Many China watchers argue that Xi Jinping has concentrated power in his own hands in a manner unprecedented since the death of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. This article tests the extent of Xi's power consolidation by comparing the strength of his faction during his time in power to similar periods under his two immediate predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. Furthermore, we investigate whether a dominant faction is emerging under Xi Jinping, replacing the power balancing between factions that was the norm throughout the reform era. Analysing factional affiliations of Chinese leaders in the top four ranks, we find that Xi has formed a dominant faction. Through statistical analysis of the promotion chances of provincial leaders, we find that Xi has been unusually successful when compared to previous leaders at promoting his clients. This suggests that Xi has boosted the power of his faction by elevating provincial leaders to an extent not seen since the death of Mao and Deng.

China's political system has been characterized by two institutions since the 1980s: an explicit “layer-by-layer administrative hierarchy” and the “appointment of cadres one level down.” There have, however, been two departures from these administrative practices. First, some provinces have “empowered prosperous counties” by placing them in a dual-reporting relationship with both prefecture-level cities and provinces. Second, some provinces have restored personnel control going “two levels down” by appointing key officials at the county and urban district levels of government. These deviations evolved as responses to China's GDP-centric policy environment during the early reform era. Based on field interviews and nationwide analysis of city-level personnel data, this article argues that such adaptations have generated unintended conflicts between provinces and prefecture-level cities. While prior studies of evolutionary change in China highlight the relationship between state and non-state actors, this study demonstrates how interactions among state actors themselves may fundamentally transform the dynamics of administrative governance.

This brief essay meditates on the advent of the ideal of horizontal social relations, exemplified in the early CCP years in the political term, “comrade” (tongzhi). It takes up Qu Qiubai as exemplary of a Marxist political thinker whose commitments to horizontality/comrade relations can be illustrated through his theories of literature, translation and language. It proposes that despite Xi Jinping's recent rhetorical admonishments to re-activate “comrade” as a political term, it is the LGBTQ community's appropriation of “comrade” in contemporary China that actually holds the potential for a substantive reanimation of the utopian ideals begun a century ago.

It is widely assumed that authoritarian states tend to use repression to suffocate social conflicts that threaten regime stability. Focusing on the Chinese state's responses to resource conflict, a particular type of social conflict triggered by mineral resource extraction, this research argues that authoritarian regimes may prefer to use redistributive policies to defuse social unrest under certain circumstances. Through mixed methods combining qualitative research and statistical analysis, I find that local governments in resource-rich regions do not spend heavily on coercive state apparatus. Instead, they generously hand out social security benefits to appease aggrieved citizens. Furthermore, the Chinese state actively involves mining companies in the redistribution process and requires them to share the financial costs of relief policies. Therefore, when conflicts arise between specific social groups with conflicting interests, redistribution may be a more effective strategy to preserve regime stability.

In its one hundred years of existence, the Communist Party of China has experimented with how to connect its narratives of legitimacy to people's affects. In this essay, I trace the conceptualization of gratitude, from its repudiation in the Mao era as a vestige of feudalism and imperialism to its return in the reform era as a re-verticalization of Party sovereignty. The paper addresses four examples of gratitude work: Politburo Standing Committee member Wang Yang's short-lived critique of gratitude in the name of a different conception of popular sovereignty; the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Sichuan earthquake as a day of gratitude; the detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang who are taught to be grateful to the Communist Party in a campaign of religious de-radicalization; and the refusal of gratitude in quarantined Wuhan during the COVID-19 pandemic. In these cases, the Communist Party's sovereignty stands at the threshold between bio- and necro-politics, promising life and salvation in the midst of death and destruction.

