The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the 21st century is anything but a decaying institution presiding over an outdated political system. The economic success of the reform policies has given the Party the credibility and, equally importantly, the revenue base for an ambitious programme of state building. Yet, as will be shown in this article, the opportunities of this programme are not distributed evenly across China. Especially since the 16th Party Congress in 2002, the CCP leadership has strengthened central institutions, spending more money and centralizing control over policy making and implementation, in addition to its longer-standing application of market principles in reforming the economy, society and the state. Cadre training is no exception. Cadre training was given much more prominence and priority from the early 1990s, yet much of what was done then simply amounted to more of the same. It was better funded, much more professional, broader in scope, emphasized both ideology and skills training, and catered for a much larger constituency of leading and ordinary cadres than ever before, but the basic philosophy behind it had not changed from the early days when the Party was still a revolutionary organization. The cat might have become a lot fatter, but it did not necessarily catch more mice.

Since the start of the 21st century, the Party has embarked on a fundamentally different approach that has brought the principles of centralization, marketization and globalization to the policy area of cadre training. This article describes and analyses this shift using a combination of documentary research and about 100 interviews and in-depth anthropological fieldwork at Party schools and other institutions for cadre training in Yunnan province and Beijing between 2004 and 2007. I will show that the shift to marketization, centralization and globalization has had implications for cadre training and cadre management – and more broadly for local government – that are similar to those of other areas of administrative reform. However, unlike for instance state-owned enterprises or public services, the new reforms of cadre training bring global forces and market principles right at the core of Leninist governance, potentially changing the Party's relationship with its leading cadres and thus, by implication, ultimately with the state and society as a whole.

Cadre Training in the Reform Era: the Development of a Policy Area

Traditionally, Party schools have been the primary institutions for training the CCP's leading cadre corps. The main objective of training is to ensure cadres' “correct” understanding of the Party's ideology and strategy and their loyalty to the Party centre and the Party line. Formal study and training is therefore where ideology and organization in Leninist parties meet, and is at the very core of the CCP's tradition of governance. Nevertheless, in the early years the training of Party leaders generally did not take place in formal institutions. Only in the early 1930s, when the Party was fully thrown back on its own organizational and mobilizational resources, was a network of schools set up, including, in 1933, the Ruijin Marxist Communist School (Makesi gongchanzhuyi xuexiao), the first real precursor of the future Central Party School established after the Long March in Yan'an.Footnote ¹ After the communist victory, the establishment of cadre training programmes was a vital component of the transformation of Chinese society and government. In most localities, cadre training classes were initially organized by the Party's propaganda or organization department.Footnote ² Only several years later were schools set up as a standard work department of local Party committees. As the Chinese administrative system and planned economy developed, Party schools continued to be established when new counties, prefectures, provinces, state enterprises and government departments were created, a process that continues to the present day.

Like most other parts of the government and Party administration, Party schools suffered badly during the Cultural Revolution. Yet despite the many upheavals and the closure of Party schools during this period, so-called “Mao Zedong Thought study classes” and other cadre training classes continued to be organized in many localities, which at least in some cases seem to have amounted to some form of continuation of the local Party school.Footnote ³ In 1977, the Central Party School opened its doors again. In an unknown number of cases, local Party schools had resumed operations several years earlier, for instance by merging with the local May 7th cadre school (wu-qi ganxiao 五七干校).Footnote ⁴ After an assessment of the first term of training at the Central Party School, in October 1977 the Party centre issued the decision to reopen or re-establish Party schools at all levels and in all areas.Footnote ⁵ At the end of 1980, more than 5,800 Party schools and cadre academies had either been re-opened or newly established.Footnote ⁶

In the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, the first priority was to rekindle the commitment of cadres to the party-state and its mission, and the leadership knew no better method than a fresh immersion in the iconic source of truth, the original Marxist classics. In 1977, Party schools were thus first and foremost the instrument to help assert reformist control over the orthodox Marxist-Leninist-Maoist canon and to undo the legacy of the Cultural Revolution. However, at the end of 1978 the new programme of the Four Modernizations envisaged demands on the party-state's governmental capacity that had never been faced before. In this context cadre training attained a whole new significance. In 1980 Deng Xiaoping himself said that China's “cadre corps should become more revolutionary, younger, more knowledgeable and more specialized.”Footnote ⁷ In a 1981 speech at a telephone conference on cadre education, CCP organization work supremo Song Renqiong 宋任穷 elaborated on central documents issued in 1980 that were intended to carry out Deng's wish.Footnote ⁸ He emphasized that cadre education and training should not be limited to ideological study, but should give cadres the management skills and specialist knowledge needed to face the new challenges of the Four Modernizations. Cadre training should be flexible, catering to the specific needs of all cadres in particular localities or departments. Participation in training should become a recurring requirement for even the most important and busiest leading cadres, and should be linked to decisions on appointments and promotions.

