When Chinese government roles are being changed, the key issues are to identify what new competencies civil servants are supposed to have and in what method to evaluate the competencies.Even though governments from top to down in different levels have actively set up their respective competency standards, the way of developing competency standards is so far restricted in qualitative methods. Quantitative methods and empirical studies are still scarce. Therefore, the pertinence, applicability and guiding effect of these competency models developed only through experience have been severely affected while their reliability and validity are statistically not fully tested. Besides, the competency instruments to measure civil servants' competency level are also in scarity. The pertinence and effectiveness of training have also been affected without operational competency scales.The subject of the study is focused on civil servants in middle-level leadership positions in municipal governments. The paper develops a Competency Questionnaire of Civil Servants in leadership positions and a Competency Model composed of nine dimentions by using empirical study methods.Critical incident technique is firstly applied to interview 32 civil servants. An initial civil servants'competency dictionary and a behavior-based competency questionnaire were developed. Four survey studies are conducted with 3218 questionnaires all together collected. Quantitative methods such as cross-validation and nomological validity are used to test reliability, validity and the prediction to job performance of the questionnaire and the competency model. Civil servants' performance structure is also discussed and two dimensions of task performance and contextual performace are identified.The results reveal that the competency of civil servants in leadership positions is a multi-dimentional construct, which can be reflected by behavior and can predict job performance. The civil servant competency model is composed of nine dimensions of developing others, communicating & relationship building, political stand, decision making, continuous learning, expertise, cognitive thinking, public service orientation and law-based administrating. Nine dimensions are further categorized into six competency clusters by high-order analysis. Causal relation is also identified among six categories.This study has made contributions to human resource development in three aspects.