Cadre system of the Chinese Communist Party

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) maintains a system to train, organize, appoint, and oversee personnel to fulfill a wide range of civil service-type roles in party, state, military, business, and other organizations across the People's Republic of China. The system is composed of the several million full-time, professional staff.

China is a one-party state under the CCP. The management of cadres is one of the key ways in which the leadership of the CCP controls Chinese society and disciplines the state and the party itself. Personnel must keep allegiance to the CCP and not develop any competing loyalties. To this end, the CCP enforces tight restrictions on the freedom of cadres to affiliate themselves with any other organizations, movements, ideologies, or activities or to practice any form of religion (although this last rule is sometimes not fully applied or can be partly evaded under certain circumstances). Cadres are not always official members of the party, but most of them are, and those who are not are usually limited to much more technical or specialist roles than their party-member colleagues, with little or no involvement in explicitly political matters. Cadres are trained to be not only competent and dependable administrators but also unwaveringly faithful to the party line and to the pursuit of socialism with Chinese characteristics.