The new policies provided the framework for the establishment of a comprehensive system of cadre training, which would subsequently be fleshed out and further developed, hesitantly at first, and much more fully in the 1990s and 2000s. Despite issues of funding and quality, during the 1980s cadre training became much more systematic and comprehensive than it had ever been in the 1950s or 1960s. Party schools at different administrative levels were required to train and retrain all leading cadres of a specific rank in their area. Schools also had to organize training classes for outstanding new leading Party cadre recruits (youxiu qingnian ganbu peixunban 优秀青年干部培训班), thus preparing the way for a generational shift in the cadre corps. In addition, Party schools played a vitally important role in the teaching and examination of degree courses after the introduction of the requirement of minimal educational qualifications for specific positions.Footnote ⁹

The standing of cadre training and Party schools again changed substantially from 1989 onwards. The protest movement of that year served as an important wake-up call to the Chinese leadership. Socialism needed to be put on a solid footing through administrative reform, Party building and political education.Footnote ¹⁰ The image of Party schools would also have to be changed. They should no longer be seen as the mouldy remnants of a tainted past, secretive and inward-looking. Instead they were to become part of the sanitized and modernized exterior of Party rule, a symbol and promise of the Party's new confidence that continued market reform would deliver not a grubby capitalist, but a bright socialist future.

Whereas Party schools focused on leading cadres, the 1990s also saw serious progress with schools of administration for the training of other cadres. The establishment of a system of schools of administration was started in the 1980s. In 1993, the National School of Administration (Guojia xingzheng xueyuan 国家行政学院) was established in Beijing; very quickly, schools of administration became a universal feature of all levels of the administration. While most lower-level schools of administration are joined up with the local Party school, the national school is located at a different site and is completely independent from the Central Party School (Zhongyang dangxiao 中央党校).Footnote ¹¹ Schools of administration provide ideological training and non-political education to high-ranking cadres who do not hold a leadership position in an administrative department or local administration. They can perhaps best be described as Party schools for non-leading cadres. With the increased emphasis on skills, education and managerial abilities in China's reformed Leninist party-state, high-level non-leading cadres, too, are considered important enough to require a measure of ideological training to ensure their loyalty.

To sum up, in the 1980s and 1990s the regulatory and institutional framework was put in place for the standardization and systemization of cadre training.Footnote ¹² However, cadre training only became a truly important priority in the 2000s in the run-up to the transition of power to the “fourth generation” of leaders around Hu Jintao 胡锦涛, when the Party started in earnest to put its money where its mouth was. In 2000, the Party centre issued the “Decision on the Strengthening and Improvement of Party School Work in the 21st Century,”Footnote ¹³ followed in 2001 by the “2001–2005 National Plan for Cadre Training.”Footnote ¹⁴ Both documents make very clear that the training of leading cadres is vitally important. Many young and well-qualified cadres have joined the ranks, but they are often insufficiently steeped in Marxist theory, Party history and tradition, and the Party's internal life and work with the masses. However, the two documents do more than just reiterate the importance of training. The salaries of staff in Party schools have to be brought in line with those in regular universities. All levels of the administration should invest in upgrading the facilities at Party schools, and in modernizing teaching and research, including the use of information technology to enable distance learning throughout the Party schools system.

The initiative in the developments after 2002 is clearly in the hands of the centre.Footnote ¹⁵ In 2005, for instance, the Ministry of Finance raised its own (non-capital construction) spending for cadre training at the central level by 10.2 per cent.Footnote ¹⁶ The centre focuses its budgetary and capital construction spending on four new national cadre schools,Footnote ¹⁷ the Central Party School, the National School of Administration and, interestingly, on web-based distance learning for rural Party members. Local administrations were supposed to follow this example. However, given the devolved nature of Chinese sub-national administration, each locality was still on its own to find the financial, human and organizational resources to follow central directives and opinions.

