Stage and Roles

This book is grounded in close observation of the everyday work and life of Chinese government officials. It centers on the daily practices of civil servants and seeks to answer three fundamental questions: What exactly do they do each day? Why do they do it in that way? And what explains the characteristics of these practices? The study offers three main findings. First, the daily behavior of civil servants at all levels has visibility in content and homogeneity in structure, mainly writing documents, holding meetings, and visiting and receiving guests. These three types of behavior have become the most important part of civil servants' work. Second, through historical tracing, it is argued that the emergence and changes of a “mountain of documents and a sea of meetings” are determined by historical power venues, depending on the design of political organizational structure, the pattern of political power relations, and the core values of political culture. Third, the characteristics of current civil servant behavior are determined by a specific bureaucratic structure. Centralized constraints, bureaucratic involution, and cultural inertia determine their behavioral rules. This book argues that the key to understanding this issue is not to deny these behaviors, but to improve these behaviors and their environment on the premise of acknowledging their necessity and rationality, and to enhance the effectiveness of civil servant behavior.