[MUSIC] Up until now, we've really been talking about the characteristics of the very top leaders in China. But now, for a period of time, I'd like to talk about the middle-level leaders in China. People from the provincial level up to the government ministers. And then you get a sense of what kinds of changes are also going on and what kind of leaders are likely to be making it up into the top leadership in terms of their background. Now, one of the things we notice, one big trend is really the replacement of politically trained officials by college-trained officials, usually engineers. This has been the trend up until, I'd say, the last two or three years. But pretty much from politics, political background, to engineers. We also see some more international experience at the middle levels of the leadership. Many of the bureau chiefs, people I'll go and talk to in some of the central ministries, they've now spent time at the Kennedy School at Harvard or at public policy programs in France, in England, Oxford, Cambridge, these programs all around the world. And this really gives them a much better perspective, and they're better trained. Now I'll show you a couple of slides and some tables now, that will show you the data on how the kinds of changes that have really taken place in the nature of the local elites. Now, the first I want to look at is changes in the age and education of the elites, and this is before the 1982 Administrative Reform, 1982 Zhao Ziyang was the Prime Minister. And he brings about major change in administration and you can see the kinds of changes that will occur. So here if we look at two groups we're going to look at. We're going to look at the ministers and vice ministers and we're going to look at primarily the governors, vice governors and the important secretaries. So we'll just look at these two groups. So what do you see in the average age? So before 1982, the average age of ministers was 64. After the reform and these people are, basically the reform is that people are retired and replaced. They are replaced by people who are on average, six years younger. Right? And here as well in terms of the directors, deputy directors, governors and vice governors, they were averaging 62 years of age, slightly younger than the ministers, and after the reform, they were averaging 58 years. 55 years, which is three years younger than the ministers. But again, seven years younger than the people that they have replaced. Now, one of the more shocking, I think, or surprising findings, and this comes from work from Ken Lieberthal, Is the percent of college educated within these two groups. Now an amazing thing is before 1982 only 38% of ministers actually had college education. Right, which is tough to be a minister and run a large ministry in China, if you haven't been to college. So we're not even talking about engineers, we're just talking about no college experience at all. After the reform, the number of people with college education hits 60%, so that's much better. Again, here we find the number of people in important government posts slightly lower, governors, or vice governors in provinces. Only 20% of those people had a college education. Before 1982, they really were many of the people left over from the revolutionary days who had been moving up, maybe they had been land reform cadres, land reform officials in the early 50s and they worked their way up to these posts. And after the reform, that number goes up to 44%. Another group to look at, again from Lieberthal is the result of between 1982 and 1987. Again, here, if you look at the number of ministers, what percentage of them had political training. And remember I talked about the importance of being a secretary to a top leader in terms of getting promoted. So many of the people who were secretaries got promoted into important positions. Here we find that, in 1982 if we look at the ministers, only 2% of ministers were engineers, had been trained as engineers, whereas 60% of them had been political backgrounds. But after the reform, 45%. So here's a huge change. 45% of the people then had education as engineers. And we can see the same thing here, with the governors. Whereas, initially, almost all the governors, in 1982, were politically trained, had somehow been involved in some kind of political work, but had not had formal education or training as an engineer, after 1982 by 1987, only 30% of them actually had had experience only in political work. Whereas here we can see already 33% of them were engineers. This is a slightly harder graph figure to follow. It's from the work by Li Cheng. Called Cheng Li, but his family name is Li. And what this does is this shows actually the rise and fall of technocrats within Chinese government officials. By technocrats, we mean, broadly, engineers, people trained in technical expertise. In the initial in 1982 with these ministers, provincial party secretaries, governors, very few had any kind of technical training. The vast majority of them had political training. By 1987, as we've seen, the percentage of people with technical training has increased dramatically, and then, here, by 1997, we can follow the trends from before and 70%, 74%, and 77%. So at least over two-thirds of all the people who are governors, provincial party secretaries, or ministers, actually had technological or technocratic training. But, what's interesting is that that group starts to lose power, and they start to decline in terms of their background, or at least this is an important background, with the kind of training that they've had. And then it drops down significantly. And then by 2013, it's down to 12, 16 and 26% of these three kinds of leaders have actually technocratic training, and many ore of them now will have training in politics but studies of law, they'll have gone to universities and studied things other than technical training. Now one other group that I want to talk about is I want to talk about women. And a professor I study with named Bob Putnam back at Michigan, who spent many years at Harvard, he had a theory called the Law of Increasing Disproportion. And what he meant by that is, as you move higher and higher up within a political hierarchy, as you move up within the political hierarchy, the proportion of minorities, women, ethnic minorities, decreases as you go up. And for women, despite living in a society which, I would say is the fairest to women in Asia, some people may disagree, but I accept clearly here in Hong Kong, but relative to Japan or relative to Korea, Chinese society is pretty fair to women. But women do not or very rarely make it to the top positions in the communist party or the government. Now it's interesting, during the Cultural Revolution when the party really was dismantled. The party falls apart because Mao attacks it. And during that period what we call, or what Putnam calls, selectorates, which really mean these organizations or this group of leaders who would sit there and select from below which group, which people are going to move up into the next level. They were a kind of barrier, a kind of gatekeeper, that existed. They previously had kept women out, but during the Culture Revolution, because of the breaking up of the Communist Party, these selectorates that had kept women out, collapsed, to a large extent, and so what we see is a large number of women being able to make it in to the central committee. So now let's look at the numbers. At the 8th party congress in 1956, 4.1% of female full members. Here these are the full members of the Central Committee were, 4.1% of the full members of the Central Committee were female. And of the alternate members, 5.5% were female. Along comes the Cultural Revolution, 1966, and by the 9th Party Congress in 1969, that number of female members of the Central Committee has gone up to 7.6. And then, as the influence of the Cultural Revolution continues, it peaks at 10.3% in 1973. And we see a similar trend here for the alternate members of the Central Committee, whereby 1969 it goes up from 5.5 to 9.2%. And then it jumps dramatically in 1973, to 16.9%. And here, in 1977, the number of alternate members in the Central Committee actually peaks at over 18%, but,after that, it drops off. Now one thing worth noticing, as well, is that no woman has ever made it into the Politburo Standing Committee, that elite group of five to nine people without being married to a member of the Politburo Standing Committee. And generally, there's only one woman on the Politburo. Sometimes there's no full member, there was a woman named Wu Yi who had one point was just an alternate member of the Politburo. And at that time, there was no other woman on the Politburo. But what's nice to see is that in the current 18th Central Committee of Politburo, there are actually two women but no women in the Politburo Standing Committee. Now look at your country, right? How well do women do? How many women, what percent of women are actually, what percentage of members of the parliament are actually women? It's often, we may look at other countries and say oh, look, this is not, look at China, it's not so good. But if you look at your own country you may find that it's not much different.
