De redactie van NRC selecteert de beste artikelen uit The Economist voor een breder perspectief op internationale politiek en economie. Lees meer over de samenwerking.
China Inc has become a breeding ground for up-and-coming officials.
Dit artikel komt uit The Economist
In much of the world the age of 55 is when an official might start to contemplate life after work. In the rarefied air of China’s elite politics, it is roughly when careers get interesting: quinquagenarians are the sprightly young things who are just beginning to break into the upper echelons. After a reshuffle that ended last week, eight of China’s 31 provinces now have governors born in 1970 or later. None of these leaders, mind you, is so green as to have been born since 1973.
It is worth looking at them more closely. Not because any will run China soon (if ever, given Xi Jinping’s grip), but because, as top performers of their cohort, they reveal traits that the Communist Party values in its leaders today. A common feature is extensive experience in state-owned companies.
De redactie van NRC selecteert de beste artikelen uit The Economist voor een breder perspectief op internationale politiek en economie.
Six of the eight governors from this youngish group rose through various appendages of China Inc. Liu Jie, now in Zhejiang province, worked for 16 years at a steel company. Guo Ningning, a rising star in Fujian, toiled for 24 years in state banks. Xie Weijiang, currently in Hunan, spent 23 years in the power sector. Of the three 1970s-born ministers in Beijing, two also worked in state-owned firms. Altogether, nearly three-quarters of the government’s highest-ranking whippersnappers today are graduates of China Inc. It is starting to look like Government Sachs, with Chinese characteristics. One such characteristic, to be clear, is that the revolving door really only turns from state firms to the government, not the other way. And the corporate types still have to wait in line: the eight governors born in the 1970s all serve under provincial party secretaries born in the 1960s.
Rising through state firms is a change from how officials previously climbed the greasy pole. The classic path was to pay your local dues, starting in a county, becoming a small-town mayor and so on until reaching a provincial perch. Another was to get fast-tracked through the Communist Youth League. A third was the technocratic channel, especially for engineers: they might go from working on a dam to the industrial ministry and then to higher leadership. Each had drawbacks. The local route could be parochial for a global superpower. The youth league came to be seen as an arrogant faction—not least by Mr Xi as he consolidated his power. And pure engineers, most useful during China’s intense phase of building, had seen their star wane in Beijing.
Enter what Li Cheng of the University of Hong Kong calls „technocrat 2.0”. Over the past five years officials with specialised training have staged a comeback. Engineers are in the mix, but their degrees are wide-ranging, from life sciences to quantum computing. A large number have also studied economics and finance. And state-owned firms are the ultimate finishing school.
Some officials have always migrated from state businesses to politics. But in the past decade the door has opened more widely. In 2019 the party reworked its appointment system, creating a mechanism to shepherd more people, more quickly, from state companies into government. In 2022 Mr Li counted 86 officials born in the 1970s who had made it by then to vice-level provincial posts; 54% had worked in industrial companies or financial firms.
Why is the party turning to state executives? State firms—coddled, bloated and slow—are hardly models for the dynamic economy that the country’s leaders want to build. Politically, however, there is much to recommend them. Truly national firms are not beholden to any one place. Their bosses have managed complex issues, and many know the world beyond China. Lu Dongliang, now governor of Shanxi, secured access to resources in Africa and South-East Asia as head of Chalco, the listed arm of the world’s biggest aluminium producer. Zhuge Yujie, the new governor of Qinghai province, ran Shanghai’s port, the world’s busiest. Feng Chucheng of Hutong Research, a consultancy in Beijing, thinks the rise of state executives reflects the party’s preference for leaders who, it hopes, can bring both technological self-reliance and economic resilience.
Dipping into state firms also broadens the talent pool for the party. It has gaping holes to fill. At an important plenary meeting last week, just 74% of the party’s Central Committee (which began with 376 members) showed up in Beijing. That was the lowest attendance rate in the post-Mao half-century, confirming the extent of Mr Xi’s purges. Some observers think these removals could come back to haunt Mr Xi by thinning out his bench for future appointments. In reality they are unlikely to be a constraint: China has no shortage of strivers eyeing powerful posts. It has even more now that state employees are also in the running.
Mr Xi’s dominance can be stifling for the bureaucracy: loyalty to him is a prerequisite for advancement, which saps officials’ initiative and derring-do. Yet the conveyor belt from state firms to high office shows that loyalty is a necessary, not sufficient, condition. To truly get ahead officials need to have demonstrated expertise and competence, not just ideological bona fides. In that sense the renewed emphasis on technical abilities is commendable.
But in another way it is a worrying portent for the economy. During China’s decades of turbocharged growth, much of its energy derived from the retreat of the state sector and the rise of private companies. Under Mr Xi the tide has shifted. Private entrepreneurs are struggling while state firms, once again favoured by state banks and central planners, are emboldened. The systematic recruitment of state executives into government only adds to the momentum. Private companies must form party cells, but no private entrepreneur has ever become a full member of the Central Committee. For ambitious graduates entering the workforce, the signal is clear: throw your lot in with China Inc.
© 2026 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.
Bij Google kan je nu zelf aangeven welke nieuwsbronnen jij vaker wil zien in je zoekresultaten.Meer informatie