Elite Chinese Politics and Political Economy

My discussion with a CCP insider about whether there were two different types of officials in the CCP: Party cadres and central bureaucrats:

I would be interested in hearing what you mean by "deeper reason" for why
HU and Zhao favored the provinces more. INthe case of Zhao, I think he was
also trying to curry favor with Deng by giving money to Yang
Shangkun's province. Hu was known to travel to provinces and give them
various benefits. In fact, that was one of the complaints against him,
that he often intervened in economic affairs. I would be interested in
hearing why you think those two favored the local level so much.

As for Chen Yun, he did in fact have proteges at the provinces, in Jiangsu
and Shanghai. Li Zemin, the party secretary of Jiangsu for a long time,
was Chen's close follower, as was Jiang Zemin. However, there was no
clear indication that Chen did them any major favor in terms of more
investment, at least not to the extent that Zhao and Hu did. The fact
that Shanghai and Jiangsu got much less loans than Guangdong did during
the 80s attests to that. I also ran a regression and found that members
of the bureaucratic factions tend to give no favors to their followers in
the provinces.