The centre continues to be set on pushing its reform agenda further, amongst other things by trying to give more structure to the variety of local changes and experiments that earlier reforms have engendered. To this aim, in March 2006 yet another central document was promulgated, the “Trial Regulations on Cadre Education and Training Work.”Footnote ¹⁸ Overall, the “Trial Regulations” express the centre's disquiet over the lack of fundamental change and further formalize a perhaps surprising development that was already well under way: the emergence of a market in many aspects of cadre training.Footnote ¹⁹ The “Trial Regulations” continue to emphasize the unique function of Party schools, schools of administration and the new central cadre schools. However, their monopoly on this training is no longer left unchallenged. For the first time, other institutions are also permitted to give ideological training, provided they have been recognized by the responsible organization department or personnel bureau. Individual cadres and their work units are given much greater autonomy and choice in selecting the kind of training and the specific training providers. Cadres have a general obligation to undergo 12 days of full-time training a year, and can opt for a variety of study methods, providers and content. This includes self-study and study while on the job, participation in study tours or coursework elsewhere in China or abroad, and web-based distance learning.

Cadre training continues to be in flux. The 17th Party Congress in 2007 promised a major new round of cadre training whose impact was not yet fully transparent at the time of writing this article in 2008. Yet despite frequent new policies and initiatives, the reform of cadre training and education is beginning to resemble reforms of other parts of the party-state, such as state enterprises and public services. The endorsement of “orderly competition” gives market forces an important role at the deepest core of Leninist governance: the Party's grip over its own cadres. The centre is simultaneously strengthening its overall regulatory grip and limiting its financial commitment to a few selected institutions. This combination of marketization and centralization has profound implications for institutions at the local level that are not immediately clear from the policy pronouncements at the top. Conversely, like in many other areas of reform, what happens in the localities or specific central institutions is in many ways ahead of the centre; in fact they often act as an important driver of further reform policies. To understand the connection between policy and practice it is therefore necessary to inspect the local reality of cadre training. However, before turning to this, the next section discusses the third element of cadre training reform, namely its increasing delocalization and indeed globalization.

Geography, Rank and Power in Cadre Training

Bureaucratic rank, level and jurisdiction are inseparable from the world of cadre training. Like all other administrative departments, including those of the Party and the government, the hierarchy of Party schools does not constitute a vertically integrated unitary organization, but is a much more loosely bound system (xitong 系统) without a direct chain of command that runs from top to bottom. Although lower-level Party schools are co-ordinated and guided by higher levels, they are only directly answerable to the Party committee of their local administration; likewise, their funding comes wholly from the local administration's cadre training budget. As shown below, Party schools also have considerable extra-budgetary income, but crucially are not funded by higher-level administrations or Party schools. A school's tasks and targets are set annually by the cadre education committee (ganbu jiaoyu weiyuanhui 干部教育委员会) of the local Party committee as part of the larger cadre training plan that also includes the local school of administration, the academy of socialism and specialized training programmes at other institutions, both local and elsewhere. Party schools (and in fact the Communist Party as a whole) are organizationally and financially a fully integrated part of local administrations, and are in this regard no different from other administrative departments with which they have to compete for local resources.

As integral components of their local administration, Party schools only train cadres of a particular rank and within the jurisdiction of that administration. Training itself thereby strongly reinforces both the vertical lines of authority within the bureaucracy and the boundaries of the jurisdiction of a particular level of administration. By gathering its subordinate cadres at a central location for training, the administration at a particular level reinforces the fact that, ultimately, these cadres belong to it and not to the smaller locality or institution that they happen to be working in.Footnote ²⁰ One of the first things that struck me when I started my research was that cadre training involves a great deal of movement. Indeed, the very efficacy of training seems to be predicated on travel or temporary residence elsewhere, which is why all institutes involved in training have ample facilities for lodging large numbers of often very demanding students. Such travel goes far beyond what is needed to receive normal training at the school in one's jurisdiction. Both students and teachers commonly travel long distances to Party schools, universities, academies and other institutions across the country and indeed abroad.

