CAREER MOBILITY AND THE COMMUNIST POLITICAL ORDER

All ruling communist parties have allocated career opportunities to th e loyal in an effort to promote conformity and discipline within their ranks and among their subjects. Yet little is understood about how th ese political reward mechanisms operate. I offer a model of selective political screening and incorporation, using survey data from urban Ch ina to demonstrate the existence of two distinct career paths that lea d to a divided elite. One path requires both educational and political credentials and leads to administrative posts with high prestige, con siderable authority and clear material privileges; the second path req uires educational but not political credentials, and leads to professi onal positions with high occupational prestige but little authority an d fewer material privileges. This division of the elite and the relati vely small magnitude of administrators' material privileges reveal som e striking vulnerabilities in China's political institutions to the gr owth of a market economy.