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China Personnel and Job Mobility
From one perspective the most important element of China's
science and technology system is its human capital--its trained
scientists and engineers. By the 1980s it was widely recognized in
the Chinese press that scientists, like all intellectuals, had been
poorly treated, underpaid, and burdened with difficult living
conditions that reduced their productivity. In many cases
scientists' abilities were wasted because they were assigned to
jobs outside their expertise or because their institute already had
all the professionals in their field it needed and there was no way
for them to change jobs
(see Educational Investment
, ch. 4). Many
Chinese science policy writers were familiar with the conclusion of
Western specialists that scientific progress and the effective
application of science to practical problems are facilitated by
personnel mobility. Accordingly, the March 1985 party Central
Committee decision called for reform of the personnel system to
promote a "rational flow" of scientific and technical personnel.
Throughout the late 1980s, however, job mobility and attempts
to place scientists where their talents could have the greatest
effect were the aspect of reform in which least was achieved.
Transfer of scientists from one unit to another remained a major
step, and a relatively infrequent one. According to the State
Science and Technology Commission, 2 percent of scientists and
engineers changed work units in 1983, and only 4 percent in 1985.
Personnel still required the permission of their work unit heads to
transfer, and that permission often was withheld. Many directors of
institutes were accused of having a "feudal mentality," that is,
regarding personnel as part of their unit's property.
The State Council reiterated in the mid-1980s that scientists
and engineers had the right to do consulting work in their spare
time. In practice, however, such spare-time consulting often
created problems within the work unit as some institute directors
attempted to confiscate payments for consulting or even to charge
their personnel in the local courts with corruption and theft of
state property. Although the press gave considerable publicity to
scientists who had left the "iron rice bowl" of a Chinese Academy
of Sciences institute to start their own business or to join a
growing collective or rural factory, such resignations remained
relatively rare. Possibly more common were practices whereby
institutes detailed their personnel on temporary consulting
contracts to productive enterprises.
The difficulties in transferring scientific personnel even when
the Central Committee and the State Council made it official policy
demonstrated the significance of China's unique work-unit system of
employment and economic organization and the obstacles it presented
to reform. Allowing personnel to decide for themselves to move out
of the work units to which the state and the party assigned them
would be a major break with the practices that have become
institutionalized in China since 1949. Some observers believe that
because of its potential challenge to the authority of the party,
which controls personnel matters in all work units, job mobility
for scientists, even though it would promote scientific
productivity and the growth of the economy, may be too extreme a
reform to be feasible
(see Differentiation
, ch. 3).
Data as of July 1987
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