The spatial imaginary of modernity and academic excellence has spawned an incredible range and density of exchanges, off-site training courses and study tours. The Yunnan Provincial Party School routinely sends groups of students to other Party schools for short-term courses coupled with inspection tours of local enterprises and other examples of desirable development. Some of these training classes are free of charge as part of mandatory support provided by developed to developing areas,Footnote ²¹ while others fall outside the assistance plan and have to be paid for.Footnote ²² For instance, the Beijing Municipal Party School is mainly a recipient of students from other, less developed parts of China and even from Vietnam. However, it also sends students to Shanghai to learn about the latest developments in economics and finance, and to a university in Georgia in the US that the school has a long-term relationship with.Footnote ²³ The Central Party School in Beijing has fostered extensive foreign links, especially to Japan, Korea, Singapore, the United States, Canada and Western Europe.

Academic staff and administrators also have opportunities to go abroad on delegations and training courses, as visiting scholars, or even to take a further degree.Footnote ²⁴ In 2007, more than 2,000 scholars, businesspeople and politicians from abroad came to the Central Party School for a visit or to give a lecture.Footnote ²⁵ Similar arrangements exist at the lowest levels. As early as 1992, Yiliang county in Yunnan, for instance, had started sending individual cadres to Guangdong province for temporary non-executive appointments (guazhi 挂职), and in 2004 sent 400 cadres to Shanghai.Footnote ²⁶ Significantly, the Party schools that students are most frequently sent to are not located in the nation's administrative centre of Beijing – the Central Party School is not involved in any such programmes at allFootnote ²⁷ – but in the areas where China's market-driven economic reforms have progressed the farthest: Shanghai, Zhejiang and Shenzhen. Schools in these places cater for large numbers of students from all over China's less developed areas, an arrangement which, one would imagine, is also a significant source of income. In Shanghai, these students are kept separate from the normal student-cadres and are reportedly looked down upon, in time-honoured Shanghainese fashion, as poor country bumpkins.Footnote ²⁸

As a rule, international cadre training programmes are not run by Party schools themselves, but by a provincial or the national administration as part of their cadre education and training programmes. Competition for places is often very keen, not only because of the opportunity to travel abroad but also for future career prospects. In fact, Chinese cadres who go to a famous university in a developed country in the West are treated in a very similar fashion to cadres who have been sent on a training programme at a Party school in, for instance, Shanghai or Shenzhen in China itself.

The establishment of international programmes has been much facilitated by the enthusiasm of international organizations and foundations, foreign governments and foreign universities. Particularly in the case of national programmes, it is common for most, if not all, of the funding to come from foreign donors or partners, who see it as an opportunity to have an impact on the modernization of China's administration and the new generation of Chinese leaders, and to establish invaluable personal and institutional relationships with the Chinese government.Footnote ²⁹ However, programmes for provincial governments in China are often taken on mainly for the income that they generate.

Diversification and Marketization

The delocalization and globalization of cadre training is merely one aspect of the centre's strategy of marketizing cadre training by increasing the number of institutions and ways to deliver it. However, it should be emphasized at this point that programmes of training for individuals or groups of cadres remain firmly part of the cadre education and training plans of all administrations in China. Conversely, they are also not incompatible with the centralizing trend since 2002 discussed above. In fact, several recent policy initiatives in the use of off-site training programmes have strengthened the grip of the centre, arguably at the expense of local administrations. Examples are the decision to train selected county Party secretaries at the Central Party School in the course of the tenth five-year plan (2001–05) and, even more ambitiously, the establishment of the three new cadre academies for “experiental learning” in Shanghai, Jinggangshan 井冈山 and Yan'an 延安 and most recently (2006) an academy for economics and management in Dalian 大连. The latter are especially intriguing because their creation signals central dissatisfaction not only with how Party schools have carried out training in modern management, economics and international relations, but, in the case of Jinggangshan and Yan'an, also in their core task: teaching socialist theory and instilling revolutionary virtues and Party discipline. The centre apparently believes that whirlwind trips to these ultra-modern new academies can be used to enforce centralist loyalties and traditional revolutionary virtues: Maoist revolutionary theory and Leninist centralism reduced to package tourism.

