Comment by HenryKissinger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HenryKissinger | Hacker News Reader

> Among the 19th CC elite, there are only 19 Tsinghua undergraduates and 37 Peking University undergraduates out of 1021 elite. The other top grantors of undergraduate degrees to the Chinese elite include Renmin University, Nanjing University, the Central Party School, and the National Defense University. The majority of the CCP elite graduated from one of the over one hundred lesser known universities in China. Although in recent years, many have pursued graduate degrees, fewer than one hundred have obtained their master degrees from Peking U, Tsinghua, or Renmin, whereas 132 of the elite obtained master degrees from the Central Party School. Even among the elite born after 1962, only a small share obtained bachelors or masters from Peking, Tsinghua, or Renmin.

That's surprising, given the geographic concentration of the birth place of CCP elites outlined later in the article.

What does this tell us about upward mobility and meritocracy within the CCP?

Well, looking at it from a game-theory perspective:

It might just mean that you have to be #1 in your local communist party to move up to the regional one, and you have to be #1 in the regional one to move up to the national one. Your chances of qualifying for each round up are inversely proportional to the number of people you're competing against, and their abilities.

In such a system, you're better off going to (or staying in) a more remote city in a more remote province, as the competition will be weaker, and your absolute ability is irrelevant.

If this view is correct, you'd expect that the assembly would be representative of a broad spectrum of regions, but that the upper rungs of leadership would be occupied by individuals from the most populous and richest areas. This appears to be the case (from what I understand).

I am not exactly well-versed in Chinese culture but it seems like locals would have an advantage over carpet-baggers given my paltry understanding of guanxi.

It's worth considering the ancient history of viewing all central governments (including all the Emperors) as essentially being carpet baggers you can ignore if you're physically far enough away from them. So, this is the carpet-bagging elite.

Carpet baggers have their own virtue that is a lack of strong power base and personal attachment. So the expectation is that they are less corrupt or preferential.

Well this statistics on "elite university" is close to meaningless in analyzing the current iteration of CCP leaders.

The reason being that current iteration mostly are 50 years or older. Put them as born before 70s, at the time of their age of entering university, pretty much any one of them are elite in the absolute sense, when compared to US concept. Note that it was until late 90s that the higher education is considered accessible to more people.

This study is kind of too shallow in this sense. But that's expected, judging from how the US president's understanding of China...

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