Chinese Communist Regime Research Articles

Changing diasporic identity and increasing global backlash: the Xi government’s tactics and challenges of engaging new generation overseas Chinese

ABSTRACT The transnational engagement between the Chinese communist government and first-generation overseas Chinese has been analysed extensively, but the academic analysis of interactions between the Chinese communist government under Xi Jinping and new generation overseas Chinese is scarce. Questions arise regarding how the rise of new generation overseas Chinese has changed the diasporic identity of the overseas Chinese community; what the Xi government’s tactics of engaging new generation overseas Chinese are; and how new generation overseas Chinese respond to the Xi government’s targeted campaign. By answering these questions, this article provides an important case study for the emerging scholarship on the relations between authoritarian states and new generation diasporas. Building on government archives, ethnographic interviews, media reports, and online and offline diaspora events, this article analyses the Xi government’s tactics and challenges of diaspora engagement targeting new generation overseas Chinese, and forecasts an uphill battle for the Xi government.

Voices from within: Tracing Chinese Public Perceptions of Democracy in the New Era

AbstractDespite the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) emphasis on whole process people’s democracy and democracy with Chinese characteristics, the type of democracy desired by the Chinese people remains debatable. Using two nationwide surveys conducted in 2015 and 2019, this study examines how ordinary Chinese people view democracy during Xi Jinping’s new era. Acknowledging the constraints of conventional methodologies, this study adopts a novel approach that uses automated text analysis to dissect open-ended survey responses about democracy. The results reveal that Chinese citizens primarily associate democracy with freedom of speech, consultation, and minben rather than competitive elections. Furthermore, this study reveals that a higher level of education, more frequent internet usage, and higher household income are positively correlated with a liberal perspective on democracy. This suggests that although the Chinese communist regime may not face immediate pressure to implement open elections, growing support for consultation and freedom may necessitate a greater focus on procedural democracy building by the CCP. By supplementing traditional research methods, this study contributes to a better understanding of China’s regime resilience and its potential future trajectories.

The KGB’s Black Box: Intelligence Operations and Bias in the People’s Republic of China

The Soviet Union's intelligence operations in China helped to fuel tensions between the two communist powers, which were based on analytical biases and the difficulty of operating in China. While the Soviet Union was worried about a potential Chinese attack, it found it hard to penetrate Chinese political circles due to cultural differences and difficulties in recruiting Chinese spies. Prior to the Cold War, Soviet intelligence agencies had an easier time recruiting Chinese nationals as spies, but as the Sino-Soviet split deepened, recruiting agents, penetrating political circles, and making sense of China became more challenging. The Soviet Union's biased analytical framework on China contributed to escalatory tensions and created a feedback loop of distrust. While there are limitations to analyzing leaked USSR official notes carried by a defector, they provide valuable insights into Soviet operations in China. The KGB established its "Line K" department for Chinese espionage and operations, but complained about a chronic shortage of Chinese documents passed along by assets that would enable it to draw serious assessments about the Chinese communist government.

Foundation of the Political Resilience in China: A Perspective of State Capacity

ABSTRACT The issue of how the Chinese Communist regime has managed to sustain amidst market-oriented reforms and social pluralism has been widely explored, but the findings have not been entirely satisfying. This study aims to provide a more comprehensive explanation from the perspective of state capacity, going beyond traditional approaches. By analyzing welfare policies implemented since the early 2000s, this article seeks to demonstrate that the regime’s resilience has been significantly bolstered through the expansion of welfare programs and improvements in efficiency. The enforcement of welfare policies involves changes in both the center-local and state-society relationships. As crucial aspects of state capacity, the rationalization of bureaucratic structure and functions, as well as the state’s influence over impoverished communities, have undergone substantial improvement and consolidation. These results contribute to the stability and resilience of the Chinese political regime. However, challenges for the communist regime will emerge if welfare provision for the economically disadvantaged is no longer guaranteed and if state capacity is seriously weakened due to economic stagnation

The culturalisation of politics in contemporary Chinese citizenship education

ABSTRACT While historically and ideologically peripheralised in modern Chinese politics, traditional culture has been discursively rehabilitated by the Chinese communist regime in recent years. Existing literature on this phenomenon tends to focus on the politicisation of culture, that is, how Chinese culture, particularly the Confucian tradition, is appropriated by the regime to legitimatise and stabilise its ideopolitical control in schools and society. This article draws attention to the interweaving but distinct and underexplored tendency of the culturalisation of politics, that is, the party-state’s discursive construction of politics in culturalist terms. It examines how politics is culturally constructed, or culturalised, in the official textbooks for the guiding political doctrine Xi Jinping Thought, the teaching of which has been mandatory in schools and universities since 2021. Situating the Chinese case in the broader context of the ‘cultural turn’ in postmodern politics, this article discusses the implications for citizenship education under China’s authoritarian regime.

