 6y ago
    The US only ambiguously "acknowledges" the One China Policy.
- powerapple 6y ago
  That's strange actually. They do have 13 representatives from Taiwan. And many times people (mostly public figures, such as actor Jacky Chong) from Macau and Hong Kong register as representatives in their origin (where their parents or grand parents from) rather than representatives from Hong Kong or Macau. Edit: I was talking about people's representatives, not CCP representatives. If it is about CCP representatives, communist party is illegal in Taiwan.
arbuge 6y ago
> Among this powerful elite which include all Central Committee members and provincial standing committee members, the share of women has gone up from a dismal 7.6% to a still-dismal 8.4% from the 18th CC to the 19th CC. Among the post-62 cohort active in the 19th CC, only 11% of the elite are women. To be sure, as more cadres in the post-62 cohort enter the vice-provincial elite, the share of women may rise, but it would be surprising if this cohort had more than 15% of women in the end, which, again, is still dismal. The small share of women among the more promising members of the post-62 cohort suggests that the gender pattern in the CCP elite will continue with the dismal status quo of one female Politburo member at each congress, along with two to four full Central Committee members and a handful of alternate members. This status quo may well persist until the 22th Party Congress in 2032, based on current trajectories. I count four "dismals" :-)
- mdorazio 6y ago
  Worth noting is our own rather poor showing in elite politics in the US. Around 25% women in congress. And if you look at only Republicans it's under 9%. Yes, you read that correctly.
  - peteretep 6y ago
    Something I’ve noticed about UK conservatism — and maybe it’s true for the US too — is that women and minorities are much better represented at the very top than at the MP/Congress level. The Tories have 25% female MPs, but are also responsible for both female PMs. Half of the Great Offices of State in the UK are currently occupied by minorities. And if you look at the historic willingness of the Tories to run ethnic and female candidates for very important roles, it’s considerably better than Labour: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Offices_of_State https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Offices_of_State I guess all I’m saying is that it’s worth factoring in proximity to power rather than just raw numbers
    - pasabagi 6y ago
      There's a simple logic to this. The center is left of the conservatives, so a woman or minority candidate allows them to capture swing voters. Racists and sexists will probably vote for them anyway. It's why Angela Merkel is such an effective politician. She essentially monopolizes the right, while being able to take positions that the right wing hate (e.g. on the refugee crisis), knowing they won't stop voting for her.
nyolfen 6y ago
https://sci-hub.do/10.1017/S0305741000045495 https://sci-hub.do/10.1017/S0305741000045495 > The Hakka are an impoverished and stigmatized subgroup of Han Chinese whose settlements are scattered from Jiangxi to Sichuan. Socialist revolution meshed well with the Hakka tradition of militant dissent, so that their 3 per cent of the mainland population has been three times more likely than other Han to hold high position. Six of the nine Soviet guerrilla bases were in Hakka territory, while the route of the Long March moved from Hakka village to Hakka village.(Compare Maps 1, 2, 3 and 4.)1 In 1984, half the Standing Committee of the Politburo were Hakka, and the People's Republic and Singapore both had Hakka leaders, Deng Xiaoping and Lee Kwan Yew, joined by Taiwan's President Lee Teng-Hui in 1988. > Hakka political history remains almost entirely undiscussed, and Chinese sources virtually never use the word "Hakka," but a vital subset of political alliances appears as soon as Hakka networks are decoded. Hakka solidarity also illuminates how a small sub-ethnic group can gain significance when it meets an historic opportunity. In the early 20th century Hakka poverty made land reform worth fighting for at precisely the moment when socialist organizers desperately needed the traditional Hakka strengths: mobility, military prowess, strong women and a strategically-useful common language.
