英文摘要 |
In the past several years, scholars have emphasized on the increasing importance of institutional factors in China’s elite recruitment. According to the existing literature, this paper derives three necessary conditions and five sufficient conditions as the criteria to evaluate who among China’s top elite would most likely be selected as the new members of CCP’s Politburo in 2007. The three necessary conditions discussed here are: (1) incumbent members (or alternate members) of the 16th CCP Central Committee; (2) incumbent leading cadres with the experience at the full-ministerial level for at least 5 years; and (3) cadres under the age of 64 in the year of 2007. The five sufficient conditions are: (1) relative age advantage; (2) best age advantage; (3) the experience of leading a province; (4) the experience of working in different provinces or in the central and local governments; and (5) the knowledge background in economics and management. Based on these criteria, this paper chooses seven frontrunners—they are Li Keqiang, Wang Qishan, Li Yuanchao, Xi Jinping, Han Zheng, Bo Xilai and Yang Chuantang. Among them, Yang first lost his competitive advantage several months ago because of serious illness. This paper doesn’t take non-institutional factors such as factional affiliation into account. In addition, it excludes some institutional factions that either have no information available (such as cadres’health conditions), or have not been operationalized (such as cadres’performance). These insufficiencies will affect the reliability of the conclusion of this paper to a certain degree. Further researches should aim at overcoming these weaknesses. |