Between Scylla and Charybdis: Land Reform and Local Agents Under the Chinese Communist Regime

Between Scylla and Charybdis: Land Reform and Local Agents Under the Chinese Communist Regime

The ballot or the bullet? Public awareness of grassroots elections and regime stability in China

AbstractThis study examines the attitudinal and behavioral consequences of holding local elections in China. Using survey data to test the propositions that elections do not alleviate pressure from society butreasonably make state–society conflict manageable for the Chinese Communist regime, evidence suggests that being aware of elections is negatively associated with citizens' involvement in collective activities that would destabilize the regime. Instead, the awareness of elections is positively correlated with people's willingness to use the institutionalized mechanism, letters and visits (shangfang), to solve their concerns. The findings imply that although elections may help buttress China's authoritarian rule, the survivability of the Chinese Communist Party is still dependent on whether existing institutions can function well in reducing public grievances.

Editing Legitimacy

This research note is a textual comparison between different versions of Deng Xiaoping’s two speeches in May and June 1989 using recently accessible scanned copies of original documents distributed to local officials. It reveals numerous alterations—including both deletions and additions—in the later published texts. The research note suggests that in the context of the early 1990s, these editorial efforts were made to restore the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party by highlighting Deng’s image as a pragmatic reformer, maintaining Jiang Zemin’s position as the core of the new leadership, downplaying the party’s internal struggles and corruption, and assuring people that China would continue its market-oriented reform. More broadly, findings in the research note showcase the essential role of propaganda in legitimation under the Chinese communist regime.

China’s Minority Fiction

China’s Minority Fiction Sabina Knight (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution China’s fifty-five officially recognized “minority peoples” make up less than 9 percent of the People’s Republic of China. Still, they number more than 130 million, and their literature deserves study both for its political urgency and for its lyricism and philosophical power. Multiethnic fiction speaks volumes about Chinese attitudes toward minorities, as well as these peoples’ historical understandings, their search for roots, and longings for cultural survival. [End Page 48] What Holds China Together? How has literature enabled China’s evolving empire? Rather than a continuous polity, “China” names a culture. It may be this culture’s seemingly infinite resilience that confers political legitimacy. What has made Chinese culture so resilient? For three thousand years a powerful literary tradition has held together diverse and sometimes competing civilizations. The written language has been the glue that connects Chinese people to a shared cultural past. Throughout the region’s history, what counts as “Chinese” has been shifting. Yet even as Chinese characters, literally “Han words” (漢字), have evolved over time, expert sinologists can still read the inscriptions on tortoise shells and sheep scapulae from the Shang Dynasty (1600–1046 bce). Identification as a people has hinged on this written language. Written Chinese has also enabled communication across disparate spoken dialects, including those of ethnic minorities. For ethnic groups with their own languages, from the Mongols and Manchus that once conquered and ruled the realm to contemporary Tibetans and Uyghurs, writing in Chinese has brought status and acceptance. The cost has been Sinification, a homogenizing trade-off. Literary writing has also been fundamental to governance, likely more so in China than anywhere else. To enter the civil service, scholars had to master the core philosophical canon and poetic composition. Thanks to a long tradition of scholar-officials who remonstrated with rulers, such texts also served as voices of conscience. The Chinese Communist Party continues to recognize the political power of writing, and literature in particular, through the PRC’s official organ for writers, the Chinese Writers Association (CWA). Who Counts as Chinese? During the Civil War of 1946 to 1949, the Chinese Communist government adopted the Soviet paradigm using the term “nationalities” (民族) to refer to ethnic groups within the empire. Ethnic Han Chinese had earlier conceived of themselves in terms of a center-periphery model. This new notion of “nationalities” made the empire’s internal nations, cultures, and ethnicities distinct categories of official discourse. These distinctions paved the way for the establishment of the “autonomous regions” of Inner Mongolia (1947), Xinjiang (1955), Guangxi (1958), Ningxia (1958), and Tibet (1965). China’s label of “autonomous” for these areas should not be taken at face value. They are always subject to Beijing’s dominion; their powers of self-rule are even less than the modest rights begrudged to Indigenous peoples on US reservations or among Canada’s First Nations. In China, these cultures’ distinctiveness has meant that their inclusion within the PRC has entailed battles over independence and identity that some have called civil wars. China’s fifty-five officially recognized “minority peoples” (少数民族) make up less than 9 percent of the PRC. Still, they number more than 130 million, and their sparsely populated homelands account for over 45 percent of the country’s area. On the Chinese Writers’ Association roster of 12,000-plus members, more than 1,500 are self-identified ethnic minorities. Many of these non-Han writers represent their group’s first generation of published authors. Since 1976, Chinese presses have issued hundreds of novels by minority writers on ethnic themes. In addition, at least eighty literary magazines (about half in ethnic languages) publish poems, stories, and essays by minority writers. These ethnic groups all have long oral traditions, and their cultures are distinct enough to make China a multinational polity, more analogous to the European Union than to a single country. Fiction and Survival Dynamic and defiant, fiction by China’s ethnic minorities offers clarion voices amid the din of Chinese nationalism and party discourse. Often lyrical and nostalgic, this fiction documents the pluralism of cultures within China’s historically shifting borders. In so doing...

