Handbook of China's Governance and Domestic Politics

Chris Ogden, Chris Ogden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136579530
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politischer Prozess

This Handbook provides an in-depth overview of how China is governed, how its domestic political system functions and the critical issues that it currently faces. Governed by the world's largest political party in the world's longest-ruling Communist regime, China is undergoing a transitional period of rapid economic and social development. How this period is managed will have significant implications for the Chinese state and its population concerning China's governance structures and economy, as well as the country's justice, public health, education and internal/external security concerns. This transition to a modern state is not without its challenges – particularly in terms of how the Chinese state deals with diverse issues such as social inequality, corruption, separatism, increasing individualism and political reform.

China's governance and domestic politics also have possible major global consequences, especially in the context of China's continued rise within the international system. This Handbook will improve understandings of the core national dynamics of this rise and, as levels of international interdependence with China increase, can offer vital insights concerning China's domestic attributes. Gaining a better knowledge of China's internal workings can also help better appreciate the multiple and varied problems that China's leaders will face in the coming decades. Critically, many of the core internal issues facing China also have potential external repercussions, principally in terms of rising social unrest, nationalism, environmental degradation, resource shortages and attitudes towards globalization. This book aims to cover these issues and will help readers to fully comprehend China's ongoing contemporary global significance.

Part I Organizational principles

1 The CCP and the one-party state

Kerry Brown

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) remains one of the most difficult political forces in the modern world to categorize and understand. With 80 million members, it is the world’s largest political party; however, it shares very few characteristics with political parties in liberal democracies, and trying to see it simply as a political party along the same lines as those creates immediate conceptual problems. One of these is trying to define how the CCP relates to other forces of government within the People’s Republic of China, and with other constituent elements in Chinese society. This is not helped by the fact that the CCP is intrinsically secretive so that even its budget, and much of its inner decision-making processes, is poorly understood. This uniqueness has prompted some commentators to say that the CCP has more in common with a multinational business than a political party (McGregor 2010).

There are three ways to try to come to grips with what the CCP is. The first is to look at its historical background, its evolution from its foundation in 1921, and the key challenges that it has faced in the last nine decades of its existence. The second, which is closely linked to the first, is to look at how, through its ideology and the articulation of its political programme, it has justified itself, and explained what it has done. The third is to look at the practical ways in which it is organized, how it elects and appoints leaders, and conducts its own business. The CCP is primarily confusing because it has radically transformed itself during its history, both from a party of revolution and change before 1949 and the foundations of the People’s Republic of China, to one of governance after then, and from a Party which saw its primary task until 1978 and the start of the reform and opening up period as class struggle, to one which, post-1978, placed economic productivity as its key performance benchmark.

What has remained consistent throughout its history has been the commitment to placing itself at the vanguard of modernity. This was as true in 2007, when the then Party Secretary Hu Jintao talked at the 17th Party Congress that year of the CCP bringing China forward into the 21st century and creating a modernizing society, culture and economy, as it was in 1921, when the Party was seen as importing progressive ideals from the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and other sources of revolutionary inspiration.

History

The CCP defines its legitimacy, at least in its own narratives, as based upon three fundamental achievements (Kallio 2011). The first was being part of the United Front that won the war against the Japanese; the second was winning the Civil War from 1946 to 1949 and unifying the country; and the third was starting the reform and opening up period in 1978, which has lifted many millions out of poverty and regenerated China’s economy, changing its place in the world. Getting a consistent narrative that has been acceptable to all wings and flanks of the CCP has, however, proven difficult. In 1945, while in Yan’an, the Party produced a resolution on the meaning of its own history from 1921 up to that day, stressing its revolutionary objectives, and redefining its application of Leninism to the specific conditions in China where the main base for support was not the proletariat in cities, but the agricultural workers (Mao 1965: 177–225). In 1981, after the instability and contention of the final era of Mao Zedong, its preeminent leader from 1942 to 1976, the Party pulled consensus around the redefinition of its primary purpose reached at the third Plenum of the 11th Party Congress in December 1978. This consensus was achieved by issuing judgement on the Maoist period in the ‘Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China’, issued in 1981, in which mistakes were admitted, and a new direction towards economic productivity and tolerance of the non-state sector was sanctioned. In 2011, after many years of research and refinement, the first comprehensive official history of the CCP was produced, running up to 1978. In this, the achievements of the CCP in its early decades in power were justified, and given an overall framework (CCP Party History Office 2011).

