China's Administration and Civil Service Reform: An Introduction

To promote economic development, Chinese policymakers have implemented many policies to reform their country's administration and civil service system since the late 1970s. In the area of civil service reform, the Chinese government adopted the Provisional Regulations on State Civil Servants in 1993 and then the Law of Civil Servants in 2005 to emphasize professional personnel management concepts and methods in the Chinese civil service. This symposium introduction provides a brief review of the development of reform policies and a summary of five articles that examine concepts and cases of government reforms, values present in the civil service reform, challenges in appraising employee performance, experiences of civil service training, and lessons of pay reform as it relates to public corruption. The overall re-form lessons and their implications are discussed in the conclusion section.