POLITICS VERSUS SCHOLARSHIP: THE HISTORY DEPARTMENT AT BEIJING UNIVERSITY REVISITED, 1949–2009

Some scholarship always regard that the Chinese intellectuals after 1949 have switched from serving their culture to serving their nation or even their Communist Party of China, their service to the nation has severely limited their intellectual and moral autonomy. Such phenomenon is particular true in the field of Humanities and Social Sciences, especially in the discipline of history. In my point of view, although the interest of the Chinese Communist government in intellectuals after 1949 is a form of somewhat manipulation, however, the role of the intellectuals is not merely the passive collaborators with the Communist Party or simply malleable servants of the ruling regime. This article is going to take the development of the History Department at Beijing University (Beida) from 1949 to 2009 as a case study. It attempts to closely examine the evolution of the History Department in four different periods with the influence of Communist government of the People’s Republic of China, and with the increasing contacts with the foreign academic world since 1949. It intends to demonstrate this academic unit after 1949 was not merely conventionally stifling; however, many historians and researchers in the Department under Mao Zedong era were genuinely doing historical research by using the theory of Marxism, and were seeking possible limited academic autonomy. After Deng Xiaoping took power in 1978, the History Department was becoming more professional and the factors of politics were being gradually withdrawn from the research milieu. Most of the professors in the Department were committed to historical research as a serious scholarly enterprise within the framework established by the regime. They did not view their role as mere propagandists, and they were not willing to subvert academic standards or distort history to serve immediate political ends. The article will first briefly go through the history of Beida under the People’s Republic of China. Afterwards, it will individually examine the historical stages of the History Department from 1949 to 2009 at different sections; it pays special attention to the relationships between the politics, the departmental professors, and the history curricula. To conclude, after sixty years from the founding of the People’s Republic of China (1949–2009), at the beginning of the twentieth-first century, the History Department at Beida seemed to end its long time isolation and suffocation in the pre-1978 decades, and returned to its heyday during the 1920s and 1930s. The Department looked more cosmopolitan, and the professionalization and academic autonomy quietly came back. The four decades of development has not only contributed considerably to the reform of the History Department especially in the aspects of curricula and pedagogy, but also effectively cultivated Beida’s long-cherished culture of historical research and studies.

Spatial Dynamics of a Social Movement Centred on an Independent Bookstore in China

Against the background of tightening social control by the Chinese communist regime after 2012, a small-scale social movement was mobilised by the independent Jifeng Bookstore in Shanghai. Unlike the traditional means of organising resources, this mobilisation was driven by a physical space. Between 1997 and 2017, Jifeng had offered and produced advantageous spatial forms of mobilisation, including liberal idea transmission, networks, extending to cultural symbolism and the identity boundary between citizens and authority. This article explains why the movement emerged, by using the process–mechanism approach. Conversation, brokerage and boundary activation of identity are the three interacting mechanisms that developed Jifeng into a space and leader of a social movement. The movement concluded in failure, implying the political regime's success in imposing further limitations on the operation of civil society. Nevertheless, historically, it is impossible to entirely eradicate the root of civil society growth in the face of harsh repression.