- deleted 6y ago
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- balsam 6y ago
  Anyone knows if Xi Jingping is hakka? Your article (1992) is from before his rise but the following link from later on, 1999-2002, when he was governor of Fujian province (where historically part/most of the hakka holdings were) seems to imply he is. http://www.china.org.cn/english/4344.htm http://www.china.org.cn/english/4344.htm
  - rfoo 6y ago
    No. Xi was born in Beijing, with his father and grandparents living in Fuping County, Shaanxi before joining CCP. And they are migrants from Henan.
itsthetruth 6y ago
insect people
tomohawk 6y ago
> liberated by CCP forces Ah, is that what they call the invasion and take over of Tibet, East Turkistan, and other areas?
- wffurr 6y ago
  I think they are referring to the other more central, heavily populated yet underrepresented areas of China that were held by the Kuomintang before their flight to Taiwan.
eshack94 6y ago
Where does this dataset come from?
- nineplay 6y ago
  > Shih, Victor, Jonghyuk Lee, and David Meyer. 2015. “The Database of CCP Elite.” San Diego: Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation
  - deleted 6y ago
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throwaway69123 6y ago
I wonder what will happen to the politcal climate of China when the old guard age out.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
  The way I see it this form of government is no different than any other Chinese dynasty before it. Qi, Tang, Ming, Wing, you name it. They were always large, dynastic/monarchical, emphasis on military, kowtow, heavens mandate post confucianism, and unchanging until an internal coup or massive peasant revolt. The CCP is no different. The only thing that would make me think they are is if they'd be willing to launch a nuke at their own people to prevent a revolution.
timwaagh 6y ago
So basically what it says is Xi is a non-traditional leader who hands all the positions to his friends and would rather let the leadership grow old and senile than promote a competent person, because old friends are not a threat.
- inquirerofsorts 6y ago
  > would rather let the leadership grow old and senile than promote a competent person Sounds a tad familiar? The US just elected the oldest President ever, who has spent decades in government. Honestly confused by Americans pretending they have anything that different to what the Chinese do. Bushes, Clintons, it's like you've all harked back to royal lines while pretending it's something else. It's truly terrifying that democracies are electing older and older people across the board, they simply aren't capable of doing the job, everyone I know over 60 has highly diminished mental capacities and if not retired they should be relegated to menial tasks. I know it's a harsh thing to say and I'm truly sorry to people of said demographic reading this stuff but it's a cold hard fact easily backed up by decades of science. Elderly people are the most dangerous politicians on the planet.
  - alavesto 6y ago
    +1. Biden and Trump both sounded so much more intelligent in their younger days; I don't understand why we insist on only allowing people to lead our country when they're at their worst. And despite billing himself as the alternate to the dynastical system, Trump quickly used the presidency as a vehicle for advancing his family's careers. Biden did the exact same thing as vice president - you can tell me what Hunter Biden did was "legal" till the cows come home, he obviously profited immensely from foreign business opportunities that existed solely because his dad was VP. It's a problem that so-called liberal people love claiming that a scandal has been "debunked" because it was, in fact, legal to engage in extreme corruption. Do we really accept that this system is legitimate, much less superior to those horrible Russians and Chinese? As if they don't call their corruption legal, too?
    - DangitBobby 6y ago

