China's New Governing Party Paradigm

Political Renewal and the Pursuit of National Rejuvenation

Timothy R. Heath

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317167105
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For the first time since its founding in 1921, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has adopted a new paradigm for its role in China. Abandoning its former identity as a 'revolutionary party', the CCP now regards itself as a 'governing party' committed to meeting the diverse needs of its people and realizing China's revitalization as a great power. To enhance its ability to realize these aims, the CCP has enacted extensive political and ideological reforms. Central to that effort are changes to how the party develops and oversees strategy and policy. Few studies are available on the CCP's adoption of this new identity and of its political implications. This book remedies that oversight by explaining the historic context, drivers, and meaning of the governing party paradigm. It explains how adoption of this paradigm is transforming the processes through which the CCP develops strategy and policy. Furthermore, it differs from many other books in that it is the first to derive its analysis primarily from the study of authoritative Chinese sources. The book also provides an extensive array of helpful references, including chronologies, lists of major strategy documents, a glossary, and more. Accurately understanding the CCP's new role as a governing party requires a firm grasp of how China's leadership formulates, documents, and implements strategies and policies to improve its governance and further the nation's rejuvenation. This book provides such valuable information in one handy volume.

Chapter 1
Introduction: The Rationalization of Politics

From late 2002 to early 2003, a highly contagious respiratory illness, eventually designated the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), spread from Guangdong Province throughout China and into foreign countries. Authorities initially responded to signs of panic with well-worn techniques of social control, such as the distortion and suppression of all unfavorable news. In an era of widespread mobile phones and of a major foreign media presence, however, these obsolete tactics backfired completely. As news of the disease circumvented official controls, domestic and international criticism intensified. Watching the erosion of the government’s credibility, a newly installed Hu Jintao administration decided to take a different tack. At a Politburo meeting in April 2003, Hu directed that information be provided directly to the public, without delay, and without distortions and cover-ups. Several days later, Xinhua announced that numerous officials responsible for the bungled response had been fired and new policies put in place to combat the disease (Fewsmith 2004). Soon after, the outbreak came under control.

The dramatic and sudden reversal in how Beijing handled the crisis caught many observers at that time by surprise. Many read the developments as evidence that a more liberal Hu Jintao had tried to overturn the more conservative, antiquated politics of Jiang Zemin (Lam 2003). Other proclaimed the SARS outbreak “China’s Chernobyl,” speculating that the severity of the crisis would impel the CCP to pursue liberal reforms or face collapse in much the same way that the original 1986 Chernobyl accident accelerated the demise of the Soviet Union (Economist 2003). Still others doubted anything had really changed at all. One major study dismissed the significance of the entire episode, concluding that the CCP’s “natural tendency” to conceal information and delay its response to crisis remained “largely intact” (Puska 2005).

The debates pointed to an inchoate awareness of some new development in Chinese politics, although what exactly the crisis heralded could not be clearly articulated at the time. With the benefit of hindsight, the most lasting significance of the episode can now more clearly be identified. The decision by the Hu Jintao administration to elevate the handling of the SARS epidemic to a priority co-equal with that of economic growth, epitomized in the slogan, “fight SARS and promote local development” (CCTV 2003), signaled a major political shift in the CCP’s self-conception of its role in the Chinese polity. Through his words and actions, Hu signaled that the party’s legitimacy depended on its ability to address the growing economic and non-economic demands of the people, starting with the provision of quality medical care, public health services, and reliable information on threats such as the SARS epidemic. The CCP leadership’s elevation of the importance of providing non-economic goods and services, still novel and easily missed in 2003, clarified in subsequent years. In July 2004, Hu raised the development of the armed forces to a status co-equal with that of economic development (Xinhua 2004e). In 2006, the CCP leadership prioritized the development of social welfare policies through its endorsement of the “socialist harmonious society” concept (Xinhua 2006j). The recent 18th Party Congress continued the trend, raising “environmental development” as a major policy priority (Xinhua 2012h). The common theme linking these developments together has been the CCP’s expansion of its policy program beyond that of rapid growth to include a more balanced vision of economic development, as well as the provision of a broad array of public goods and services spanning social welfare, politics, culture, and the environment. Indeed, the past decade saw the CCP concentrate primarily on the formulation and execution of this expanded policy agenda.

