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In the absence of competitive popular elections for selecting the leaders of the party state, Chinese politics is often reduced to its informality. The present article calls into question the heuristic value of the distinction between formal and informal politics. In China, it is impossible to distinguish between these two ideal types for the system of political selection makes an institutional foundation of its leaders’ partiality. Taking the cadres of the CCP’s main youth organization, the Communist Youth League, as an example, I examine in detail political trajectories in contemporary China in order to grasp the complexity of the interpersonal relations that link officials to one another. In contrast to a widely held view of the party state as organized around established factional groups, I argue that the combination of very strong relations linked to the organizational hierarchy and weaker, horizontal ones developed by the cadres over the course of their careers put them at the center of multiple and varied networks of allegiance. It is this diversity of relations that nurtures the cadres’ individual loyalty to the system as a whole.