96 points by undefined1 6y ago

The CCP is terrible but there’s no question intellectually they outclass the United States’ geriatric leadership. Much more STEM too. We love our lawyers and business folk, don’t we?

bigbubba 6y ago
I prefer being ruled by incompetent fuckwit lawyers if the alternative is competent genocidal engineers.
- justicezyx 6y ago
  It's not that Indians were magically disappearing on earth... I don't think your statement is baseless. But you are being emotional and completely dodges the OP's intention: I.e. US leadership have not been as competent in most major domestic areas as Chinese counterpart. BTW: US leadership probably caused more civilian death international than Chinese government's domestic figure. Probably 2-3 orders of magnitude more. Iraq Syria etc. Of course, in the name of spreading democracy and universal human rights. I have no doubt on the sincerity. I just don't think the leadership has the competence to carry out those goals.
  - croissants 6y ago
    > BTW: US leadership probably caused more civilian death international than Chinese government's domestic figure. Probably 2-3 orders of magnitude more. Iraq Syria etc. Going off the conservative estimates, the CCP-led Great Leap Forward killed over 10 million people. 2-3 orders of magnitude more than that is 1-10 billion.
    - justicezyx 6y ago
      I implied to be recent history. Mostly within 20 years. Let's extend to 2 regimes history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas#:~:text=One%20of%20these%20factors%20was,of%20overall%20native%20population%20decline https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indige.... Wow, US and China are among the most evil government in human history! What a surprise... Give me a break, my lad. I am not talking about how morally superior CCP is to US government. Look at the havoc raged by the US leadership. I am fking weeping every night regretting the stupid 12 years I spend at this damn declining country. Cannot we stop the bittering and focus on improving and positive thinking... I never defend CCP in any degree beyond showing the lack of leadership from US. Read my comments, judge for yourself. I don't think a US born person can understand the profound disappointment I am experiencing everyday now. I am comparing US to CCP, that's not what I setup to learn 12 years ago coming to this country...
    - yeetman21 6y ago
      If you want to go back you can count all the natives and slaves killed by the US, going off the conservative estimates the US killed over 100 million people. HOWEVER. The US back then is not the US right now. And the CCP back then is not the CCP right now, so both arguments are quite foolish.
    - WaxProlix 6y ago
      I guess the real question if you want to be scientific-ish about it is, how many more died in the 1959-61 famine than in previous, similar ones? The Chinese region has a rich history of famine going back for thousands of years, so it shouldn't be too hard to do a bit of math. What's interesting is that after this period, there are no more famines (though food scarcity I think is still an issue). So China did something right in its industrialization. Edit to quote from a slate article that was on top of a search: > Over the past 2,000 years, China has suffered almost one famine per year. Severe drought killed as many as 13 million Chinese in the two-year famine beginning in 1876. The 1927 famine killed as many as 6 million. There were significant famines in 1929, 1939, and 1942. from https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/why-does-china-not-have-famines-anymore-capitalist-and-socialist-reforms.html https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/why-does-china-not-have...
- adultSwim 6y ago
  US has never confronted it's foundations of genocide and slavery
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - chrisco255 6y ago
    Yeah we fought a big war over it 160 years ago. 600,000 people died.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      Indeed, but even then the US never recognized officially that it perpetrated genocide, and US bills still have the faces of slave holders and slave rapists on them. I guess that for some definitions of confronting that does qualify as "not confronting".
    - oh_sigh 6y ago
      I think it's kinda cute (but mostly sickening) that far left ideologues and far right ideologues can at least come together and agree that the Civil War was not actually about slavery (despite every fact contradicting that view).
      - chrisco255 6y ago
        I think the reasons for the elites who initiated the war and the people who actually fought the war were quite different, but that is so often the case in world history.