While the party’s embrace of a political program centered on the pursuit of comprehensive development may no longer seem remarkable, the shift in policy focus is a relatively recent one that bears deep political ramifications. To be clear, the CCP has always provided direction on non-economic topics. In the Mao Zedong era, the CCP politicized every dimension of policy and regulated even the most intimate details of personal life. However, these directives largely sought to transform the lives of the people and institutions to conform to communistic ideals determined by the central leadership. In the Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin eras, the government encouraged the modernization of education, culture, and science and technology, but these were conceived primarily in terms of reforms to support the focus on rapid economic growth. The embrace of the governing party concept represents something different. For the first time, the PRC government has explicitly defined its primary responsibility in terms of the provision of a comprehensive, qualitative increase in the standard of living for the population, rather than through the realization of Maoist ideals or primarily through improvements to the economic livelihood of the people. In accepting most of the diverse wants and needs of the populace as legitimate in their own right (political demands being the most obvious exception), the CCP leadership has concluded that the provision of competent governance offers the best hope for ensuring its continuation and for realizing the nation’s revitalization. The shift may seem subtle, but the political implications are huge. The adoption of the new paradigm requires that the party develop, formulate, and implement policies that provide basic goods and services typical of many modern governments, but for which the PRC has generally had much less experience. It also requires the development of the political processes, market mechanisms, economic and social organizations, government administrative systems, technical expertise, and comprehensive policies necessary to ensure orderly implementation of a vastly expanded policy agenda. Successful adoption of the new paradigm offers the potential for a more stable, longer lasting CCP-led government, but it requires the implementation of major, systemic changes.

To return to the SARS episode, international and domestic criticism of the party’s performance undoubtedly contributed significantly to the CCP’s decision to abandon obsolete political tactics and adopt a more effective, transparent response. Yet the domestic and international pressure made an impact on Beijing’s decision making primarily because the demand for more competent governance reinforced the consensus decision already made by the senior leadership in favor of more competent governance. At the 16th Party Congress, which concluded a few weeks before the first cases of SARS emerged in late 2002, the CCP agreed for the first time that it should view itself as a “governing party” (zhizheng dang) oriented to satisfying the material and non-material needs of the people. The most lasting significance of the SARS case, therefore, was that it provided one of the earliest test cases of the feasibility and wisdom of this decision. The success of the anti-SARS effort and the domestic and international praise garnered afterwards confirmed, for Beijing, the correctness of its judgment and set the stage for much of the Hu administration’s subsequent political and policy work.

The Reconceptualization of Strategic Leadership

While the CCP has always maintained pretensions to strategic leadership, the adoption of the governing party paradigm has raised the demand for a more pragmatic and far reaching style of strategic leadership. Designed primarily to competently carry out the increased demands of governance, the shift in leadership style also recognizes the reality of a weakened CCP. With its store of political capital battered by decades of disastrous movement politics, party leaders recognize that their best hope for maintaining power lies in a form of leadership that attempts to master, rather than resist, the new political and economic pressures and challenges confronting China and its leadership.

The same economic and social changes which have undermined earlier forms of totalitarian control have introduced new forms of political authority which, properly exploited, can prolong the party’s grip on power. China’s modernization today features a pluralistic society with diverse and rising expectations; an increasingly market based economy based on a freer exchange of goods; the diffusion of information and mobile media technologies; and increasingly technical and complex policy issues. In such a situation, political authority accrues to a government which can: deliver policies that meet the needs of the people; uphold the integrity of market mechanisms and institutions; demonstrate savviness in managing news and information; and demonstrate the strategic vision and foresight necessary to ensure a continued increase in the standard of living. These are exactly the qualities the party aspires to in its reconceptualization of strategic leadership. The party’s proclaimed ambition to “rule by law” is more than a cynical ploy to shore up popular support- it is symptomatic of a realistic recognition of the need to enact deep reforms to enable a more lasting form of CCP rule.

The significance of the CCP’s adoption of the governing party paradigm can easily be overlooked because on the surface little seems to have changed from the Deng and Jiang eras. The party’s Leninist apparatus remains intact and reforms have been slow and incremental. The CCP continues its practice of penetrating government and non-government entities to guide and control decision making behind the scenes through an extensive network of party committees, organizations, and dual-hatted leaders. The party also occasionally carries out “education activities” campaigns, as it did in 2006 and 2013, which look to many observers like the rectification campaigns of old.

