# **Appendix B. Measuring promotions, lateral moves, and demotions**

We discuss how we use the CPED data to determine promotions and demotions in detail here. Our database has all city PSs for all prefecture-level administrative units from 2000 up to 2019.

We classify all PSs into nine groups by their ranks when they assumed office and when they left office. Each PS could be ranked at one of the three hierarchical levels when they assume (leave) office: the deputy-provincial level with the membership of provincial Party Standing Committee (PSC), the deputy-provincial level without the membership of provincial PSC,<sup>54</sup> or the prefecture level. We distinguish deputy-provincial level PSs by whether they are members of the provincial PSC or not because similar to the Politburo Standing Committee in the central committee, the provincial PSC is the highest decision-making bureau at the province level. Though most members in the provincial PSC hold the same administrative level with vice governors, vice directors of the provincial Party Congress, and vice-chairmen of the provincial PPCC, they maintain more real power. In total there are nine possible starting-ending level pairs for a city PS.<sup>55</sup> Because no PSs are downgraded from deputy-provincial level to prefecture-level during their tenure in the city secretaryship, we end up with seven groups of city PSs.

For a PS that does not experience a rank change during his tenure, we only need to compare the rank of the PS’s current position and that of his destination job. For a PS who experiences a rank change during the term, we compare the changing ranks within his tenure. Specifically, if his hierarchical level is from either a deputyprovincial level without provincial PSC membership or a prefectural level to a deputy-provincial level with provincial PSC membership, we regard this rank change as a promotion during his tenure. In contrast, if he loses the PSC membership during his term as the city secretary, this is a demotion.<sup>56</sup> Apart from this additional check of determining promotions and demotions for PSs who have a rank change during their term, we reclassify all the 7 PS groups into 3 classes based on their hierarchical levels when they leave office. The three groups are labeled as: class-A consisting of PSs of deputy-provincial level with the membership of the provincial PSC when leaving office; class-B consisting of PSs of the deputy-provincial level without membership of the provincial PSC when leaving office; and class-C consisting of PSs of the prefecture level when leaving office.

Next, we manually identify destination positions for all city party secretaries by exploring the rich information from the CPED data set. We categorize all these new jobs into 45 mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive groups. These 45 groups are:

- (1) Investigated for corruption or other illegal activities during the PS term, and it is categorized as a demotion for all PSs of class-A, B, and C.

- (2) Suspended or dismissed during the PS term. PSs in this group are usually those who make serious mistakes (from the upper government’s point of view) and take major responsibilities in public affairs. This case is also classified as a demotion for all three classes of PSs.

- (3) Died during the PS term: some city secretaries died of disease or accidents during their term while some PSs committed suicide in fear of investigation. Since public announcements rarely mention the latter case, we practically treat this case as a demotion.

- (4) Full and direct retirement after the PS term. Typically, local leaders do not retire in the full sense immediately after leaving office (Li and Zhou 2005). A city leader who approaches the retirement age will be placed in some honorary position in PC or PPCC (Wang, Zhang, and Zhou 2020). We follow Li and Zhou (2005) in grouping retirement and demotion together, and we label them as a demotion for all three classes of PSs.

> 54 This might be that the city secretary also holds a deputy-provincial level position at the same time other than the provincial PSC membership, for example, the vice governorship, the vice directorship of the provincial People’s Congress (PC) or the vice chairmanship of the provincial People’s Political Consultative Conference (PPCC).

> 55 For PSs whose rank is changed to the deputy-provincial level with provincial PSC membership, we modify the timeline to six months before they leave office to accommodate the fact that provincial Party Congress mostly take place in the middle of the year, around half a year before the annual meeting of the city People’s Congress.

> 56 For example, Mr. Yan Rongzhu, who became the party secretary of Yantai, a coastal prefecture level city in Shandong Province in June 2001, was a prefecture level PS at the time when he took office. In April 2004, he became a member in the Shandong Provincial PSC but still remained his office in Yantai until two and half years later when he returned to the provincial capital and became a fulltime member of the PSC in charge of propaganda affairs. When we measure his career path in his tenure as the party secretary in Yantai, we regard the level change in April 2004 as a promotion since his hierarchical level was increased from prefecture to deputyprovincial while see his transfer from the city party secretary to the full-time provincial PSC member in October 2006 as a lateral move as both positions are of the same level (membership of the provincial PSC).

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