The Institutionalization of the Communist Party and the Party System in China

Abstract

Introduction For years, China scholars have been debating the sustainability of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Since the crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in 1989, scholars have frequently predicted the fall of the CCP. Immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern European communism, Roderick MacFarquhar (1991) claimed that it was only a matter of time before China would go the same way as these regimes. It seems that more radical reforms and greater openness triggered by the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour in 1992 did not lead scholars to change such a deeply rooted mind-set. In 1994, Avery Goldstein (1994: 727) stated that “[a]lthough scholars continue to disagree about the probable life-span of the current regime, the disagreement now is usually about when, not whether, fundamental political change will occur and what it will look like.” Surprisingly, although the country has sustained three decades of reforms, more scholars tend to believe in the coming collapse of the communist rule. The issue of the sustainability of the CCP was raised in a recent debate on “Reframing China Policy,” organized by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think tank. In the debate, two leading China experts in the United States, MacFarquhar and Andrew Nathan, presented rebuttals of each other’s position, with MacFarquhar arguing that the CCP would not be able to sustain itself and Nathan taking the opposite view. According to MacFarquhar, The [Chinese] political system is fragile … Despite truly impressive progress in its economy, the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China] polity is in systemic crisis. VIP visitors to Beijing are exposed to an impressive panoply of power, but this is a fragile regime … The problems I shall analyze [in the debate] are likely to result in a breakdown in the communist regime in years rather than decades. Some other scholars seem to share MacFarquhar’s pessimistic view. For example, Susan Shirk (2007: 6–7) argued that “China may be an emerging superpower, but it is a fragile one. And it is China’s internal fragility, not its economic or military strength, that presents the greatest danger … Chinese leaders are haunted by fears that their days are numbered.”