As before, the CCP enforces its authority through an extensive security apparatus supplemented by extensive propaganda and censorship. Indeed, in the Hu era this control has been bolstered. For example, China in 2011 announced that its internal security budget had surpassed that of its defense budget for the first time (Reuters 2011). China has also bolstered its control of the Internet. In 2004, Xinhua reported that China had closed 50,000 unlicensed Internet cafes while installing monitoring software in others. A year later, the State Council announced regulations tightening government control over the content and use of the Internet (Xinhua 2005b).

Beneath the surface, however, the CCP is undergoing a subtle but profound transformation. The adoption of the governing party paradigm broadened and deepened a sustained effort to gradually rationalize virtually all party functions. The goal is to transform the CCP into a stable, competent, rational bureaucratic actor capable of effectively governing its people and leading an increasingly powerful, technologically advanced, prosperous nation with global interests.

The innovation of this transformation may be seen more clearly by contrasting the CCP’s ambitions in earlier periods. In the Maoist era, party leaders sought unchallenged control over the state and society to realize communist ideals. It employed tools such as ideological indoctrination, movement politics, struggle sessions- and, when these failed- brutal violence, to rally the populace and subdue opposition. Party leaders initiated reforms in 1978 to transform the economic system while retaining its formal political structures. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the CCP leadership increased its flexibility within Maoist dogma, expanded the availability of information, initiated reforms to regularize politics, and shifted the focus of the CCP from class struggle to an increase in the economic standard of living.

Deng’s passing in 1997 ended the era of revolutionary leadership and accelerated trends towards the institutionalization of power. The party has continued its retreat from the untenable position of “total control” over China’s political, social, and economic life that it once aspired to as a revolutionary party. This retreat has the advantage of facilitating stability by granting citizens some degree of control over their lives, easing opposition to CCP rule. Just as importantly, the government has opened space for scientific and professional expertise to flourish, which the party recognizes is critical to enabling its rule.

As the CCP has redefined its primary role in the polity from the pursuit of communist ideals to the provision of competent governance, virtually all aspects of party life have been affected by this transformation. The phenomena may be understood as the rationalization of political processes to meet the demands of a modernizing state. This broad-ranging transformation is critical to the party’s ambitions. By building systems and institutions to render party processes more “scientific,” efficient, accountable, and capable of carrying out rationally defined policy objectives, the CCP aims to ensure it develops the intellectual, political, and bureaucratic strength and resilience needed to sustain its leadership role in a period of massive and rapid change.

The concept of “rationalization” is an important one that requires definition. As used in this book, the term refers to the transformation of a process, activity, or system of thought characterized by increased functionality, effectiveness, and efficiency in accordance with rationally defined objectives. The concept emphasizes qualities of institutionalization, standardization, predictability, systematization, and scientific control. Although the Chinese do not use the word “rationalization,” they do use terms that collectively evoke this concept, such as “scientific management” (kexue guanli), “system building” (tixi jianshe), “regularization” (zhengguihua), and “institutionalization” (zhiduhua).

The rationalization of Chinese politics has been noted by various observers before, but only from partial perspectives. Analysts have noted trends, for example, towards the regularization of promotion and retirement norms (Manion 1993). Others have noted the progress towards the institutionalization of party meetings and congresses (Miller A. 2007). The much remarked upon focus on recruitment of professional and technical elites may be read as another symptom of this transformation (Dickson 2003).

A central thesis of this book is that the process of rationalization extends much further and deeper than is commonly understood, and that this process has extended to the party’s identity, ideology and political processes. One is tempted to quip that the CCP’s strategy is to build up the state and other sectors of the polity to enable the eventual “withering away” of the Chinese Communist Party. But this would be a serious misreading. The CCP has no intention of going away any time soon. On the contrary, the party is not only strengthening internal security forces to suppress challenges to its rule, it is deepening expertise in the one area that can ensure it retains power over the long term: strategic leadership as a governing party. This means, in essence, the formulation, development, implementation, and enforcement of strategic and policy directives that can unerringly deliver sound governance and guide the development of a modern, prosperous, politically stable, powerful China by the centennial of the founding of the PRC in 2049, an end state the CCP calls the “rejuvenation of the Chinese people.”