Foreign ink: student mobility, overseas training and Chinese geography, 1912–1952

During China’s Republican period Chinese students, supported by public and private scholarships, gathered at the University of Liverpool and Clark University for geographical training. Upon their return these students revolutionized traditional Chinese geography with the introduction of regional geography and fieldwork. The returning students and ‘native geographers’ – who had very limited professional overseas training – split into factions that competed for control of the Geographic Society of China and other resources. However, the Chinese Communist regime’s programme of thought reform changed the trajectory of these returning geographers, resulting in the decline of human geography and the rise of historical geography. The story of these returning Chinese students is valuable for understanding the modernization of geography as a discipline in China and academic mobility as both an intellectual venture and a lived experience.

The Impact of Chinese Reign on the Development of Tibet (1950-Today)

When thinking about Tibet, people often envision Mount Everest and "the paradise” secluded from the world. What most people do not know is the struggle of Tibetans under the Chinese Communist regime and the thousands of deaths it has caused. In history, Tibet has been both an independent nation and part of powerful Chinese and Mongolian dynasties. In 1950, Chinese troops took over and started a period of drastic change in Tibet. As a result, Tibet's economy developed rapidly, but it was at the cost of losing its rich culture and traditions. To maintain its rule over Tibet, China should not just focus on economic development, but, more importantly, preserve Tibet's culture and religion by adhering to the agreements made earlier.

Architecture of Diplomacy: Chinese Construction Aid in Asia, 1950–1976

Construction aid was a physical tool – and indeed a key tactical manoeuvre – of international diplomacy that became especially obvious during the Cold War period. Among the outcomes of construction aid were cultural and technical exchanges between the donor and recipient countries. This essay examines the typical construction aid projects gifted by the Chinese Communist government and professionals to developing countries in Asia and African during the era of Chairman Mao Zedong, with a focus on key Asian examples. The remarkably high percentage of national income spent by Maoist China on construction aid might have increased the burden upon the lives of ordinary Chinese people, yet they gave Chinese architects rare opportunities to practice Modernism in overseas environments. The strength of the technical forces of the Chinese Communist state, and the wisdom of Chinese designers, were notably crystallized through a series of conference halls and stadiums built across Asia. These construction aid projects informed similar designs back in China, which led in turn to further innovations that could then again be exported abroad. Altogether it represents an important non-Western strand within Modernist architecture of the twentieth century.

Missing Links in The China Model

Missing Links in The China Model Chenyang Li (bio) Daniel A. Bell's recent book The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy makes a significant contribution to political theory, political philosophy, and China studies. The book has already drawn a variety of responses (e.g., see Bai 2016, He et al. 2016, Nathan 2015, and Horesh 2016), some of which I believe are due to utter misreadings and misunderstandings. It is therefore important for us to spell out explicitly what kind of work we are dealing with here before we dive into other substantive issues. We should not take this book as an apologetics for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) even though it offers both positive and negative assessments of the Chinese communist regime, as any fair-minded work should. There is a tendency among scholars to avoid discussing certain topics in order not to be perceived as politically motivated to help governments with a less than commendable reputation. For example, when the Chinese government was [End Page 568] using harmony as a leading motif for policies, while some people would say anything in praise of harmony in order to please the government, there were also many who chose to turn their back on topics related to harmony in order to avoid being perceived as dancing to the music of the government. So the bandwagon goes both ways. This is unfortunate because scholarship should retain its own integrity and should not be influenced by politics. Professional ethics requires academics to say what a thing is as it is, regardless of what the government says or wishes us to say or not to say. In our case here, if we shy away from speaking positively of Chinese political meritocracy just to avoid being perceived as sleeping in the same bed as the Chinese government, which after all has a questionable reputation to say the least, we fail our professional responsibilities as serious academics. In the case of the CCP and China, I think the fact that the CCP survived the catastrophic Cultural Revolution and the devastating backlash of the June 4th incident in 1989 demands that serious scholars find out what the CCP did right more than what it did wrong. I am not saying that scholars should speak positively of political meritocracy even if they do not believe in it. However, if one studies political meritocracy and believes in its positive value, he or she should speak up, regardless of whether the Chinese communist government practices it well or not, and if the Chinese communist government does well as a political meritocracy we should find out more about this. Contrary to those accusing Bell as an apologist for the Chinese communist government, I think his book is a testimony both to Bell's integrity as a serious scholar and to his personal courage. Let me be explicit in saying that I am sympathetic to an integrated model of democracy and political meritocracy. I do not agree with a rather widespread assumption that the more democratic a society is the better it is. Besides the general and empty notion of "good," there is hardly anything of which it can be said that the more of it there is the better. Michael Sandel (1998) has argued that the appropriate amount of justice in a society depends on the circumstances of justice. Similarly, I believe the appropriate amount of democracy in a society depends on the circumstances of democracy. The circumstances of democracy should include the need for meritocracy in society. As Bell maintains, there should be a balance between democracy and meritocracy. However, I argue that Bell's model needs to be strengthened in two major areas. First, it lacks a mechanism of checks and balances on political power. Second, as a Confucian thinker, Bell needs to integrate (more of) the Confucian idea of "governance by virtue" into his model. Confucian governance by virtue is not merely about virtuous rulers; it is also about fostering a culture of virtuous behavior in government as well as in society at large. Let me first turn to the issue of checks and balances in government. After arguing for the need of both...

