Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 June 2008
China's township leaders have a bad reputation and the CCP is trying to find new ways to select them. This article first presents data on the education and careers of township leaders in one county in Yunnan, and then looks at two partly contradictory trends in cadre selection: exams and consultations.
* A first draft of this paper was presented as part of the 2005 Contemporary China Seminar Series, University of Oxford, Department of Politics and International Relations. I am grateful to the organisers and participants in the seminar for their helpful comments. I thank the Danish Social Science Research Council for supporting my fieldwork.