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.

This article investigates a prominent but little discussed CCP central organ, the Central Discipline Inspection Commission (CDIC), and its local discipline inspection commissions (DICs) in the post-Mao era. It analyses how the CCP exerts its control over the disciplinary organizations and argues that the disciplinary agencies' lack of autonomy hinders their efforts to crack down on corruption. This article investigates the important role played by the CDIC in CCP politics by examining its organizational structure, modes of operation and criteria for imposing disciplinary sanctions, and evaluates the measures and approaches employed by the Party's disciplinary organizations to combat corruption. The study concludes that structural, institutional and cultural factors hinder the effectiveness of the CCP's disciplinary agencies in their efforts to control Party members, officials and corruption.