After joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, China’s total international trade volume has increased five times. Does this change in international trade have an impact on Chinese politics? How does the Chinese government react to the economic changes resulting from international trade?

As a centralized political system, the Chinese government has played an important role in the country’s rapid economic growth in the past decades and has been  implementing export-oriented strategies since the 1980s. Aside from drawing up the economic and social policies, choosing the right person to implement the policy is also an important task of the government. In this article, we attempt to answer the question on how the Chinese government relocates its officials or human capital inside the system to achieve its economic goal.

The central government increases the number of officials assigned to non-export-oriented provinces to promote local exportation. To address the widely existing endogenous problem in the political assignment problem, the WTO is treated as an exogenous factor. The effects of the WTO on different areas in China are not uniform: greater influence is noticeable on the coastal areas than the inner land areas. Therefore, we use difference in difference method to examine the effect of the WTO on the cross-province official assignment. 

Results indicate that the WTO significantly increases the promotion probability of the officials from the export-oriented provinces to the non-export-oriented provinces. However, the officials from the export-oriented provinces do not necessarily have higher promotion probability to the central government or other export-oriented provinces. Furthermore, the officials transferred from the export-oriented provinces significantly improve the exportation in the non-export-provinces.