Steering the Middle: Meritocratic Promotion and Limited Politicization in China’s Ministerial Bureaucracy

How do authoritarian executives manage the tension between political control and professional autonomy when they staff the upper-middle tiers of the civil service? This paper contributes to the panel on “Comparing the politicization of the executive triangle” by analyzing promotion patterns among mid-level officials in a Chinese central ministry. We focus on the career step from division chief (chu-level) to deputy department director (si-level), which links the world of everyday administrative management to the ministerial leadership at the apex of the executive triangle. At this level, officials must simultaneously deliver policy outputs, manage sizeable units, and credibly signal political reliability to their superiors. The paper draws on a near full-population career-history dataset that tracks all division chiefs in one core central ministry from the mid-1990s to 2021, yielding 5,396 person-year observations for 650 officials. Using event history models, we examine how three clusters of factors – (1) meritocratic qualifications, (2) structured political signals, and (3) informal social capital – shape the chances of promotion to deputy department director. Meritocratic indicators include postgraduate education, elite university credentials, and the size and functional profile of the division headed. Political signaling is captured through service as a personal secretary to the minister or vice-minister, a classic advisory role that connects career officials to political principals. Informal social capital is measured via shared provincial origin, shared university background with the minister, and cadre-family background. The results show, first, that institutionalized merit filters are strong and robust predictors of promotion. Better educated officials, those with selective university degrees, and those managing larger or more central divisions are systematically more likely to advance. Second, politicization works primarily through routinized advisory positions: secretarial experience to ministers significantly increases promotion probabilities, indicating a structured channel for signaling trust and alignment with political priorities rather than ad hoc patronage. Third, we find little evidence that classic guanxi-type ties or cadre-family background exert a consistent influence on promotion outcomes, and their limited effects further weaken after the early 2010s, when anti-corruption and professionalization reforms intensified. Taken together, these findings suggest that in this segment of China’s executive bureaucracy there is no strong loyalty–competence trade-off of the kind often discussed in the literature on patronage appointments. Instead, the system combines merit-based screening with specific, institutionalized forms of political signaling, while keeping broader factional or ideological divides at bay within a single-party framework. The paper therefore offers a rare career-data-based measure of politicization in an authoritarian setting and speaks directly to the panel’s interest in how different executive triangles structure political discretion in personnel decisions over time and across types of positions. Beyond the Chinese case, the paper contributes to comparative debates on civil service politicization by showing how fine-grained career histories can be used to detect when and where political discretion actually bites in internal labor markets, and to distinguish politicization through formalized advisory roles from politicization through partisan or personal networks. This perspective invites systematic comparison with ministerial personnel systems in parliamentary and presidential democracies.