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        I don't know anyone on the left that thinks that the Civil War wasn't about slavery. That doesn't mean that they think that it wasn't just about slavery - because it wasn't just about slavery, and even less just about the moral issues of slavery. When people say that the US hasn't confronted its legacy of slavery and genocide, they mean things like personality cults of people that owned slaves, institutional racism - that persisted a hundred years after the civil war, not recognizing that there was a genocide of natives, and so on. It's perfectly consistent to say that the Civil War was mainly about slavery (and, of course, also for economic reasons as an extension of that) and to say that the US still hasn't fully confronted its origins of slavery. Also, there is still a lot of people in the US that are sympathetic to the Confederacy, even amongst the government - the Civil War didn't even go all the way.
HenryKissinger 6y ago
Shou'en Li's answer to this Quora query[1] is insightful. > In China, if you want to be a leader, you have to start from the grassroots level to accumulate rich government work experiences after ascending nine levels of posts (section chief, deputy division chief, division chief, deputy director of general office, director of general office, vice-minister, minister, deputy-state leader, state leader). With such experiences, you may have the opportunity to become one of the candidates for leadership. [1] https://www.quora.com/How-does-the-Communist-Party-of-China-select-and-groom-a-person-to-be-the-next-paramount-leader https://www.quora.com/How-does-the-Communist-Party-of-China-...
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  That sounds like the system's ideal - but is that how most people become, say, deputy state leaders? Or can you pay your way in, advance through nepotism, or blackmailing, or mutual corruption, etc?
  - eunos 6y ago
    One reason why Chinese bureaucrats are constantly rotated and not allowed to serve in their homeland is to prevent those.
itsthetruth 6y ago
2 social credits have been added to your account
bassman9000 6y ago
How is it a good thing to have more efficient dictators?
- burnte 6y ago
  China isn't ignoring climate change, understands geopolitics, learns from it's mistakes, etc. The US is falling behind in all of those areas.
  - ghostcluster 6y ago
    China isn't ignoring climate change in their rhetoric. What they are actually doing is building record amounts of coal power plants, right now, this year. https://www.wired.com/story/china-is-still-building-an-insane-number-of-new-coal-plants/ https://www.wired.com/story/china-is-still-building-an-insan... The US' greenhouse emissions peaked years ago and have been in steady decline. China is the #1 emitter, #1 coal consumer, and building record amounts of new coal domestically. And not just in China, but all over the developing world through their Belt and Road program.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      This is true, however these plants are being used quite rarely and are instead base load. Chinese emissions per capita and per dollar are falling, and total emissions seem to have plateaued, so I'm not sure that really qualifies as ignoring it. Same in the developing world, while some kinds of fossil fuels for baseload generation is necessary so long as nuclear is taboo, they are on track to never even get close to the level of emissions per capita of the US, and indeed plateau in total emissions soon. Of course, you can make the argument that this isn't enough. That being said, for places stricken by poverty, it's certainly a hell of a lot more effort than the US that doesn't even deign join the Paris Climate Agreements.
      - pueblito 6y ago
        > This is true, however these plants are being used quite rarely Hence the need for more of them at record pace? Ridiculous
mkj 6y ago
Where's the mention of more STEM? (I was hoping it might have some details, but can't see it)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dnautics 6y ago
Let's not forget that Wilson was a Princeton Professor and Hoover was an engineer. (Wilson appointed KKK members to his cabinet, screened a white supremacist film in the white house, invaded and occupied the soviet union for two years; hoover treated society as a machine that he would "tweak the knobs to try to optimize" - we all know how that turned out) And Coolidge, a lawyer, was arguably the "least bad" president of the 20th c (didn't invade any countries, re-desegreated the federal workforce).
- c1ccccc1 6y ago
  Just to clarify for those reading this, Wilson studied political science and history, and went to law school. He wasn't a "STEM" professor.
  - dnautics 6y ago
    Parent comment had three parts. First part was about intelligence in general, second part drew attention to stem in particular, third part was about lawyers and businessmen. I structured my response with deliberate parallelism.

