China's Leadership Gap

John L. Thornton

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2006

Article preview: first 500 of 2,615 words total.

Summary:  After 28 years of reform, China now faces accelerating challenges of an unprecedented scale. Of these, none is more critical -- or more daunting -- than nurturing a new generation of leaders who are skilled, honest, committed to public service, and accountable. Without them, Beijing's public promises of a prosperous, democratic future will go unfulfilled.

John L. Thornton is a Professor at Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management and its School of Public Policy and Management, in Beijing, and Director of the university's Global Leadership Program. He is also Chair of the Board of the Brookings Institution. He retired as President of Goldman Sachs in 2003.

RECRUITING THE NEXT GENERATION OF REFORMERS

After 28 years of reform, China faces challenges of an unprecedented scale, complexity, and importance. China has already liberalized its markets, opened up to foreign trade and investment, and become a global economic powerhouse. Now its leaders and people must deal with popular dissatisfaction with local government, environmental degradation, scarce natural resources, an underdeveloped financial system, an inadequate health-care system, a restless rural population, urbanization on a massive scale, and increasing social inequality. Most of these problems, of course, have existed throughout the period of reform. What is different now is that the pace of change is accelerating while the ability of the state to manage that change is not keeping pace.

Solving any one of these problems by itself would be a formidable task. But Beijing must deal with all of them at once. Because China's government is a one-party system with minimal popular participation, success depends on the energy and ideas of its leaders. Yet the Chinese government today finds it harder than ever to attract, develop, and retain talent. Graduates from the country's top universities, who once would have filled government posts, are instead choosing to take jobs in the private sector. Ironically, by creating new opportunities for talented people, China's three decades of reform have made undertaking new reforms more difficult. Moreover, the structure of the country's bureaucracy stifles initiative and promotes mediocrity. Worse, many officials, from the village to the central government, are corrupt, eroding the government's effectiveness and feeding popular discontent with the system.

Of all of China's challenges, none is more critical -- or more daunting -- than that of nurturing a new generation of leaders who are skilled, honest, committed to public service, and accountable to the Chinese people as a whole. Unless China manages to produce such leaders, Beijing will fail to meet the country's challenges, and its public promises of a more prosperous and democratic future will remain unfulfilled.

MANDARINS AND MULTINATIONALS

For much of China's history, the central bureaucracy attracted the country's best and brightest. The famous imperial testing system for identifying future mandarins provided what was, at least in part, a merit-based route to social advancement: government service, especially when combined with personal connections and keen political skills, was the fastest path to power and wealth. Although the powerful state that emerged after the ascendancy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949 changed much in Chinese society, it only reinforced the bureaucracy's near monopoly on talent. Today, however, many ambitious Chinese no longer regard a government job as the best route to success. And those who try to pursue careers in government after spending time in the private sector often find that their way is blocked.

China's educational system continues to identify the best minds (or at least the best test takers) and send them to top universities. Once there, however, most students now study what they find most interesting or what they think will be most lucrative instead of ...

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