On March 28, 2026, Doctoral Researcher Buyun GONG of the Research Training Group 2833 “East Asian Futures” gave a presentation titled “Taylorization of the Government: The Chinese Administrative Efficiency Movement in the 1930s” at the 2026 Conference “Co-Creation” organized by the Business History Conference (BHC) at the Imperial College London, Mr. GONG’s talk was part of the conference’s “Session 5b: Rationalizing Chinese Management across the Public-Private Divide, 1930s–1950s”, chaired by Peter Hamilton, PhD (University of Bristol).

In his presentation, Mr. GONG focused on one specific aspect of the Chinese administrative efficiency movement in the 1930s, namely, the diffusion of scientific management ideology into the domain of government and its discursive effects on the concept of politics. By examining early PA textbooks, monographs and journal articles published in Chinese, it dealt with how Chinese PA scholars re-appropriated Sun Yat-sen’s definition of zhengzhi (politics) and re-framed it through the lens of Progressive managerialism. As a result, they almost universally championed the Wilsonian vision of government as an enterprise whose performance could and should be improved through business-like methods such as standardization and simplification. Another spill-over effect of Taylorism, as Mr. GONG argued, is the temporalization of politics. Chinese PA scholars tended to justify the administrative efficiency movement by invoking a sense of urgency. This is especially true when they sought to transform the government into an efficient machine that can be objectively measured. Political debate and dissidence, once central to the May Fourth ideal of politics, were recast in this movement as a waste of time. In an emerging era of apolitical politics, the Taylorite program of increasing administrative efficiency shaped a new mode political culture that favored pragmatic future-making while simultaneously legitimizing the Guomindang’s technocratic project of state-building.