For over a century, the Western civil service model was hailed as the gold standard of modern governance. Today, especially in the US, we are witnessing loyalty replace merit and brazen corruption go unchecked. Drawing on China’s 2,000 years of bureaucratic history, Professor Fan Yongpeng argues that the system was a superficial transplant from the start and is now regressing to its feudal roots.
In recent years, news reports have increasingly suggested that the bureaucratic systems in the West—particularly in the United States—are in deep trouble.
It is not only outside observers who notice this; Americans themselves are worried. There has long been criticism of bureaucratic red tape, inefficiency, and corruption. Yet the U.S. government’s approach to solving these problems has been remarkably unconventional and differs significantly from China’s approach. During his first term, Donald Trump, frustrated by his inability to master the American bureaucratic machine, began lashing out at the “deep state”—which was understandable. But in his second term, his actions grew increasingly bizarre. First, he joined forces with Elon Musk in a radical “chainsaw” reform, abolishing agencies they deemed useless, firing large numbers of officials, and smashing many people’s other jobs. Then Trump and Musk fell out, and even the Department of Government Efficiency was abandoned. Trump began treating the government as his personal retinue, packing the White House with cronies, calling black white, indulging in sycophancy, self-glorification, and outright “victory narratives”—almost elevating himself to kingship. Reading Chinese history, we used to marvel at the absurd deeds of incompetent rulers and treacherous officials during the late Eastern Han, Eastern Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties (early 3rd century to late 6th century), and the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (10th century)—wondering how humans could act that way. Now, in just a few years, the U.S. has managed to replicate nearly all the classic cases of misrule from China’s millennia-long history.
After such upheaval, U.S. bureaucratic politics have become even more convoluted. Old problems remain unsolved, while new ones have proliferated. In summary, the current symptoms include the following:
I. The traditional principle of “civil service neutrality” has collapsed, replaced by political litmus tests and personal loyalty.
For decades, political science circles have extolled the core values of the Western civil service—“political neutrality” and merit-based promotion. Today, these values are being systematically supplanted by “political loyalty.”
In fact, a politically neutral Western civil service is little more than a myth. Already in the 1960s, the rise of the New Public Administration movement began challenging traditional notions of efficiency, economy, and rationality, criticizing value-neutral bureaucracy and rigid division of labor. In the 1980s, neoliberalism promoted marketization, outsourcing, and politicization, further challenging the traditional civil service—for example, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher broke with civil service conventions by appointing “special advisers” based on political alignment. Today, the Trump administration is pushing a “de-neutralization” reform, making personal loyalty to the president the core criterion, rendering neutrality and depoliticization increasingly farcical.
In February this year, new U.S. regulations reclassified approximately 50,000 previously protected career civil servants as “at-will” employees, allowing political appointees to dismiss them without traditional procedures. Critics have rightly called this a regression toward the “spoils system.” The spoils system refers to the pre-civil service era, when—after being influenced by China’s imperial examination system—Western nations only began establishing civil service systems in the late 19th century (the U.S. did so in 1883). Before that, the U.S. had no rational state bureaucratic apparatus; winning parties or politicians would distribute public resources, government positions, contracts, and benefits to political supporters, donors, and personal connections like gangsters dividing loot—a deeply corrupt practice. Today, barely a century after its establishment, the civil service system is already backsliding toward that spoils model.
II. Old forms of red tape and inefficiency persist, now compounded by new politicization and even fascist tendencies.
Although the recent reforms were ostensibly meant to address bureaucratic rigidity, the traditional inefficiency, incompetence, and waste caused by rigid rules have not been resolved at all—and may even be exacerbated by the new politicized reforms. Bureaucrats, seeing Trump’s reckless moves and powerless to stop them, either resort to passive resistance or pay lip service, further reducing their willingness to work.
Meanwhile, the politicization of certain agencies has worsened the situation. For example, Trump has used Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to systematically undermine the bedrock of civil service neutrality. ICE operates under direct White House instructions, often outside the law, engaging in politically motivated enforcement. Many mock ICE as Trump’s “Gestapo” and warn that the U.S. is sliding toward fascism.