In this paper, we examine how the Chinese state controls social media. While social media companies are responsible for censoring their platforms, they also selectively report certain users to the government. This article focuses on understanding the logic behind media platforms’ decisions to report users or content to the government. We find that content is less relevant than commonly thought. Information control efforts often focus on who is posting rather than on what they are posting. The state permits open discussion and debate on social media while controlling and managing influential social forces that may challenge the party-state's hegemonic position. We build on Schurmann's “ideology and organization,” emphasizing the Party's goals of embedding itself in all social structures and limiting the ability of non-Party individuals, networks or groups to carve out a separate space for leadership and social status. In the virtual public sphere, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to apply these principles to co-opt, repress and limit the reach of influential non-Party “thought leaders.” We find evidence to support this logic through qualitative and quantitative analysis of leaked censorship documents from a social media company and government documents on information control.

Democratic centralism, a hallmark of Leninist party organizations, has played a formative role in the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Yet despite being hailed as an “inviolable” and “unchanging” Party principle, understandings of democratic centralism have shifted dramatically over the century of its existence. This study traces the long arc of the concept's evolution across successive Party Constitutions, focusing on three critical historical junctures: the Sixth Party Congress, which formally adopted democratic centralism into its Constitution as an organizational principle; the Seventh Party Congress, which adopted rectification as the Party's practice of democratic centralism; and the 19th Party Congress, which set a new milestone in codifying the system as a disciplinary tool. I argue that while democratic centralism exemplifies the CCP's institutional plasticity and adaptive governance and is critical to understanding Party-driven constitutionalism in contemporary China, it also highlights an irresolvable paradox inherent in Party rule. Adaptability does not necessarily impart resilience. I conclude that the CCP's normatively unconstrained extra-constitutional leadership under Xi Jinping highlights the essentially and increasingly irrationalist aspects of its illiberal governance project.

A large body of literature on state–business relations in China has examined the political role of capitalists and collusion between the state and the private sector. This paper contributes to that literature and understanding of the internal differentiation among China's business elites by documenting the emergence of a particular kind of large, non-state business group that we argue is more akin to a mafia system than any standard definition of a firm. Drawing on large-N descriptive data as well as deep ethnographic and documentary research, we argue that mafia-like business systems share organizational principles (plunder and obfuscation) and means of growth and survival (relations of mutual endangerment and manipulation of the financial system). Understanding the particular moral economy that underlies mafia-like business systems and their interactions with the state challenges methodological foundations of research on China's political economy and helps to explain recent conflict between high-profile business people and the state.

Among the most distinctive features of Chinese Communist Party governance is the frequent deployment of work teams to conduct campaigns, implement policies and troubleshoot crises. An underappreciated aspect of work-team operations from Land Reform to the present has been the active participation of educated intellectuals as key intermediaries between central leaders and grassroots society. Serving in effect as “missionaries” of the Party, intellectual work-team members function as trained “ritual specialists” in carrying out their appointed mission. Although work teams are often not the most efficient or effective means of governance, the impact of work-team experience on team members themselves is consequential. Employing quasi-religious practices designed to promote the ideological incorporation of intellectuals, work teams have helped to forestall the emergence in China of an alienated class of dissidents like those whose criticisms eroded the legitimacy of Communist regimes elsewhere in the world.

The CCP's commitment to gender equality since 1921 has produced vast gains in employment and education for countless women while overlooking established gender hierarchies in family life. Long-term research in Beijing reveals that crossing class, sectoral and generational differences, there is an apparent paradox between women's increasing access to education and employment and their abiding attachment to ideas and practices associated with their roles as wives, mothers and daughters-in-law. A reconfigured “patchy” form of patriarchy is sustained by a dominant discourse of gender difference that naturalizes women's association with the domestic sphere. Unprecedented engagements with international feminism after 1995 introduced new approaches to gender equality. Recently, young feminists from diverse backgrounds have launched public protests targeting expectations of women in marriage and family life, marking a contestation of previous articulations of gender equality. Online platforms are flooded with exchanges about women's empowerment in a market environment that grants them considerable leverage to manage their marital and domestic relationships. The focus of this new generation of feminists on social reproduction signifies a radical departure from the classical Marxist principles underpinning earlier approaches to women's emancipation. Nevertheless, a “patchy patriarchy” continues to characterize widely held gender assumptions and expectations, spanning class and sectoral difference.

