Governing Civil Service Pay in China

"While there are an increasing number of studies on the Chinese civil service system, important aspects of this system have not yet been subject to close investigation. This includes civil servants' salaries and non-monetary compensation. Alfred Wu remedies this lacuna by providing an overview of civil service pay in the People's Republic of China past and present. ... I do not hesitate to recommend Alfred Wu's much needed study. The book contains a wealth of factual information on the various civil service pay regimes in China and is very useful for anyone interested in how the civil servants, the backbone of Chinese government, are managed and remunerated." - Kjeld Erik Brodsgaard, Copenhagen Business School, in The China Journal, No. 75, 2015; "Civil service pay is not only a public economics topic related to public personnel and financial management, but also a controversial, highly sensitive subject deserving public debate. China is no exception. The academics (in China) have not accorded enough attention to this important public administration topic. ... Wu's book appears to fill in the gap." - Guang Zhang, School of Public Management, Xiamen University, in Journal of Public Administration, 5, 2015; "This interesting book focuses on a greatly under-explored topic of how the Chinese central government governs civil service pay. The author's fundamental arguments are that although central government has tried four waves of civil service pay reform since the foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949, China still has not found a strong solution to align cadres' motives to better public services and curb over-corruption within the complexities of central-local relations. ... The major contribution of Wu's work is to enrich governance theory with experience from China and to deepen our understanding of endogenous tensions within China's public administration system. It is more about theoretical application than theoretical innovation, and it displays a rich collection of empirical evidence and statistical data to support its theoretical arguments." - Yongjing Zhang, University of Ottawa, in Political Studies Review 14 (1), 2016; "Wu's research not only explores human resources management in the Chinese government, but also the politics of contemporary China. ... this should be an interesting book for scholars working on public administration in China because civil service pay is a neglected subject area and the author's fieldwork offers valuable data." - Joseph Yu-Shek Cheng, Department of Public Policy, City University of Hong Kong, in Journal of Comparative Asian Development, 14(3), 2015.