Young party cadres begin jockeying for leadership positions
Jockeying for prominence among the ranks of aspiring Communist Party cadres has begun on the mainland as the party prepares to headhunt young cadres as part of an across-the-board reshuffle over the next three years.
The ruling party is expected to endorse a new leadership lineup in 2012 when President Hu Jintao, Premier Wen Jiabao and many other older party cadres within the hierarchy are expected to retire, setting the stage for ambitious younger cadres to compete for some of the key posts.
During a forum on the cultivation and selection of young cadres at the end of last month, Vice-President Xi Jinping, Mr Hu's heir apparent, stressed the need to have a mechanism in place to select and groom standout cadres who had the necessary morality and expertise, with morality paramount.
However, some of the crop of young cadres have fallen from grace in recent years as an unprecedented number of young and low-level cadres and officials have been indicted on corruption charges.
Tang Xianwen, a section head in charge of trade promotion in Guangxi, was arrested in October 2005 after he was found to have made 10 million yuan (HK$11.3 million) from the illicit sale of imported cars.
The public has been dismayed over scandals in which officials have been exposed for networking or paying for promotions, which often come with enormous benefits.
The perceived power and benefits of being a civil servant and having lifelong job security make public service vacancies so highly coveted that they have spawned a sizeable industry around the civil servants' qualifying exams.
Citing the exams and a much more open selection process, Li Chengyan, party chief of Peking University's School of Government, said the system of selecting and promoting cadres was much better regulated now in terms of fairness than 30 years ago, when the mainland began to reform and open up to the rest of the world.
However, Professor Li noted that the promotion of government and party officials was subjected to undue interference at times.
'A lot of government departments have not yet adopted a sunshine policy as required to select cadres openly for certain posts, and such under-the-table processes would get in the way of promoting capable officials,' he said.
To select better cadres for promotion, authorities must also audit officials before promotions and subject them and their assets to public scrutiny, he said.
According to a joint online survey conducted by the People's Daily, the party's official mouthpiece, and a news web portal owned by the party, more than half of the 1,853 respondents said young cadres needed to do more to discipline themselves and watch how they behaved.
The survey also found that more than 40 per cent believed young cadres had little grass-roots work experience, which meant they had little insight into the mainland's affairs, public sentiment and the broader state of the party.
Youth movement
Official statistics regarding Communist Party cadres at the end of 2007
Percentage who are 45 or younger: 71.5%
Percentage who are 30 or younger: 30%
Percentage with at least a tertiary degree:
1978: 9.3%
2008: 87.5%
