The word "cadre" in China is used to designate any person who plays a full or part time leading role in any area of political activity whether it be the government, the Communist Party, or the technicians in industry, agriculture, education and other areas employed by the government

Over the past 40 years in China, the main ways of entering the ranks of cadres have been:
　　--Giving cadre rank to graduates from the specialized secondary schools, colleges and universities in accordance with their academic records.
　　--Automatically conferring cadre rank on transferred army officers in accordance with their military ranks.
　　--Allowing a certain number of workers to become cadres each year where they are especially needed.

China's conventional cadre evaluation system is outdated. The country's current economic reform requires competent and honest government administrative personnel as referees to ensure its sound and rapid development.

The new system is mainly composed of three parts: merit evaluation, judgment and examination. In merit evaluation, the candidate's file records should be carefully examined first. Judgment includes the assessments of the candidate from his superiors, peers and subordinates. Although merit evaluations are usually reliable, they cannot always be accurate. To increase the accuracy of the evaluation system, examination is adopted. It requires all examinees to accomplish the same set of tasks under the same conditions and to be judged by the same standard. The examination is the best guarantee of fairness, openness and competitiveness.

Since the concept of establishing a new civil service system in China was adopted in recent years, many cadres are evaluated by holding a civil servant examination across the country every year.