East Asia: Politics, Economy, and Society

This workshop focuses on current social science research on East Asian societies, particularly the People’s Republic of China, Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. The scope of the workshop is truly interdisciplinary, as we attract students and faculty from economics, political science, sociology, international studies, and various other areas. The workshop features presentations by university faculty members, graduate students, and guest speakers working on East Asia at other institutions. Graduate students are especially encouraged to present their thesis and dissertation research.

The Central Committee Past and Present: A Method of Quantifying Elite Biographies1
Victor Shih
Department of Political Science, Northwestern University
Wei Shan
Department of Political Science, Texas A & M University
Mingxing Liu
School of Government Management, Peking University
Abstract
What are the social characteristics and career trajectories of the Chinese political elite? Scholars of Chinese politics have provided many answers to this question for various periods in the CCP’s history. However, few have traced the evolving characteristics of the CCP elite through time. Using official biographies of central committee (CC) members, the authors constructed a quantitative database of every CC members since the First Party Congress which traces the bulk of their careers in so far as details are publicly accessible. After describing the logic, mechanisms, and drawbacks of the database, this paper provides analysis of several demographic trends of CC members from the inception of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 to 2006, including their age and education level. This paper further analyses the representation of People’s Liberation Army officers in the Central Committee since 1949.
1 We would like to thank Yang Bo and Li Qiang, both graduate students in the Peking University, for carefully and accurately coding the data used in this paper. They have both graduated into government service and will soon become subjects of our inquiry! We further thank Nancy Hearst at the Fairbank Center Library for valuable help during the final stage of data correction.
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Since the beginning of contemporary Western studies of China, China scholars have held the belief that knowledge about the attributes of the Chinese political elite leads to insights into their preference and incentive, which in turn allow us to make inferences and predictions about policy and political outcomes. With this belief, scholars of Chinese politics have engaged in elite analysis through investigating the writing of key political elite (Schram 1989; Schwartz 1966), conducting historical research on the actions of particular leaders (Baum 1994; Fewsmith 1994; MacFarquhar and Schoenhals 2006), analyzing the institutions confronting the political elite (Lieberthal and Oksenberg 1988; Nathan 1973; Shirk 1993), as well as systematic analysis of the personal attributes of the political elite (Bo 2002; Li 1994).
This paper and the database which it describes begin on the same foundation. As the Chinese political system remains an authoritarian one where ordinary people can at most influence policies indirectly, there is every reason to believe that elite characteristics have a great impact on policy and political outcomes (Jones and Olken 2005). Furthermore, a long research tradition on the elite in advanced industrialized countries also suggests a prominent role played by the elite(Aberbach, Putnam, and Rockman 1981; Dahl 1961). This tradition has been sustained by more recent work in various social science disciplines. For example, much of the literature on central bank independence and reform takes as given the importance of elite characteristics and interests (Adolph 2003; Chappell, Havrilesky, and McGregor 1993; Schamis 1999; Williamson 1994). Likewise, the literature on East Asian newly industrialized countries hones in on the crucial interaction between senior government officials and business leaders (Evans 1995; Grimes 2001; Johnson 1982; Kang 2002; Woo-Cumings 1991).
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In the tradition of elite analysis, this project focuses on the characteristics of an institutionally defined group of the elite—the central committee (CC) members. Although by no means the universe of the power elite in China, one can reasonably argue that most officials holding important positions are CC members. There are obvious exceptions, for example Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun in the 90s, but even they had been CC members for a long time. Chen Yun to this day holds the record as the longest serving CC member (1930-1987). CC members further wielded real power through controlling specific bureaucracies (i.e. provinces, ministries, military regions….etc.) and through exerting influence on the selection of top leaders in the regime (Shirk 1993). Thus, the Leninist party structure produces a fairly well-defined group of elite that can be systematically analyzed.
Given the importance of Central Committee members, it behooves us to know as much as possible about them. Indeed, various studies already examine the traits of CC members in various periods of time (Bo 2004a; Lee 1991; Li 1994; Li 2001; Nathan and Gilley 2002). While these studies have given us intimate understanding of subsets of the CC elite in various periods, we still lack an overall sense of how members of this elite body have evolved through the 85 years of CCP history. Furthermore, without data on CC members over time, it remains difficult to make causal inferences on how membership characteristics and overall makeup of the CC affected political and policy outcomes and vice versa. This has produced a field of study rich in theory but remarkably lacking in quantitative assessment of how the power elite impacted policy outcomes. To the extent there has been work (Huang 1996; Landry 2002; Shih 2004; Su
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and Yang 2000), they mainly concern a subset of the CC elite, namely the provincial and city leaders.
In the following, we first describe the conceptual underpinnings of a quantitative data-set that tracks the careers of all CC members from the First Party Congress to the Sixteenth Party Congress. We further give an account of how we implemented the coding, the problems we encountered, and the solutions we devised to deal with these problems. In the final section, we provide trends and analysis on the size of the CC, the age make-up of CC members, and the education level of CC members from 1921 to 2006. We further provide analysis on the representation by People’s Liberation Army (PLA) officers in the CC since 1949.