Marketization, globalization and diversification should therefore not be interpreted as a loosening of the grip of either central or local administrations. The marketization of cadre training gives local administrations a greater choice of local and non-local providers of training, especially in modern management skills and other forms of non-ideological training. For the central administration, marketization supplements selective direct centralization by strengthening the quality, diversity and relevance of training programmes; likewise, regulation supports centralization by improving the accountability of local administrations to the centre. The centre thus both plays the card of strengthening strategic central provisions and assumes the role of regulator in the emerging market for cadre training. In this regard, cadre training follows the pattern of market reforms and restricted regulation of (former) state enterprises and service organizations, ensuring that the freedom of market competition does not violate the centre's vital strategic interests and objectives.Footnote ³⁰

At the three best-known universities in Beijing (Peking University 北京大学, Tsinghua University 清华大学 and Renmin [People's] University 人民大学), for instance, large numbers of cadres attend specifically tailored training courses lasting up to several weeks.Footnote ³¹ In all three universities, the school of public management or public administration is an important provider of such training programmes. Other providers include the business school and the department of continuing education. Especially since 2002, such training has grown exponentially. In 2006, Tsinghua's School of Continuing Education taught 120 classes, each with on average 50 cadres. This “high-end training” (gaoduan peixun 高端培训) caters for groups of cadres from a specific province, prefecture or city administration, or sometimes a central government department. As with international cadre training programmes, getting a place on a programme at a prestigious national university is a privilege given only to selected individuals, usually cadres with potential for promotion to a higher rank or recent recruits awaiting their first appointment to a leading position.

Training at prestigious universities is virtually devoid of political content. The curriculum usually focuses on subjects such as management and leadership skills, economics, city planning, or law. Although cadres in China now normally have at least a BA or MA degree, many have majored in the sciences or engineering. Training with a focus on management and the social sciences is therefore necessary in their preparation for leadership. “High-level” training programmes have created a very active secondary market in teachers. Large and academically strong schools and departments can of course rely on their own staff to teach core courses, but the many additional subjects and topics that specific delegations request often can only be catered for by paying a teacher from another department in the university, or even from another school or government department. Hence schools in Beijing have a distinct competitive advantage over academic institutions outside the capital: nowhere else is there such a rich and diverse potential pool of specialist teachers.

Schools rely very heavily on word of mouth, repeat business and simply the reputation of their university, but have also developed elaborate websites to attract business. The clients that departments deal with usually are the organization department or personnel bureau of local government. Although cadre training is principally a money-making undertaking, an additional benefit is that trainees become alumni of sorts of the university, and this consideration may well lead a department to decide not to charge the full market price for training certain cadres. At Tsinghua's School of Continuing Education, for instance, training courses for personnel from private enterprises cost 1,000 yuan per person per day, while cadres were charged at lower rates that also took into account how poor or well-off their area was. Similar arguments are made by foreign universities, governments and sponsors in discussions about setting up or subsidizing foreign training programmes for Chinese cadres.

Party schools are not passively watching central initiatives and ordinary universities eroding their traditional monopoly. While schools in more remote and poorer parts of the country have only limited options, those in affluent and developed parts have reacted by entering the new market for cadre training and other kinds of education themselves.Footnote ³² The Party school of Beijing municipality (a province-level school), for instance, was confident that it would be able to retain 60–70 per cent of regular training for Beijing cadres, citing its staff's direct exposure to and knowledge of Beijing's specific circumstances as its edge in the competition with universities. The school has also made considerable headway in turning itself into a diversified provider of higher education. Somewhat surprisingly, an area that has become one of its strengths is the provision of short Chinese language and culture courses for foreign students and foreign-language training for Chinese going abroad. It also claims to organize management courses for large companies in the Beijing area. As a result, it is on a financially solid footing. In 2006, only one-third of its total annual budget of 120 million yuan came from the normal budgetary allocation from Beijing municipality. The rest consisted of income from outside-the-plan courses, rental of facilities and fee income from degree students.

Perhaps the most unexpected operator in the emerging market for cadre training is the Central Party School itself. In 2005, the school opened its commercial branch, called the External Training Centre (Duiwai peixun zhongxin 对外培训中心). Quite openly, the new centre aims at offering training courses for cadres who would never have been able to gain acceptance on one of the school's regular courses. In this way, such cadres can have at least some of the prestige that comes with the name of the Central Party School. Even the most vaunted source of Maoist revolutionary glory and Leninist career opportunities, it appears, is now for sale. In 2007, the school expected greatly to expand courses offered through its External Training Centre. It knows full well that it has to exercise considerable care here. Unlike ordinary universities, the school does not simply advertise its services far and wide. Recruitment on commercial courses is done exclusively through the Organization and United Front Departments of the CCP, and its courses are only available to cadres of at least chu (county) rank and not to employees of private enterprises.Footnote ³³ However, according to the South China Morning Post, short, six-day courses at the Central Party School aimed specifically at businesspeople are in fact on offer commercially. Agents across the country recruiting students for these courses openly advertise the opportunity to meet very senior former government officials and learn from the horse's mouth about the CCP's ideas and plans. The six-day course reportedly costs 6,800 yuan; by 2006, it had already been taken by 10,000 students.Footnote ³⁴