III. Loss of professional expertise, undermining the very foundation of governance.
Massive political purges and brain drain are directly impairing the government’s capacity to formulate policy and manage the state effectively. For instance, diplomacy has hollowed out: the U.S. currently has over 100 key ambassadorial vacancies worldwide, many caused by the abrupt recall of career diplomats. The professional expertise in international relations, economics, and law accumulated by the civil service is being replaced by political loyalty. Some analysts have even suggested that the U.S. escalation toward conflict with Iran is linked to the lack of professional competence in Trump’s team—people with no understanding of war or strategy now hold the levers of military power, like ignorant children wielding deadly weapons, which is deeply alarming.
IV. Corruption persists, old and new forms compounding each other.
Finally, the old-style bureaucratic corruption remains utterly intractable, while newly installed officials—who owe their positions to political loyalty and nepotism—are even more brazen. Corruption has become more blatant and unapologetic, pushing the U.S. to new heights of venality.
In short, the current state of U.S. civil service politics is undergoing a pathological transformation—not merely the decay of aging institutions, but a pronounced regression. And it is not just the U.S.; European, Japanese, and South Korean civil service systems are also showing signs of stagnation, rigidity, and backsliding.
So the question arises: why has the Western civil service system—once boasted for over a century as advanced, modern, professional, and resilient—decayed so rapidly and is now regressing toward a pre-modern condition? I believe we can see more clearly when placed in historical perspective.
Western ancient bureaucratic development was quite limited. Influenced by China’s imperial examination system and bureaucracy, the West began establishing civil services only from the 19th century onward. However, the Western civil service is vastly different from China’s native bureaucratic system. Over two thousand years since the Qin unification (221BC), China’s bureaucracy underwent repeated trials, setbacks, and evolutions, reaching a high degree of sophistication by the mid-Qing dynasty (late 18th century), with deep-rooted foundations. In contrast, when bureaucratic systems spread to Europe and America, they took shallow root and remained underdeveloped. A preliminary comparison reveals the following differences:
1. China’s ancient bureaucracy was inseparable from imperial power, jointly constituting the state structure of a unified, centralized polity. The Chinese bureaucratic system was not merely an appendage of the emperor; it was a necessary and relatively autonomous partner, forming a “co-governance” with the crown. Western civil servants, however, cannot participate in high-level politics; they merely execute laws passed by legislatures and orders from political officials. Their instrumentality is more pronounced, because from birth they were embedded in electoral representative systems and multi-party politics, emerging from the highly feudal practices of patronage and spoils.
2. China’s ancient bureaucracy served as the “skeleton” supporting a unified state. China was a vast, populous, unitary empire, and the bureaucracy carried the core function of extending central authority to the localities. Without it, there would be no unified empire. Western nation-states, by contrast, are much smaller in scale, and their systems of unified statehood and local administration were established much later. Western civil services originally evolved from appendages of royal or parliamentary power, and their extension to the localities has never been fully completed. Larger Western states either adopt federalism or have strong local autonomy, so their vertical bureaucratic systems are underdeveloped. Others embrace separation of powers, with horizontal checks at both central and local levels, precluding a unified civil service. Finally, the logic of electoral politics dictates that civil service systems are merely executors of local or national representative bodies, making it impossible to form a nationwide rotating civil service.
3. China’s traditional bureaucracy blurred the line between political officials and career administrators—from zhixian (county magistrate) to zaixiang (the highest chief minister under the emperor), their official status was fundamentally the same. The Western civil service, by contrast, is built on status differentiation: for example, a strict politics-administration dichotomy exists everywhere, with political officials and career officials clearly separated. What are political officials? They are elected or politically appointed, bear political responsibility, and typically serve at the pleasure of the leader or cabinet. What are career officials? They are recruited through open examinations and responsible for implementation.