This paper explores the perception and politics of air pollution in Shanghai. We present a qualitative case study based on a literature review of relevant policies and research on civil society and air pollution, in dialogue with air quality indexes and field research data. We engage with the concept of China's authoritarian environmentalism and the political context of ecological civilization. We find that discussions about air pollution are often placed in a frame that is both locally temporal (environment) and internationally developmentalist (economy). We raise questions from an example of three applications with different presentations of air quality index measures for the same time and place. This example and frame highlight the central role and connection between technology, data and evidence, and pollution visibility in the case of the perception of air pollution. Our findings then point to two gaps in authoritarian environmentalism research, revealing a need to better understand (1) the role of technology within this governance context, and (2) the tensions created from this non-participatory approach with ecological civilization, which calls for civil society participation.

This article interrogates the operating logic of China's street-level regulatory state, demonstrating that residents’ committees (RCs) assume a role as regulatory intermediaries to enhance the efficiency of local governance. Using Shanghai's new recycling regulations as a case study, it explores the mechanisms by which RCs elicit not only citizens’ compliance but also active participation. We show that the central mechanisms derive from the RCs’ skilful mobilization of particular social forces, namely mianzi and guanxi, which are produced within close-knit social networks inside Shanghai's housing estates (xiaoqu). We advance three arguments in the study of China's emerging regulatory state. First, we show how informal social forces are employed in regulatory governance at the street level, combining authoritarian control with grassroots participation. Second, the focus on RCs as regulatory intermediaries reveals the important role played by these street-level administrative units in policy implementation. Third, we suggest that the RCs’ harnessing of informal social forces is essential not only for successful policy implementation at street level but also for the production of the local state's political legitimacy.

The Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) ideology, rooted in its foundational struggles, explicitly denounces “bureaucratism” (guanliaozhuyi) as an intrinsic ailment of bureaucracy. Yet while the revolutionary Party has blasted bureaucratism, its revolutionary regime has had to find a way to coexist with bureaucracy, which is a requisite for effective governance. An anti-bureaucratic ghost thus dwells in the machinery of China's bureaucratic state. We analyse the CCP's anti-bureaucratism through two steps. First, we perform a historical analysis of the Party's anti-bureaucratic ideology, teasing out its substance and emphasizing its roots in and departures from European Marxism and Leninism. Second, we trace both the continuity and evolution in the Party's anti-bureaucratic rhetoric, taking an interactive approach that combines close reading with computational analysis of the entire corpus of the People's Daily (1947–2020). We find striking endurance as well as subtle shifts in the substance of the CCP's anti-bureaucratic ideology. We show that bureaucratism is an umbrella term that expresses the revolutionary Party's anxiety about losing its popular legitimacy. Yet the substance of the Party's concern evolved from commandism and revisionism under Mao, to corruption and formalism during reform. The Party's ongoing critiques of bureaucratism and formalism unfold in parallel fashion with its efforts to standardize, regularize and institutionalize the state.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is a closely constituted party. Recent studies of the CCP describe and evaluate its formal rules, but to understand the Party as an institution we also need to understand its informal rules. The literature on “party norms”, “institutionalization” and the “unwritten constitution” often fails to distinguish rules from other political phenomena. It confuses informal rules with political practices, constitutional conventions, behavioural equilibria and doctrinal discourse. It is prone to overlook important rules, and to see rules where there are none. Hence, it potentially overstates how institutionalized the CCP is, and therefore how resilient it is. The article provides a clearer account of informal rules and suggests a different explanation for the resilience of the CCP.