HenryKissinger 6y ago

> Among the 19th CC elite, there are only 19 Tsinghua undergraduates and 37 Peking University undergraduates out of 1021 elite. The other top grantors of undergraduate degrees to the Chinese elite include Renmin University, Nanjing University, the Central Party School, and the National Defense University. The majority of the CCP elite graduated from one of the over one hundred lesser known universities in China. Although in recent years, many have pursued graduate degrees, fewer than one hundred have obtained their master degrees from Peking U, Tsinghua, or Renmin, whereas 132 of the elite obtained master degrees from the Central Party School. Even among the elite born after 1962, only a small share obtained bachelors or masters from Peking, Tsinghua, or Renmin. That's surprising, given the geographic concentration of the birth place of CCP elites outlined later in the article. What does this tell us about upward mobility and meritocracy within the CCP?

nickff 6y ago
Well, looking at it from a game-theory perspective: It might just mean that you have to be #1 in your local communist party to move up to the regional one, and you have to be #1 in the regional one to move up to the national one. Your chances of qualifying for each round up are inversely proportional to the number of people you're competing against, and their abilities. In such a system, you're better off going to (or staying in) a more remote city in a more remote province, as the competition will be weaker, and your absolute ability is irrelevant. If this view is correct, you'd expect that the assembly would be representative of a broad spectrum of regions, but that the upper rungs of leadership would be occupied by individuals from the most populous and richest areas. This appears to be the case (from what I understand).
- wavefunction 6y ago
  I am not exactly well-versed in Chinese culture but it seems like locals would have an advantage over carpet-baggers given my paltry understanding of guanxi.
  - hawkice 6y ago
    It's worth considering the ancient history of viewing all central governments (including all the Emperors) as essentially being carpet baggers you can ignore if you're physically far enough away from them. So, this is the carpet-bagging elite.

woah 6y ago

Interesting that their map seems to include Taiwan, although it is marked "NA", and no representatives come from there

Supermancho 6y ago
The US tells the world that it subscribes to a 1-China policy (taiwan and others are recognized as part of China in theory) but militarily defends it as an ally against China. Taiwan does not participate in the CCP directly.
- gurkendoktor 6y ago
  The US only ambiguously "acknowledges" the One China Policy.
powerapple 6y ago
That's strange actually. They do have 13 representatives from Taiwan. And many times people (mostly public figures, such as actor Jacky Chong) from Macau and Hong Kong register as representatives in their origin (where their parents or grand parents from) rather than representatives from Hong Kong or Macau. Edit: I was talking about people's representatives, not CCP representatives. If it is about CCP representatives, communist party is illegal in Taiwan.

arbuge 6y ago

> Among this powerful elite which include all Central Committee members and provincial standing committee members, the share of women has gone up from a dismal 7.6% to a still-dismal 8.4% from the 18th CC to the 19th CC. Among the post-62 cohort active in the 19th CC, only 11% of the elite are women. To be sure, as more cadres in the post-62 cohort enter the vice-provincial elite, the share of women may rise, but it would be surprising if this cohort had more than 15% of women in the end, which, again, is still dismal. The small share of women among the more promising members of the post-62 cohort suggests that the gender pattern in the CCP elite will continue with the dismal status quo of one female Politburo member at each congress, along with two to four full Central Committee members and a handful of alternate members. This status quo may well persist until the 22th Party Congress in 2032, based on current trajectories. I count four "dismals" :-)

mdorazio 6y ago
Worth noting is our own rather poor showing in elite politics in the US. Around 25% women in congress. And if you look at only Republicans it's under 9%. Yes, you read that correctly.
- peteretep 6y ago
  Something I’ve noticed about UK conservatism — and maybe it’s true for the US too — is that women and minorities are much better represented at the very top than at the MP/Congress level. The Tories have 25% female MPs, but are also responsible for both female PMs. Half of the Great Offices of State in the UK are currently occupied by minorities. And if you look at the historic willingness of the Tories to run ethnic and female candidates for very important roles, it’s considerably better than Labour: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Offices_of_State https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Offices_of_State I guess all I’m saying is that it’s worth factoring in proximity to power rather than just raw numbers
  - pasabagi 6y ago
    There's a simple logic to this. The center is left of the conservatives, so a woman or minority candidate allows them to capture swing voters. Racists and sexists will probably vote for them anyway. It's why Angela Merkel is such an effective politician. She essentially monopolizes the right, while being able to take positions that the right wing hate (e.g. on the refugee crisis), knowing they won't stop voting for her.

