ABSTRACT
The Secretariat is different from the Politburo in important respects. It is a smaller group. A larger proportion of its members are specialists or technocrats, directly supervising institutions in their areas of expertise. The Party apparatus has primacy over government institutions in China, the Party Secretariat clearly is senior to the State Council. Hu Yaobang himself, who as Party general-secretary heads the Secretariat and formally is the highest-ranking member of the Party has spent virtually all of his career in Party work. Hao Jianxiu, a woman and by far the youngest member of the Secretariat, is another good example of China's younger technocrats. Starting as a worker in a textile plant in Qingdao, she became a technician and then a deputy director of a plant. Another important group under the Secretariat that deals with certain aspects of foreign affairs is the already-mentioned International Liaison Department.