For a long time, mainstream Chinese scholarship glorified this dichotomy, regarding it as modern, professional, rational, and scientific. Some textbooks and encyclopedias even state outright that the distinction between political and career officials is the hallmark of a modern state, effectively excluding China from the modern category. Yet in recent years, it has become increasingly clear that this is not the case. Historically, political officials were largely tools for feudal aristocrats and the bourgeoisie to evade democratic constraints and control state power. In recent years, in the U.S. and elsewhere, they have shown their true colors as partisan and personal retainers. Career officials, meanwhile, are merely instrumental figures with neither political power nor political responsibility—in the U.S. federal government, they are simply employees, incapable of assuming leadership roles and under no obligation to serve the people. This distinction reflects a considerable feudal legacy within Western institutions.
4. China’s traditional bureaucratic politics carried high moral expectations—officials were to serve the emperor, uphold the Confucian orthodoxy, cultivate themselves, regulate their families, govern the state, and pacify all under heaven. Western civil service traditions, by contrast, often reduce bureaucratic professionalism to a baseline of “professional neutrality”—the faithful execution of laws and policies. Strictly speaking, they are not guan (officials) in the Chinese sense, but rather more like li (clerks).
Comparing the two, we see that in Chinese political civilization, bureaucracy is an integral part of the “complete package” of the commandery-county system, serving higher philosophical pillars. The West has fundamentally different philosophical pillars, and although it may borrow bureaucratic techniques, their nature and form are already distinct. Moreover, even as a technique, the Western civil service has developed for too short a time. It is only natural that it would prove to be a different kettle of fish altogether when transplanted into a different soil.
Hence, I venture to propose that Western political civilization now faces its own “Caudine Forks.” The ancient Romans suffered a humiliating defeat at the Caudine Forks, which became a byword for disgrace. Later, Marx borrowed the phrase to refer to the bloody and brutal stage of capitalist development experienced by Western European countries. His “Caudine Forks” question asked whether Eastern societies like Russia could bypass that painful capitalist process and leap into socialism. I adapt this concept to the history of political development.
Analogous to Western European capitalism, China’s political civilization has its own unique Caudine Forks—the two-thousand-year-long stage of unified, centralized bureaucratic politics. Of course, I do not use the term in a fully literal sense, because China’s two millennia of bureaucracy were not all disaster, suffering, and alienation; they also represented valuable experiments in advancing human political organization toward higher forms, contributing many positive elements to philosophical pillars of Chinese governance. The imperial examination system only became rigid (eight-legged essay) in its later period; it had played a huge progressive role and still retains vitality today. Liang Qichao, who once fiercely criticized the examinations, later called for their restoration in 1910, saying, “The examination system is not a bad institution.”
The “Caudine Forks” problem I pose for Western political civilization is this: can the West skip over the two-thousand-year stage of unified centralized bureaucratic politics that China experienced, and, building on medieval feudal aristocratic politics, enter directly into modernity through capitalist development, establishing a modern bureaucratic system?
In fact, this question has long attracted attention. Yan Fu, Liang Qichao, Sun Yat-sen, and Zhang Taiyan all pointed out that the West had not escaped feudalism, arguing that institutions like representative government were often variants of feudal systems. The Western civil service emerged during capitalist development, inspired by China, as a “compressed” institutional development—lacking the resilience of historical sedimentation and lacking spontaneous, fully matured holism and systematicity.
Consequently, Western civil service systems and state-building have been neither sufficient nor enduring, with various dysfunctions surfacing frequently. In recent years, as Western economic and social development has stagnated and its global hegemony approaches its end, the congenital deficiencies of its civil service politics have become more acute, giving rise to the chaotic scenes I described at the outset.
Of course, the overall changes in Western societies are fundamentally driven by the internal contradictions of capitalism. But specifically regarding the crisis of the civil service, it is clearly shaped by both the fundamental contradictions of capitalism and the historical confluence of multiple forces. The “Caudine Forks” proposition I offer may capture one part of that historical confluence. If this proposition holds, it may help explain many issues. Therefore, I call on everyone to step outside the myths surrounding Western institutions, to break free from the traps of traditional Western civil service theory, and to observe, understand, study, and diagnose the development of Western civil service—and indeed the entire political system—from new perspectives. This will help us understand Western systems more scientifically and rationally, and also help us see more clearly which path we ourselves should take.
Fan Yongpeng, Vice Director of the China Institute of Fudan University, Professor in Political Science.
