Chinese Personnel and Organization Work Timeline (组织人事工作大事记)
What this is:
Below, you will find an interactive visualization / explorer for personnel and organization work in the Chinese Reform Era (1978-1997). In total, there are about 2700 organization work entries and 170 personnel work entries. Naturally, there’s some overlap between these entries, but they are not the same, and even when they note the same event, the events are glossed differently.
I compiled these entries from three sources I collected, scanned, OCR’d, and manually corrected: first, three timelines of significant events from the Research Office of the Central Organization Department: one covering 1978-1988, another covering 1989-1992, and a third covering 1993-1997. These were dedicated publications that cover not just relevant meetings, speeches, the release of relevant reports, and some statistics, but also the appointments and removals of significant figures. To these, I also added a less-exhaustive set of “personnel work” events from Xu and Sun’s 2009 book, “Reform of China’s Personnel Institutions, 1978-2008” (for the overlapping years).1
As you explore, please do note that the format of the entries changes over time; while some entries were possible to separate, other entries list multiple discrete events that took place on the same day.2
I hope that this resource will be useful anyone interested in the changes in Chinese history, the study of institutional reform, organization work, or personnel appointments in China for this period.
Explore the data!
Below you should be able to explore the (translated) data in an interactive way. If it’s not working or displaying correctly, or if you’d like to view the original Chinese, please check out the shiny app version.