In the office, everyone was hotly debating the case of the Wuhan University female government-track trainee who had refused her posting to a direct city-level unit in Jiayuguan. A political commissar officer walked in, and his words cut through the noise: “Comrades, you’re still treating this as after-dinner gossip without grasping the real danger here. Government-track trainees are reserve cadres selected through the organization’s screening standards and filtering processes, layer by layer. After two years of grassroots training, these reserve cadres are promoted to more important positions to shoulder greater responsibilities. Ten years from now, these people will become the backbone — even the heads — of their respective units. So the reserve cadres selected through the organization’s screening mechanisms and investigative interviews should be people with firm convictions, strong organizational discipline, clean backgrounds, outstanding abilities, and the right attitude. What makes this incident serious is not whether Jiayuguan is some backward frontier outpost — it’s that this woman single-handedly announced to all of society the complete failure of this organizational screening mechanism and selection process.”
To see the large in the small, to perceive the significant in the subtle — no wonder even official outlets like People’s Daily personally stepped into the arena to argue that someone like her leaving the organization is actually a good thing. And Wuhan University’s statement reads more like a political signal sent upward: the majority of trainees our school cultivates are people of conviction… Although it’s unclear exactly how she sailed through all the repeated screening and assessments, one thing is certain: the face she showed the organization during those screening processes was very different from her true character. If this woman could evade the organization’s screening and assessment mechanisms through performance and deception, then others like her can do so just as easily.
And this group is even better positioned than outsiders to qualify. Over time, our cadre ranks will become filled with these opportunists — and there will be no way to tell them apart. Ten to fifteen years from now, these opportunists will occupy core positions in every unit, even leadership roles. At that point, the entire organization will be captured by this group. Once the organization’s ideology and administrative reach can no longer penetrate the nodes in the chain of command — and those nodes start deceiving their superiors, concealing things from below, and colluding with each other for personal gain — the entire chain of command collapses.
About six years ago, after watching the TV drama The Advisors Alliance, I wrote a review titled “Looking East, East — What I See Is Time.” The core argument was simple: as social governance grows increasingly complex, the threshold for becoming a functional component of the governing apparatus will rise ever higher. Fewer and fewer families will be able to invest the enormous upfront costs needed to cultivate their children into such components. In the future, the only pool from which the apparatus can draw its replacement parts will be the children of those same families — no matter how rigorous the screening, it will always come back to this same group.
— Commander, 2024-05-31 20:26
This group will, from the very beginning, deliberately shape their children to meet precisely these standards. They also have a far clearer understanding of how to navigate the organization’s screening and testing mechanisms, so naturally their pass rates will be higher. Over time, this will give rise to a new Nine-Rank System (九品中正制) — the medieval aristocratic model where birth determined rank. This trend is accelerating.
Another consequence of this trend is the regional pooling and stagnation of people and resources, intensifying internal competition, growing regional imbalance, and deepening structural distortion across the whole system. What harm does this cause? Think about how the An Lushan Rebellion came about and you’ll understand. Resources from Hedong were continuously extracted to feed the Guanlong Clique in Hexi — their descendants were the only candidates for building the entire governing apparatus, monopolizing every channel of advancement while doing nothing to solve real problems. And those with the ability and genuine will to solve those problems had no opportunity to act or rise, and so they drifted to Hedong and gathered around An Lushan. This kind of structural distortion operates like a great fire — it will utterly consume the splendor of an era as brilliant as the High Tang.
Student 473: Commander, how can this trend be reversed?
2024-05-31 20:31
Commander replies to Student 473: What became of the Six Dynasties? Nothing but private calculations behind family gates. The laws of history and the bedrock of human nature cannot be reversed — only delayed.
2024-05-31 20:33