With approximately 30 million students the Chinese higher education system is the largest in the world. In every publicly funded institution there is a communist party secretary, however, little is known about these party secretaries. The purpose of the study was to understand who these people were. We collected data from 1,751 party secretaries in Chinese higher education institutions and grouped party secretaries into eight types according to the institutions where they worked. We conducted multidimensional scaling analysis and cluster analysis to explore the differences among the eight party secretary types and to put them into categories. In addition, we compared the findings from this study to those from another study investigating the characteristics of higher education institution presidents to examine the differences between party secretaries and presidents. We conclude that party secretaries from whom data were collected are on average 55 years old, 92 percent are males, 76 percent are at the rank of professor, 29 percent have a doctorate degree, and 9 percent have an overseas degree. The eight types of party secretaries can be put into two categories; those in the first category are older, have been in position longer, and more of them have a doctorate degree. In comparison, party secretaries are more likely to be administrative leaders whereas presidents are more likely to be academic leaders.