The Chinese government has placed workforce upskilling at the core of its reform agenda to sustain the Chinese “economic miracle.” As such, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MOHRSS) and Ministry of Education (MOE) have each launched separate apprenticeship reforms geared towards enhancing China's oft-criticized vocational education and training system. Using a self-constructed theoretical framework, this article examines the two reforms and ascribes their divergent outcomes to the two ministries’ distinct approaches to institutionalizing their central initiatives (i.e. the top-down model followed by the MOHRSS versus the collaborative model of the MOE). However, given the absence of industry-level civil society governance in China, neither of these models has delivered ideal training outcomes, although the collaborative model has satisfied more employers and apprentices. China's skills-development reforms have thus become trapped in an institutional dilemma which is likely to impede the long-term economic restructuring efforts of the central state.

In recent years, domestic tourism into the Xinjiang region of China has grown rapidly. Government officials view tourism as a source of both economic capital and social stability, presenting a normalcy that makes it attractive for investment. There are two paradoxes to Xinjiang tourism. According to most literature, a massive military presence should deter tourists, but numbers have continued to grow in the militarized Xinjiang region. Second, the cultural “otherness” of Xinjiang is a big draw to the region, yet this culture is being suppressed by state policies to contain Islam. Using a dataset of Han Chinese travel diaries, I look at how narrated tourist experiences of Xinjiang justify policing, how ethnic boundaries are reinforced by practices in both transportation and personal interaction, and how state policies influence Chinese travellers’ views on the authenticity of their experience. While bodily assurances of security substantiate political legitimacy, tourists resist the bureaucratic management of sites, allowing for critiques focused almost exclusively on aesthetic taste.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regards the Communist Youth League (CYL) as a critical and distinctive mass organization that acts as an “assistant” and “reserve army” for the Party. This article uses the analytical concepts of historical institutionalism and critical junctures to discuss the changes in the CYL during the post-Mao period. We focus on two critical junctures: 1982, when the CYL became a route to rapid promotion for cadres, and 2016, after which its cadres had fewer opportunities for promotion and the CYL was pushed back to its original role in youth United Front work. We also find that the CYL has refined its United Front methods to attract talented young people by offering them services. This reflects the efforts of the CCP regime to adapt to circumstances and ensure its survival.

The recent surge in public remembrance of the Second World War in China has been substantially undergirded by a centrally planned and systematically implemented discursive shift which has remained overlooked in the literature. This study examines the revised official narrative by drawing on three cases from China's school curriculum, museums and formal diplomacy. It finds that the once dominant trope of “national victimization” no longer represents the main thrust in the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) rhetoric on the Second World War. Under Xi Jinping, this has been replaced by a self-assertive and aspirational narrative of “national victory” and “national greatness,” designed to enhance Beijing's legitimacy and advance its domestic and foreign policy objectives. By emphasizing national unity and CCP–KMT cooperation, the new narrative offers an inclusive and unifying interpretation of China's war effort in which the victory in 1945 has come to rival the 1949 revolution as the critical turning point towards “national rejuvenation.” The increasingly Sino-centric and centrally controlled narrative holds implicit warnings to those challenging Beijing's claim to greatness.

Village cadres are important agents for the state yet disciplining them has been difficult. There are few disciplinary tools that can easily hold them to account. Prior to 2018, Party discipline did not apply to non-Party cadres. Legislation was ambiguous in relation to these grassroots agents and had to rely heavily on legal interpretation. The impact of the cadre evaluation system on village cadres, who are not considered to be public servants on the state payroll, was limited. This situation has changed since 2018. The party-state has consolidated and institutionalized ways in which grassroots cadres are checked and disciplined. Instead of relying on policy regulation, which had been the dominant disciplinary method since 1949, village cadres are now fully subject to Party rules and state laws. These changes have been accomplished through the application of three measures. First, village Party secretaries are to serve concurrently as village heads, and members of village and Party committees are to overlap, thereby making them subject to Party discipline. Second, village cadres are now considered to be “public agents” and are on an equal legal footing with other state agents. Finally, a campaign waged by the criminal justice apparatus cleaned up village administration and prepared it for upcoming village elections in a new era.