The Career Path Into Urban Chinese Professional Elite

After modifying the"new class"theories and reforming the common comparative mobility model, Andrew Walder presented us a model of dual paths into elites in urban China. It says that party membership and education may have had different effects in administrative and professional careers. Only recently has college education improved a high school graduate's odds of becoming an elite administrator, while it has always been a virtual prerequisite for a professional position. On the other hand, party membership, always a prerequisite for top administrative posts, has never improved the odds of becoming an elite professional.This paper focused on the professional elites and their career paths. The author applied her attention to figure out the relationship between education and party membership which both play roles in professional elite path. And the paper declared that, rising educational levels and increasing emphasis on skill and training in recruitment, reflect an unmistakable secular trend toward meritocratic and universalistic criteria for promotion and upward mobility. But it seems that there are clear distinctions between elite professionals and elite administrators in urban China, and the positions with less authority, income, and welfare are distributed to the professionals. The author presented some policy suggestions about this.What's more, besides supplementing the dual career paths, this paper animadverted on Walder's visual angle of interest groups,and brought forward some new viewpoints.