South Korea, "senior Civil Service Group" System

Changes to a society come about day by day. Therefore, "reasonable structures don't exist in many departments and branches of a government, and administrative reforms are endless." I believe that the study on "senior civil service group" in South Korea will enrich the theory on personnel management and promote administrative reforms of our government. The study of South Korea's "senior civil service group" system will contribute to the development of theory of administrative personnel reforms, which is determined by the conditions that all the countries in the world survive in the same era and universal rules of administrative management always apply for all the governments. Economic globalization has blurred distinctions between "domestic and international" affairs, which means that it is very urgent to enhance the internationalization and international competitiveness of administrative personnel system. Undoubtedly the knowledge and information-based trend increases the degree of democratization of administrative personnel system, and provides a severe challenge to the traditional mode of it as well. In this way, the analysis and research on the background and content of "senior civil service" system in South Korea plays a very important role in promoting the part of theory. Secondly, compared with western countries, South Korea carries out a different development path and stage as a rising industrialized nation in Asia. Not only that, its political and administrative culture, such as authoritarianism, familism, formalism, desinism and equalitarianism, is totally different to specific cultural features in European and Anglo-American countries, like liberalism and individualism. Hence, an innovation of this paper is the choice of research object. I focus on the South Korean-style "senior civil service system", instead of rushing to take personnel systems of the Europe or the United States as the main body in my study. It will exert a profound impact on administrative reforms in East Asian countries, including China, particularly on content, process and strategy choices of the senior civil service system.On the one hand, senior civil servants, the backbone and elite of government, usually undertake the important task of explaining and converting the government's program and macro planning into some feasibility decisions. On the other hand, they take a major duty of supervision, under the premise of the fact that a large number of government affairs are accomplished outside the government through some ways of contract, outsourcing and agreement. As Professor Zhang Chengfu suggests, senior civil servants are the most important capital and assets of our government, and they play a very important role during the process of governing a country.Above all, this paper starts with international and domestic background of implementation of South Korea's "senior civil service group" system, because the creation and development of any system are not accomplished in vacuum and the choice of systems and ideas is restricted by administrative environment and historical conditions. We should make a research from the angle of combination of theory and practice, instead of making a study simply for a study. This lay the foundations of the theoretical analysis and study. Then I introduce the main content of the South Korea's "senior civil service group" system, which is the main body of the paper. Through explanation and definition of some key elements about the system in this part, I hope to grasp real substance of the whole system and critically assimilate whatever is beneficial. From both a rational and realistic point of view, I'll give a brief analysis of the direction of "senior civil service group" system in South Korea. Finally, I may propose the significance of South Korea's "senior civil service group" system for China's personnel system reform of senior cadres.