In the words of Xi Jinping, the CCP’s leadership has “shifted” from one of “taking on everything” to “mainly exercising political, ideological, and organizational leadership.” Xi has explained that this means “formulating major policies and principles, putting forward legislative proposals, recommending important cadres, conducting ideological propaganda, bringing into play the role of the party organization and members, and adhering to the principle of exercising state power according to law” (Xi J. 2009). How the CCP is transforming its style of leadership in accordance with this ideal is a primary focus of this book.

Book Outline

The party’s adoption of the governing party paradigm has not merely resulted in an accumulation of policy issues or a change in leadership style; it has also corresponded with changes in the very fabric of the political processes through which party develops and exercises its power. While aspiring for a more institutionalized form of authority, the CCP continues to rely on traditional methods of controlling policy through the issuance of political directives. However, the reforms associated with adoption of the governing party paradigm have not left these traditional methods unaffected. On the contrary, the party has initiated a widespread standardization and institutionalization of many elements of these traditional political processes. A primary focus of the party’s political reform agenda centers on the rationalization of the Leninist mechanisms through which it has traditionally exercised political power. The benefit of this approach is that it increases the stability, functionality, and coherence of the party’s political language and processes in a manner than minimizes disruption. The downside, however, is that the reliance on such tools as political mobilization, indoctrination, and central directives continue to invite problems of policy misalignment, poor coordination, and abuse of authority.

This book begins with a study of the origin and drivers of the governing party paradigm. Chapter 2 explores major social, economic, and cultural influences underpinning the party’s turn to the new paradigm. The chapter highlights the evolution of the mode of economic growth, the expanding popular demand for better social welfare services and environmental restoration, and public dissatisfaction over the negative costs of rapid growth.

Chapter 3 analyzes the governing party paradigm. It explores the efforts by party theorists and thinkers to identify the types of reforms that could best position the party to avoid the fate of its Soviet brethren. It highlights the importance of the idea that scientific “natural laws” could coexist with Marxist precepts regarding the historical evolution of societies. This distinction enabled party thinkers and theorists to adopt modern approaches to governance and policy administration more in keeping with the needs of China in the early 2000s in a manner that allows them to uphold the pretense of honoring Marxist orthodoxy. The chapter also traces the party’s adoption of the governing paradigm and the array of organizational changes and other reforms which the CCP has undertaken during the Hu era to better conform to the paradigm.

The process by which central authorities articulate and implement strategies and policies remains central to the strategic leadership at the core of the governing party paradigm. Chapters 4 through 6 explore the main components of this process: analysis and theory; central directives; and policy implementation. The distinction is admittedly artificial, as many of the tasks include aspects of the other. For example, the implementation of policies which accord with central directives requires the education and training of the cadre corps in the party’s theory and analysis. Each of these processes also occurs simultaneously on a near continual basis. Nevertheless, the steps remain distinct enough in purpose, nature of activity, and bureaucratic function to merit separate analysis.

All steps must be carried out for the party to oversee policy implementation. Failure to carry out, or appear to carry out, any of the steps imperils the party’s authority. Without rigorous analysis of data, for example, the central directives may lack a reliable basis, resulting in bad policy. Without a theoretical interpretation that reinforces the infallibility of the party’s Marxist-Leninist identity, on the other hand, directives based “purely” on scientific analysis would undermine the party’s claim to ground all its policies on a uniquely profound theory which alone can guide China’s development, thereby imperiling its legitimacy.

Chapter 4 examines the role of analysis and theory in the CCP’s exercise of political leadership. Despite abandoning revolutionary politics in favor of a more pragmatic policy focus, the CCP retains the claim to a monopoly on access to the most profound truths of China’s development through its socialist theory. It continues to justify the necessity of its single party rule by claiming that no other political group can ensure China’s long term success for the simple reason that no other political group possesses an intellectual grasp of the historic natural laws underpinning China’s development. The collapse of Maoist utopianism has not fundamentally changed the political logic, although it has dramatically changed how the party expresses this logic. The CCP today...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Appendices
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: The Rationalization of Politics
• 2 Farewell to the Revolutionary Party
• 3 The Governing Party Paradigm
• 4 The Reinvigoration of Ideology
• 5 Central Directives: The Strategy for China’s Revitalization
• 6 Strategic Planning and Policy Action
• 7 Party–Military Relations: Towards a Professional Political PLA
• 8 Core Interests and the Strategy to Resolve Sovereignty Disputes
• 9 International Relations: Building the Harmonious World
• 10 Conclusion: The Future of the CCP as Governing Party
• Appendices
• References
• Index