China's Changing of the Guard: Threats to Party Supremacy

Abstract

����� �� With the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) having emerged from its Sixteenth Party Congress in November 2002 with a new leadership and an updated program, what is the outlook for the political system that it controls? The ease with which the recent turnover of power was handled bespeaks an unprecedented degree of institutional stability within China’s political elite. And yet the CCP has for some time now been watching its grassroots organizational strength ebb away, the victim of a number of stresses that have been generated by the Party’s progressive integration with a rapidly changing society. The CCP’s policies of “reform and opening” have meanwhile had unintended consequences that have further weakened the prospects for its continued political monopoly: Due to an expanding private sector, the Party no longer controls where people live and work; due to the spread of internet access, satellite television, and alternative media, it no longer controls what information people have or how it is disseminated; and due to a combination of larger disposable incomes and political liberalization, it no longer controls what people do with their spare time. To manage these consequences, the Party has adopted a new strategy of control. As necessary as this strategy has been, it has effectively reoriented the Party relative to Chinese society, and in a way that raises a question of long-term survival common to many a liberalizing authoritarian regime dominated by a single party: Will adapting to a new economic and social environment strengthen or actually weaken the Party’s hold on power? Bruce J. Dickson is associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. He is the author of Red Capitalists in China: The Party, Private Entrepreneurs, and Prospects for Political Change (2003) and Democratization in China and Taiwan: The Adaptability of Leninist Parties (1997), and is associate editor of the journal Problems of Post-Communism.