In the aftermath of their suppression of the democracy movement in June 1989, China's leaders concluded that the Chinese Communist Party's leadership selection system was in serious trouble. The actions of intellectuals and the media during the May-June crisis, measures proposed by former Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang for cadre reform and the results of an earlier decision to decentralize the nomenklatura convinced authorities in Beijing that Party control of leadership selection had decayed and that decentralization of personnel decisions had gone too far. During the next few years China's post-4 June leadership took steps to rectify these problems. One of these was to revise the central Party's nomenklatura, which they subsequently re-issued in 1990.

China's civil service reforms sought to improve the performance of civil servants by introducing more competitive selection processes, incentives to reward performance, and tightened monitoring and supervision. The impact of the reforms was undermined by clashes with other policies being implemented at the time and by a failure to address elements of organization culture that have rewarded various forms of illegal behaviour, such as corruption. Empirical material for our study is drawn from government data and the experience of civil service reform in three Chinese urban areas (Beijing's Haidian district, Changchun and Ningbo) since the 1990s.

The Chinese government has undertaken extensive reforms to its civil service system over the past ten years. The capacity of the civil service has improved, but perhaps due to reasons other than civil service reform. This article reviews the government reforms in the context of the particular nature of the Chinese civil service system, and makes recommendations for further reforms.

After 50 years of revolutionary transformation and uneven consolidation, and a generation of economic re-structuring, the political institutions of the People's Republic of China remain essentially Leninist. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to enjoy monopoly power, and independent media, autonomous trade unions and other manifestations of civil society are almost wholly absent. Yet the environment within which the Party now operates has changed fundamentally. Marxist-Leninist parties in power around the world have collapsed and to stay in power the CCP has abandoned central planning for market economics. Living standards and literacy rates have improved dramatically and ordinary people now have more control over their own lives. Some analysts have suggested that as a result of these changes, the regime is facing imminent institutional collapse. Others have suggested that the regime cannot but democratize. This article argues that the regime is more resilient than either of these interpretations allows. In spite of the formal trappings of Leninism and its neo-authoritarian political reform programme, the CCP has adapted to the new situation. The reforms, which date from the early 1980s, have considerably strengthened the country's political institutions. Although there is disagreement on the content and pace of reform, China's elite with few exceptions appears to agree that further political reform is necessary. Yet the Party is caught in a dilemma: if it moves too slowly, it could fail because it cannot meet the demands of the people; if it moves too quickly, it could fail because it further undermines its already weakened position.

The Chinese Communist Party has maintained tight control over the institutions and processes for creating and deleting official posts. The Party's goal of maintaining as many official positions as possible to preserve political patronage and social stability conflicts with the need to curb administrative expenses and cut government deficits. Aggregate data indicate that the downsizing campaigns of the 1990s have not been particularly successful and that staffing levels in local government are probably to a large extent politically determined. A case study reveals that some local governments may have officially downsized while expanding the total size of public employment.