Abstract

"Taylorization of the Government: The Chinese Administrative Efficiency Movement in the 1930s"

Buyun Gong, University of Bochum (Buyun.Gong@ruhr-uni-bochum.de)

From the beginning of the 1930s, members of the Nationalist elite launched an administrative efficiency movement that sought to rationalize China’s bureaucratic system. The movement was enthusiastically promoted by a new generation of Chinese political and administrative scientists, many of whom had recently completed their studies in the U.S. and were eager to replace value-laden politics with the ‘impartial scientific methods’ of Public Administration (PA). Although this movement was interrupted by the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, the gospel of efficiency continued in the “three-in-one” administrative system (xingzheng sanlianzhi) and work competition movement advocated by Chiang Kai-shek in wartime China.

This paper focuses on one specific aspect of the movement, namely, the diffusion of scientific management ideology into the domain of government and its discursive effects on the concept of politics. By examining early PA textbooks, monographs and journal articles published in Chinese, it deals with how Chinese PA scholars re-appropriated Sun Yat-sen’s definition of zhengzhi (politics) and re-framed it through the lens of Progressive managerialism. As a result, they almost universally championed the Wilsonian vision of government as an enterprise whose performance could and should be improved through business-like methods such as standardization and simplification. Another spill-over effect of Taylorism, I argue, is the temporalization of politics. Chinese PA scholars tended to justify the administrative efficiency movement by invoking a sense of urgency. This is especially true when they sought to transform the government into an efficient machine that can be objectively measured. Political debate and dissidence, once central to the May Fourth ideal of politics, were recast in this movement as a waste of time. In an emerging era of apolitical politics, the Taylorite program of increasing administrative efficiency shaped a new political culture that favored pragmatic activism while simultaneously legitimizing the Guomindang’s technocratic project of state-building.