The Erosion of Local Party Schools

National and provincial Party schools and schools of administration are full-fledged institutes of higher education and research, in addition to their specialized function of the provision of short-term main courses. Provincial schools are to all intents and purposes smaller versions of the central schools, and also have the important right independently to confer degrees. However, at lower levels of the administrative hierarchy this right no longer exists, and it would be a mistake to think (as I did initially) that prefectural and county-level schools are simply lesser copies of the provincial and central schools. Sub-provincial Party schools are a different world from the prospering, even pampered establishments at the centre and provinces. Indeed, they present a picture that is in many respects similar to other local state organizations. Budgetary constraints, leadership neglect, the ubiquity of the use of connections, tokenism in performance and even downright corruption reveal why the central authorities have lost much of their patience with local Party schools and have resorted to centralization, delocalization and marketization to insert vitality and relevance in cadre training.Footnote ³⁵

During visits to the prefectural schools in Qujing 曲靖 and Honghe 红河, and the county-level schools in the urban district of Qilin 麒麟 and the counties of Yiliang 宜良 and Shilin 石林, all in Yunnan province, I came away with decidedly mixed impressions. It is true that all the schools had an organizational setup that was a trimmed-down version of higher-level schools, much like other government and Party departments at all levels are built on the same template. They all also fulfilled their core task of teaching short-term training courses for cadres of the rank appropriate to a school at their level, and organized teaching for correspondence degree courses on behalf of the provincial or central Party school. Funding at levels below the province tended to be much less generous than higher up, to which most schools had responded by active involvement in the market for degree courses, capitalizing on their assets (buildings, teaching and administrative staff) and proximity to potential students.Footnote ³⁶

However, other responses to the financial realities of local government were less straightforward, and in several ways compromised the institutional integrity of the schools. From my limited exposure to just five local Party schools it is obviously difficult to generalize, and indeed at all the schools I visited the situation was different. What they seem to have in common, however, are major financial constraints resulting from the budgetary allocation from the local government that pays for the salaries of permanent staff (bianzhi 编制) and recurrent costs. At Yiliang county, for instance, the Party school's budget had been consistently reduced in recent years, forcing the school to send many of their staff into early retirement, leaving only 17 established staff (including a driver and three administrators), supplemented by external teachers hired for specific sessions or classes. Even so, the school's budget was not enough to carry out the tasks assigned to it in the county cadre education and training plan, and it relied heavily on income from degree classes to make up the shortfall.Footnote ³⁷

At the Shilin county Party school self-generated income was the sole source of an investment of 3.2 million yuan in new premises.Footnote ³⁸ During the interview, the head of the school summarized very candidly what the reduction in budget had led to. In 2004 the county's total budget for cadre training, including such items as expensive inspection and study tours in other parts of China, was 2 million yuan. However, from this, the Party school only received the salaries for its 21 staff, with teachers earning a monthly salary of about 1,600 yuan, and 40 yuan per training student per day, a sum that was just about enough to cover the cost of their lodging and food. With 21 staff and 2,000 training students trained on average for seven days, the total budgetary allocation to the school could therefore not have been more than 1 million yuan per year. At the same time, the school's total self-generated income (chuangshou 创收) was also about 1 million yuan, of which it could retain and spend about 300,000 yuan to pay for all other costs, including running the school's office, maintenance of buildings, equipment and fees for external teachers.Footnote ³⁹ The budgetary allocation from the finance department was in fact so low that three of the teachers supplemented their salary with commercial businesses they had set up under their wife's name. Unheard of at higher-level schools, the teacher with the largest business went as far as refusing to join the Party, because he said that would restrict his freedom in taking care of the business.Footnote ⁴⁰

Despite its tight budget, the school's contribution to cadre training was important in Shilin, whose Stone Forest only 50 miles from Kunming 昆明 is a major domestic and international tourist attraction. The 2,000 students who had taken training courses in 2004 constituted a sharp increase over the 500 per year in the past. The chief explanation for this rise was that cadre training emphasized very heavily the skills required by Shilin's exposure to the outside world: proper Mandarin Chinese (especially important because many local cadres were members of non-Han minorities), computer skills, electronic government and English.Footnote ⁴¹ While this particular school was fully engaged in teaching both training courses and degree courses, in other respects it was at risk of becoming somewhat of an empty shell. Not only was its staff increasingly attracted by the glittering prizes on offer in China's booming market economy, but the training courses taught at the school were predominantly aimed at improving cadres' linguistic and administrative skills with little attention to ideological training.