The latest history, in fact, clarifies two things. The first of these is that the CCP’s greatest achievements were always linked with nationalism, and with a strong definition of the CCP, which, while being an international movement, supported a programme of national greatness and strength. In 1956 Mao talked of China aiming, under the CCP, to move from being ‘a poor country … changed into a rich country, a country denied her rights into a country enjoying her rights’ (Mao 1957, quoted in Lewis 1963: 261). In 2008 Hu Jintao talked of China aiming to be ‘a rich, strong, democratic, civilized and harmonious socialist modernized country’ (fuqiang minzhu wenmin hexie de shehuizhuyi xiandaihua guojia ) (Hu 2009: 21). This strong commitment to a robust definition of national self-interest has remained consistent since 1949.

The second key feature is the need for the CCP to create a ‘unified view’, to be consensus driven, and to be at the heart of the political life of the country. In the 2011 Party History, the CCP is seen as rising to power at the heart and head of an alliance of farmers and workers, but it was also the key feature of the United Front, an alliance of forces, regional, social and political, of which the CCP took the lead. The institutional topography after 1949, with the creation of consultative bodies like the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and the National People’s Congress (NPC) all served to acknowledge this element of what Mao called ‘new democracy’. The CCP as the supreme expression of the collective interests of the Chinese people and of their views took root in this way.

How the CCP has been able to change its fundamental revolutionary programme and ideologically justify this, remains at the heart of its distinctive ability to survive as a political force when the Communist Party in the USSR, for instance, fell by the wayside. In evaluations of why the USSR Communist Party fell in 1991, Chinese academics and analysts returned to one theme—that the Russian leaders had failed in their primary responsibility to place economic performance as their key task. That the collapse of the USSR was an existential shock for the CCP is undisputed, but the CCP’s response was to deepen its commitment to economic reforms, even as it put more work into ideological and party-building projects (Munro 2008: 42).

This fundamental movement from class struggle being the key challenge in the Maoist era to the economy taking centre stage has been one of the great policy shifts of any ruling party in a major state in modern times. From 1949 to 1976 the CCP increasingly came under attack from movements inspired by the charismatic leadership of one man: Mao. In the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 onwards, it and its elite leaders became Mao’s victims, with the Ninth Party Congress in 1969 dominated by military leaders because the CCP leaders had been decimated. While China enjoyed stable economic growth from 1949 onwards, the simple fact was that, in the words of John King Fairbank, ‘by the time Mao died, his revolution was dead too’ (Fairbank 1987: 341). The new political direction could not disrupt the narrative of CCP achievements before 1978, but had to stake out new territory to allow a loosening up of central state controls, an urgent injection of structure and energy into the agricultural sector which was moribund, and to give credibility and legitimacy to the elite Party leadership that finally replaced Mao. In the 1980s this ideology was expressed through the term ‘socialist market economy’, something finally enshrined in the Party and State Constitution in 1992.

Ideology

That ideology is important, despite the frequent claims that China is now a country run by a non-ideological Party, is testified by the 2,000 plus Party schools spread at provincial and central level across the country (Pieke 2009). In these, Party cadres are trained and equipped with the kind of administrative skills needed to govern a modernizing, rapidly changing, and fast-growing economy. Indeed, without this training, the careers of many officials would be inhib-ited because it is on the back of demonstrating a record of training that they are assessed for promotion by the all-important CCP Organization Department, in charge of personnel decisions. The promotion criteria, who judges and how they judge remain highly opaque. That this kind of bureaucratic structure was the very sort of thing that Mao had tried to avoid is only one of the many striking changes of a ruling Party that has increasingly been run by a tightly defined elite. That this bureaucratic structure has melded so well on to the historic template of central and provincial rule in China is another. The shift in Party leadership from a military elite in the early decades after 1949 to a technocratic and civilian one since 1978 is a final notable feature. The victors in this process have never been those who were originally in the strongest position.

Despite discussions since 1978, as part of the reform process, about defining the responsibilities and roles of the Party and the government, this issue remains vexed. China’s governance is a two-pillar system. On the one hand, there are the formal institutions of ministerial and administrative rule. These are gathered at the national level in the State Council, in the 29 central ministries dealing with issues like finance, trade, health and other areas, and led at the provincial level by governors and their various officials. Office holders of these do not have to be Party members, though they almost always are. They simply take the articulations of national policy that have been arrived at by the CCP and then implement them. Running alongside these are Party structures at national and local level—and these reach into every institution, and even into non-state actors, acting as a kind of ‘framework’ or environment in which the CCP almost never ...