Jérôme Doyon's impressively researched monograph begins with an initial puzzle: “How does the Chinese party-state manage to attract recruits and maintain their commitment over time, when ideology does not structure recruitment anymore, and a liberalized employment market provides alternative career options?” (p. 153). In the course of providing a persuasive answer, he also contributes important points on some of the key issues in Chinese politics more generally –including factionalism, meritocratic bureaucracy, fragmented authoritarianism, authoritarian resilience, the relationship between institutions and individual agency, and gender and politics – often providing alternative explanations to counter what sometimes passes as conventional or received wisdom. As he notes, his research findings have implications for the study of authoritarian politics beyond the China case.
Doyon's work makes an excellent companion volume to the recent book by Konstantinos D. Tsimonis (The Chinese Communist Youth League: Juniority and Responsiveness in a Party Youth Organization, Amsterdam University Press, 2021). Both monographs are based on extensive fieldwork and interviews, along with a thorough reading of both primary and secondary sources, and both are concerned with the role of youth in the perpetuation of the Chinese political system. Tsimonis takes a systemic approach and focuses on the failures of Hu Jintao's policy initiative to increase the League's responsiveness through a “Keep Youth Satisfied” campaign, tracing the failures to the role of the League as a subordinate organization to the CCP within the Chinese political system. Doyon, however, is less interested in the League as an organization, and focuses instead on the perspectives, ambitions and agency of individual student cadres, and how they are progressively inducted into the world of officials, developing an “undogmatic commitment” to a political career. The party-state creates a “sponsored mobility” framework where young officials are “embedded” early on within the party-state hierarchy. As they rotate from one position to another in their political careers, their networks expand vertically and horizontally, with these cumulative multiple relationships producing a “diffuse allegiance” to the regime, rather than to any specific group or particular leader. Because they are embedded in these complex networks, the development of “factions,” or isolated cohesive groups, becomes very difficult.
Doyon's fieldwork covered fourteen months between 2011 and 2015, focusing on four universities, in particular Peking University (Beida) and Tsinghua, where networking resources at the disposal of student leaders were far greater than elsewhere, and which carried over and remained essential to their post-graduation careers (pp. 94, 117). Indeed, as he documents in his discussion of the very limited opportunities for networking by female student leaders (pp. 98–100), males at elite universities have been the clearest beneficiaries of the sponsored mobility process. This is true not just at Beida and Tsinghua, but also, to a somewhat lesser extent, in elite universities at the provincial level, as he discovered during his fieldwork in Nanjing (p. 102). However, as Doyon to his credit notes, his fieldwork was conducted prior to some major new regulations under Xi Jinping that have strengthened the role that CCP cells play in student control, including such areas as extracurricular activities and political education (pp. 36–37). This has led to the increasing importance of political criteria in cadre management, which have now become the “most essential criteria” for cadre recruitment and evaluation, with recruitment and promotion criteria linked to job performance now seen as “artificial” (p. 135).
These changes introduce a more activist component for officials as a replacement for what had been a “passive acceptance of ideological references and symbols,” with party-state careers “de-ideologized … but not de-politicized in post-Mao China” (pp. 12, 134). They clearly have the potential to undermine the highly effective system elaborated by Doyon, in which the party-state is able to balance cohesion and pluralism within its ranks, and where undogmatic commitment and the diversity of views and personal networks contribute to the diffuse allegiance that is at the core of his argument.
Doyon is also to be commended for ambitiously – albeit gently and civilly – taking issue with those scholars associated with other conceptualizations of the Chinese political system, for example Daniel Bell (meritocratic bureaucracy, pp. 11–12) and Cheng Li, Bo Zhiyue, Kou Chien-wen, Andrew Nathan and Victor Shih (factionalism), although his impressive research and coherent arguments are not likely to sway adherents of these other approaches to understanding how Chinese elite politics works. For example, Doyon questions the existence of a “youth league faction” (tuanpai), in a section subtitled “Hierarchical ties: all Party leaders have their tuanpai” (pp. 140–142). However, when the recent 20th Party Congress concluded, those leaders associated with what Cheng, Bo and others have called the tuanpai, were all either dismissed, demoted or shifted away from Communist Youth League (CYL) work. Most notable of these was Vice-Premier Hu Chunhua, the former head of the CYL and close associate of Hu Jintao, who had been a member of the Politburo since 2012 and was only 59 years old, ten years younger than Xi Jinping. Although many China specialists expected he would become Premier, he not only was demoted down to the Central Committee, but also lost his Vice-Premier position at the March 2023 National People's Congress. Xi's attacks on the CYL are well known and covered well, if relatively briefly, by Doyon (pp. 149–152), where he makes the important point that the 2016 CYL reform mainly affected the League's upper levels, leaving his sponsored mobility approach relatively intact. Xi's new Politburo Standing Committee members are all close associates of Xi from different stages and venues in his career, with the Politburo also disproportionately weighted toward Xi associates, along with technocrats who generally lack strong networks within the Party. This suggests the politics of personalism and the weakening of the CCP as an organization. Indeed, Xi's initiatives appear, at least for the moment, to have made any overt factional behavior very problematic, leaving only “the Xi Jinping faction.”
All that said, Doyon has produced a first-rate study that not only offers a persuasive conceptual framework on how the Party renews itself through a complex system of youth recruitment and retention, but also raises thought-provoking questions on some of the key contentious issues in Chinese elite politics.
