Tournament System,Promotion Game and Local Political Theatre

As Chinese government officials are concerned,political tournament system is a kind of encouragement paradigm with pressure and a political environment without choice.The basic operation mode of political tournament system consists of administrative contract,quantitative assessment,performance rating and merit promotion and so on.However,the field surveys show that the promotion of the grass-roots government officials is often determined by multiple causes in the "front and back" stages,and such background factors as factional relations,political background,social networks can determine whether an official is promoted or not.With the township cadres in a county-level city as observing targets,the purpose of this paper is to examine the explanatory power of political encouragement paradigm(tournament system) in the competitive promotion of local government officials.This paper has also provided a preliminary description of typology for the promotion of the grass-roots officials and it is found that there are three basic types of promotion game,that is,election game,ranking game and power-based game.Especially,this paper has proposed a political theater model of determining factors for the promotion of the grass-roots officials and concludes that,in political tournament system,democratic centralism will increasingly play a very important role in the selection,appointment and promotion of the grass-roots officials in the future.