Red Swan Song: The End of Policy Experimentation in China?

Will Xi Jinping's increasingly authoritarian rule stifle innovation by local officials, which has been instrumental in the Chinese communist regime's resilience and economic success?

Sprinting with Small Steps: China’s Cadre Management and Authoritarian Resilience

In the past two decades, a new pattern of cadre promotion has quietly emerged and reshaped Chinese politics. It has been observed that officials who have held a series of key positions briefly are more likely to rise higher in their careers than other officials, a pattern that is sometimes referred to as “sprinting with small steps.” This article examines this pattern using prefecture-level leadership data to test first an institution-based explanation and then a more encompassing political interpretation. Going deeper, our interviews with local cadres further reveal there is a dual-track system of cadre management: some cadres are preferred, cultivated, and promoted through a fast track that breaks Party regulations, while others have to earn their promotions through the regular track. The article then argues that the dual-track system, part of the Party’s broader pattern of what we call “selective institutionalization,” enables the regime to balance between legitimacy and domination and thus contributes to the resilience of the Chinese Communist regime.

China's Great Migration: How the Poor Built a Prosperous Nation by Bradley Gardner

Reviewed by: China's Great Migration: How the Poor Built a Prosperous Nation by Bradley Gardner C. Cindy Fan (bio) Bradley Gardner. China's Great Migration: How the Poor Built a Prosperous Nation. Oakland, CA: Independent Institute, 2017. xii, 219 pp. Hardcover $27.95, isbn 978-1-598-13222-9. This book champions migrants, especially migrants in China. While Gardner's statement that "The value of an open labor market is one of the truisms of economics" (p. 165) is not exactly provocative, his notion that "China has embraced an idiosyncratic pro-migrant development policy" (p. 8) may surprise many, given a mainstream understanding, especially in the West, that China uses the draconian hukou policy to restrict migration. Moreover, his goal to show how China's experiences can help "policymakers elsewhere to consider solutions to some of the problems associated with large-scale migration and capture the substantial economic benefits" might be met with more than a few jaws dropped. What can the rest of the world possibly learn from China, when it is widely assumed that migrants there live in plight, like those in Foxconn factories who committed suicide? Refuting myths and challenging assumptions happen to be Gardner's strong suit. In the Introduction of the book, he tells us that China's success in lifting its population out of poverty is due to the "Great Migration." By his account, between 1978 and 2012, more than 260 million economic migrants moved from China's countryside to its cities, surpassing the total number of international migrants worldwide. Drawing from the growth accounting literature, which he admits is marked by considerable disagreements, he reports that rural–urban migration alone added US$1.1 billion to the Chinese economy over the twenty years between 1990 and 2010. The eight chapters that follow elaborate the case why migration should be embraced as a tool of development policy not only in China but in other parts of the world as well. Chapter 1, titled "Leaving the Countryside," is about how the Great Migration started. It details the early years of the Chinese Communist regime, focusing on land reforms, and the subsequent transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy, which also lowered barriers to migration. Gardner's narrative about historical changes is straightforward yet lively, filled with real-life stories. His explanation of hukou is among the best in the literature, due to its simplicity and its emphasis on what hukou means to real people. How the Chinese government adapted to the Great Migration is the subject of chapter 2, "Coming to the City." Here, Gardner highlights major changes that accelerated China's urban development, including the collapse of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), the 1994 fiscal reform, and increased liberalization of the labor market. He also shows convincingly the connections among conditions that explain the labor-heavy path of development, that is, China is capital poor, its intellectual property regulations are weak, but it [End Page 261] has plenty of flexible labor that could be mobilized to scale up production quickly. One of the two chapters on a specific city, chapter 3, is about the miracle story of how Wenzhou transformed itself from one of the poorest cities in China to where privatization first began and where millionaires were bred. The chapter tells an interesting story of how the Wenzhou people found a way out of poverty via informal-sector entrepreneurship in niches with low barriers to entry, high-volume demand, and extremely low margins. While Gardner attributes Wenzhou's success to migrants from the countryside and gives credit to diaspora and the local government's hands-off attitude, he also warns that Wenzhou needs to reinvent itself in order to remain successful. Chapter 4, titled "The Returns on the Great Migration," is concerned with the question "To what degree has the Great Migration been responsible for China's growth" (p. 70). Gardner estimates that by improving agricultural productivity and labor reallocation, migration has contributed 33 percent to China's gross domestic product growth. In addition, migration has advanced urbanization and labor market reforms, contributing to growth in industrial productivity, human capital, and capital investment. However, he also cautions that as China's...

