Promoting Meritocracy through Recognition: The Post-recognition Career Trajectories of China’s Model County Party Secretaries

The increasingly proactive role of central authority in managing subprovincial leaders is understudied and our understanding of the function of political recognition in contemporary China remains inadequate. By adopting an expanded view of political meritocracy and using difference-in-differences analysis of original data about China’s model county Party secretaries, we demonstrate the ramifications of political recognition in generating a merit-based fast track and find that the recognition of model county Party secretaries has a lasting positive impact on recipients’ subsequent career advancement, although this impact is uneven. These findings enhance our understanding of the role of centrally bestowed political honours in promoting meritocracy, the non-institutionalized soft measures in shaping political incentives and the central–local interaction in the dynamics of political recognition in contemporary China.