An even more interesting and extreme case of the impact of the market economy was the Party school of Qilin city district (again a county-level administration) in Qujing prefecture in eastern Yunnan, where capitalism came in the form of the commercialization and privatization of education. In Qilin the Party school no longer even had its own building: since 2003, it had become simply a sign at the gate of the district's vocational upper middle school.Footnote ⁴² This school was a semi-private undertaking, and showed all the signs of success: large, ostentatious premises, well-equipped classrooms, a comfortable meeting room and a well-rehearsed routine to receive outside visitors. The school mainly catered for the rapidly growing market for vocational training and education, in addition to local government contracts, including the Party school. In Qilin, cadre training – and in fact the whole Party school – had thus become fully enmeshed with the commercialization of the educational sector. The Party school's responsibilities included both short-term (five days) training courses for local township (zhen 镇) and street (jiedao 街道) cadres, training courses for cadres in the urban district, and degree courses of Yunnan Teachers College (Yunnan shifan daxue 云南师范大学), the Central Party School and the provincial Party school. Because the Party school only received an annual budget of 100,000 yuan and six staff from the district government, most of the teaching was done by hiring teachers from the prefectural Party school, Yunnan Teachers College or elsewhere in the area.Footnote ⁴³

These examples show that the financial constraints of county governments made operating fully independent Party schools very difficult. As in many other policy areas, central government requirements put a great strain on county governments, while at the same time reducing their fiscal autonomy and discretionary use of extra-budgetary income. In the case of Party schools, considerable creativity has been applied to come up with workable arrangements that would allow them to be in effect cross-subsidized by commercial activities. In sum, even in cadre training, the ideological heart of Leninist governance, the impact of market reforms was increasingly felt, and, as so often, this took its most extreme forms at the lowest levels of government.

However, financial constraints are not the only contributory factor in the erosion of local Party schools. As shown above, policies have quite deliberately allowed for competition between different providers of cadre training in an attempt to break down the monopoly of Party schools. The effect of this was clearly visible at the prefectural Party school in Honghe in southern Yunnan during my visit in 2004. According to the signs outside the school's main entrance, it doubles up not only as the school of administration and the school of socialism (for non-CCP leading cadres), but also as the school for minority cadres of whom there are many in this southern border area. These multiple signs turned out to be just that: mere signs. The school offered Party school cadre training and teaching for various degree courses, but had little to do with the organization of the non-Party cadre training that fall under the headings of the school of administration, the school of socialism and the school for minority cadres. Instead of being a comprehensive institution for all aspects of cadre training, it merely provided teachers, classrooms and boarding facilities if requested to do so by other local administrative agencies.

Training of non-CCP leading cadres, the prerogative of the school of socialism, was fully in the hands of the CCP's United Front Department. During my visit, the “sixth non-CCP leading cadre training class” was taking place, and it was revealing how little the school's administrators knew or cared about it, despite the fact that many of their teachers (including one of the deputy heads) had been enlisted to teach specific sessions. A similar situation existed for other types of training as well. Courses for female cadres, for instance, although taught at the school, were considered the Women's Federation's responsibility and not part of the school's plan. In the case of training courses that are part of the school of administration's remit, the situation was even more extreme. Disagreements with the government's personnel bureau had led to the almost complete removal of all courses from the Party school's premises. Instead, the personnel bureau had made alternative arrangements with other schools in the area and only a few novice civil servant training courses were held at the Party school.Footnote ⁴⁴ There was more co-operation in minority cadre training, and the school helped the government's minority committee to find teachers and design the courses. However, these courses continued to be considered principally a responsibility assigned to the minority committee. The committee liaised directly with the Party's organization department in selecting students and the government's finance department to obtain funds.Footnote ⁴⁵