cadres in leadership positions.<sup>12</sup> On average, mayors and Party secretaries at county and municipal levels tend to serve between three and four years before moving on to their next assignment (Seckington, 2007; Mei, 2009; Eaton and Kostka, 2014). For instance, data on 898 former municipal Party secretaries appointed across China between 1993 and 2011 reveal that the average time in office was 3.8 years, 1.2 years shorter than the recommended tenure time for cadres in leadership positions (see _Box 5_ ). Beyond the leadership group, departmental heads with a key role in environmental policy implementation also rotate on average every four years. For instance, the average time served as head of a provincial DRC, the head of a provincial EPB, and the head of a provincial Construction Bureau was 3.6 years, 4.0 years, and 4.6 years, respectively (Kostka, 2013).

_Table 1_ summarizes the pros and cons of the cadre turnover system and its effects on environmental policy implementation. Frequent post-shuffling among local cadres can help to bridge departmental gulfs, an eternal problem in China’s huge and fragmented bureaucracy. Circulating cadres between different administrative levels can also enhance communication across administrative levels and improve cadres’ knowledge of upper or lower governments’ daily tasks. Job rotations through state-owned enterprises can also aid effective environmental governance; cadres with previous work experience in state-owned enterprises can draw from their knowledge of enterprises’ decision-making processes and internal politics and thus negotiate more effectively with enterprise managers on implementation of onerous environmental regulations (Eaton and Kostka, 2014).

Although cadre rotation has some benefits for environmental policy implementation, there are also significant downsides to the rotation system. Short tenure cycles incentivize cadres to prioritize short-term over long-term gains. For instance, a series of short-staying mayors and Party-secretaries in Datong City, Shanxi province, had reputations for extracting rents from local industries while avoiding the painful restructuring Datong urgently needed (Eaton and Kostka, 2013). In addition, frequent rotation of leading cadres can be disruptive to local development planning. Newly-posted cadres frequently stop existing initiatives, regardless of their merits, in order to place their own stamp on a locality. Finally, in the space of a three- or four- year tenure, circulating officials spend much of their time simply getting up to speed in their new localities and their limited knowledge of local circumstances can result in suboptimal environmental policy outcomes (Eaton and Kostka, 2014). Once leading cadres move on to a new post, they are also no longer held responsible for environmental outcomes of their previous actions. This inability to hold cadres responsible for environmental damage after they leave a post prompted Xi Jinping’s recent call for “lifetime accountability” for cadres (South China Morning Post, 2013).

> 12 The five-year tenure limit is, in reality, a firm recommendation rather than a hard and fast rule. A 1999 CCP Organization Department document set ten years as the absolute limit for cadres in leading position but rules stating that cadres change positions at five year intervals is phrased in the language of “should” ( _yinggai_ ) rather than “must” ( _bixu_ ). This flexibility explains why some cadres have tenures longer than five years.

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