nyolfen 6y ago

https://sci-hub.do/10.1017/S0305741000045495 https://sci-hub.do/10.1017/S0305741000045495 > The Hakka are an impoverished and stigmatized subgroup of Han Chinese whose settlements are scattered from Jiangxi to Sichuan. Socialist revolution meshed well with the Hakka tradition of militant dissent, so that their 3 per cent of the mainland population has been three times more likely than other Han to hold high position. Six of the nine Soviet guerrilla bases were in Hakka territory, while the route of the Long March moved from Hakka village to Hakka village.(Compare Maps 1, 2, 3 and 4.)1 In 1984, half the Standing Committee of the Politburo were Hakka, and the People's Republic and Singapore both had Hakka leaders, Deng Xiaoping and Lee Kwan Yew, joined by Taiwan's President Lee Teng-Hui in 1988. > Hakka political history remains almost entirely undiscussed, and Chinese sources virtually never use the word "Hakka," but a vital subset of political alliances appears as soon as Hakka networks are decoded. Hakka solidarity also illuminates how a small sub-ethnic group can gain significance when it meets an historic opportunity. In the early 20th century Hakka poverty made land reform worth fighting for at precisely the moment when socialist organizers desperately needed the traditional Hakka strengths: mobility, military prowess, strong women and a strategically-useful common language.

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balsam 6y ago
Anyone knows if Xi Jingping is hakka? Your article (1992) is from before his rise but the following link from later on, 1999-2002, when he was governor of Fujian province (where historically part/most of the hakka holdings were) seems to imply he is. http://www.china.org.cn/english/4344.htm http://www.china.org.cn/english/4344.htm
- rfoo 6y ago
  No. Xi was born in Beijing, with his father and grandparents living in Fuping County, Shaanxi before joining CCP. And they are migrants from Henan.

itsthetruth 6y ago

insect people

tomohawk 6y ago

> liberated by CCP forces Ah, is that what they call the invasion and take over of Tibet, East Turkistan, and other areas?

wffurr 6y ago
I think they are referring to the other more central, heavily populated yet underrepresented areas of China that were held by the Kuomintang before their flight to Taiwan.

eshack94 6y ago

Where does this dataset come from?

nineplay 6y ago
> Shih, Victor, Jonghyuk Lee, and David Meyer. 2015. “The Database of CCP Elite.” San Diego: Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

throwaway69123 6y ago

I wonder what will happen to the politcal climate of China when the old guard age out.

MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
The way I see it this form of government is no different than any other Chinese dynasty before it. Qi, Tang, Ming, Wing, you name it. They were always large, dynastic/monarchical, emphasis on military, kowtow, heavens mandate post confucianism, and unchanging until an internal coup or massive peasant revolt. The CCP is no different. The only thing that would make me think they are is if they'd be willing to launch a nuke at their own people to prevent a revolution.

timwaagh 6y ago

So basically what it says is Xi is a non-traditional leader who hands all the positions to his friends and would rather let the leadership grow old and senile than promote a competent person, because old friends are not a threat.

inquirerofsorts 6y ago
> would rather let the leadership grow old and senile than promote a competent person Sounds a tad familiar? The US just elected the oldest President ever, who has spent decades in government. Honestly confused by Americans pretending they have anything that different to what the Chinese do. Bushes, Clintons, it's like you've all harked back to royal lines while pretending it's something else. It's truly terrifying that democracies are electing older and older people across the board, they simply aren't capable of doing the job, everyone I know over 60 has highly diminished mental capacities and if not retired they should be relegated to menial tasks. I know it's a harsh thing to say and I'm truly sorry to people of said demographic reading this stuff but it's a cold hard fact easily backed up by decades of science. Elderly people are the most dangerous politicians on the planet.
- alavesto 6y ago
  +1. Biden and Trump both sounded so much more intelligent in their younger days; I don't understand why we insist on only allowing people to lead our country when they're at their worst. And despite billing himself as the alternate to the dynastical system, Trump quickly used the presidency as a vehicle for advancing his family's careers. Biden did the exact same thing as vice president - you can tell me what Hunter Biden did was "legal" till the cows come home, he obviously profited immensely from foreign business opportunities that existed solely because his dad was VP. It's a problem that so-called liberal people love claiming that a scandal has been "debunked" because it was, in fact, legal to engage in extreme corruption. Do we really accept that this system is legitimate, much less superior to those horrible Russians and Chinese? As if they don't call their corruption legal, too?
  - DangitBobby 6y ago