Hao CHEN (University of Southern California), Saul WILSON (Harvard University),
Yuhua WANG (Harvard University)

Prevailing wisdom attributes to local officials much of the economic dynamism of the early reform period. Those local officials were the product of a wholesale transformation of the Chinese political elite undertaken by the reformist leadership in the early 1980s, ushering out Mao-era elites and replacing them with younger, professionalized cadres. We show how thoroughgoing was the removal of Mao-era elites by examining the removal of military leaders, Cultural Revolutionaries, and older Mao-era elites during the 1982--1984 administrative reforms. Gleaned from organizational histories and yearbooks, this new dataset extends from the provincial level to the township level and from the founding of the party to the present, opening the door to much deeper insights into temporal and geographic variation in cadre management.