Utopia, nostalgia, and femininity: visually promoting the Chinese Dream

The concept of the Chinese Dream has become a primary developmental goal of the Chinese Communist Government since it was put forth by Xi Jinping in 2012. It has been promoted through different forms of media, of which propaganda posters have played a dominant role. The propaganda discourse regarding the Chinese Dream has been mainly articulated in both the verbal text in official documents and the visual text in the posters. This study focuses on analyzing the visual images represented in the posters and exploring how they accord with social and historical texts, particularly the official verbal text of the Chinese Dream, the historical text of the propaganda of the Communist Party of China, and the social–cultural text interrelated with the visual symbols. The approach of intertextuality and intervisualityis adopted for the analysis and interpretation. The study shows that the majority of the visual symbols used in the posters are transposed from the sign systems of Chinese traditional culture and the revolutionary discourse of the Communist Party of China. The political concept of the Chinese Dream has embodied the characteristics of utopia, nostalgia, and femininity. With the posters in public spaces, the visual propaganda of the Chinese Dream has turned it into a mundane movement of political culture. This study hopes to contribute to the understanding of the role of visual images in political discursive formations and integrated propaganda in post-socialist China.

Communist/Socialist Regimes As Ethnic-Conflict-Prevention Institutions: What Do We Have to Keep in Mind the Most When We Consider East and Southeast Asian Security?

In reality, what are communist/socialist regimes? Viewed from modern European history, they are in essence ethnic-conflict-prevention institutions to be established where ethnic relations are too complicated: and the Chinese communist regime is no exception. Although they may appear either regimes of Marxists or totalitarians (or both) to be established where the disparity in wealth is too large, those are rather of their inessential attributes. Further, we must know that as long as we naively regard such inessential attributes as essential, our strategy for East and Southeast Asian security will fatally err; for we will fail to see that the biggest threat to East and Southeast Asian security is the collapse of the Chinese communist regime. Namely, if it collapsed, it should be followed by a replay of the Balkan tragedies that started immediately after the demise of the Soviet bloc in the early 1990s. To make matters worse, the Chinese replay should be far more disastrous than the original Balkan tragedies, for there is no such institution as the EU in East and Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, the total breakdown of the Chinese communist regime and the subsequent Balkanization of China are no longer an unreal nightmare: they have been getting more and more probable because the paradigm of society in China has steadily been changing since the mid 1990s. Moreover, we must know that the current North Korean problem is in truth one to be understood in precisely the same context. The overall security of East and Southeast Asia entirely depends upon whether or not the Chinese Communist Party can fully reverse the ongoing dangerous change in the paradigm of society in China.