Birth influences future: examining discrimination against Chinese deputy mayors with grassroots administration origins
Autor
Wang, Ying
Hua, Lei
Institución
Resumen
There is no systematic empirical study to address the unfair political treatment of Chinese
officials with grassroots beginnings. This research addresses this gap by conducting theoretical and empirical studies. Drawing on a new biographical database of Chinese deputy
mayors of municipal cities, this paper conducts competing risk regression and classical
logistic regression modeling to examine the role of career starting level in deputy mayors’
political careers. The empirical analysis provides solid results and demonstrates that the
higher the career starting level, the greater the probability of getting promoted and the lower
the risk of political downfall, which indicated that deputy mayors who started their careers in
grassroots-level governments were associated with the lowest probabilities of promotion and
highest risks of falling. The unfair political treatment is the tragedy of grassroots cadres and
does not match the importance of grassroots work, which leads to great discontent and may
threaten the sustainability of Communist Party rule in the future.