Chinese Communist Party Regime Research Articles

Buddhism Revamped for Socialism: The Monastic Economy on Mount Jiuhua from 1949 to 1966

This article explores rarely accessed local archives to reveal the fate of a renowned area of Buddhist activity—Mount Jiuhua—from 1949 to 1966 and the impact of the Chinese Communist Party regime’s economic and religious policies on the region’s religious communities. Specifically, it examines how the authorities attempted to utilize all the tangible and intangible resources of the Buddhist communities on Mount Jiuhua—including human capital, land, buildings, religious instruments made of metal, and cultural and historical status—to consolidate their grip on power and stimulate the area’s economic development. While the local cadres encouraged young clerics to disrobe, forced others to engage in physical labor, confiscated monastic landholdings, and expropriated metal instruments, they also dispensed relief to elderly and disabled clerics and funded the renovation of key monasteries. In the face of this unprecedented interference, the clerics made full use of the mountain’s reputation to argue with the authorities and renegotiate the boundaries of legitimate religious activities.

Founding Myth, Institutional Adaptation, and Regime Resilience in China

To explain the factors behind the regime resilience in China, this article focuses on the foundational and institutional resources that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) accumulated in the earlier stages of regime development and their lasting influence on regime trajectory. At the stage of regime foundation, the CCP successfully constructed the founding myth of the party-state as the foundational resource to legitimize its rule. At the later stage of regime adaptation, institutional adaptation during the process of achieving modernization allowed the CCP to accumulate substantial institutional resources to further buttress the regime. While negotiating the space between state and society, the CCP regime demonstrated high capacity in granting more autonomy to market actors to accelerate growth while increasing the embeddedness of economic strata in the system through informal and formal institutional arrangements. When confronted with a serious crisis, the CCP was able to draw strength from the foundational and institutional resources to survive. This article argues that the CCP’s efforts in accumulating strength at the early stages of regime development continue to exert strong influence on China’s regime trajectory at later stages.

How a non-democratic regime maintains its legitimacy over time: A study of changes in Chinese Communist Party legitimacy after 1949

By exploring the operation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since its rise to power in 1949, this article demonstrates how a non-democratic regime maintains its legitimacy. While previous studies have shed light on the CCP’s sources of legitimacy, few abundantly and comparatively discuss the different forms of legitimacy and how legitimacy changes over time in a non-democratic state. This study addresses these gaps by analyzing how the CCP’s operational principles change over time, including changes in sources and forms of legitimacy. This study uses different frameworks of legitimacy to facilitate the comparison of changes in legitimacy of different leadership generations, and also demonstrates the specification of legitimacy of the CCP from different perspectives. By comparing the sources and forms of legitimacy of different generations of regime leaders, this study demonstrates that after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the CCP regime lacked substantial legitimacy based on political participation, and thus emphasized instrumental legitimacy based on economic development instead. Using process tracing to analyze policy changes, this study argues that different CCP leadership generations employed different sources and forms of legitimacy to maintain regime support.

Institutional Changes, Influences and Historical Junctures in the Communist Youth League of China

AbstractThe 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.

Beijing's Crackdown on Human Rights and the Rule of Law in Hong Kong

executive summary: This essay examines how Beijing's escalating crackdown on Hong Kong has systematically imposed authoritarian policies that undermine international human rights and the rule of law, abandoning China's commitments both to the Hong Kong people and to the international community. main argument Confidence in the "one country, two systems" model China promised Hong Kong has slowly drained away in the years since the 1997 handover. In 2019, as "one country" seemed set to gobble up "two systems" under the weight of a proposed law to allow the extradition of accused from Hong Kong to the mainland, the people of Hong Kong staged one of the world's largest ever protests to demand the autonomy, rule of law, and basic freedoms they were promised in the city's Basic Law. In the face of government indifference and aggressive police tactics, these protests morphed into a confrontation that carried on for months throughout the second half of 2019. In 2020, Beijing responded with a total crackdown, imposing a national security law that undermined the core liberal institutions that have long sustained Hong Kong. To ensure absolute control, Beijing this year amended the Basic Law to impose new rules under which electoral committees can bar from the political process anyone deemed disloyal to the Chinese Communist Party regime. The new rules create an electoral model that profoundly violates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights requirements applicable to Hong Kong. policy implications • International partners and organizations can play a more constructive role by focusing on meeting grassroot concerns. In this regard, recognition and support for autonomous territorial entities, such as Hong Kong, could be conditioned on adherence to relevant international and constitutional commitments to secure democratic representation, human rights, and the rule of law at the local level. • To encourage central government engagement on critical issues relating to human rights and the rule of law, diplomatic efforts ought to be multilateral, targeted, and involve clear messaging on the importance of the rule of law and international standards of human rights. • If Chinese and Hong Kong officials remain indifferent to both local and international concerns, immediate policies will need to focus on the exit and immigration concerns Hong Kong residents will face as they seek to escape the repressive conditions being imposed.

Is China a Deviant Case? A Societal-Level Test of the Modernization Theory

Some view China as a deviant case to the modernization theory. This view is based on two observations. First, the Chinese middle class shows no distinct democratic orientations. Second, one’s trust in the Chinese Communist Party regime rises as he or she gets financially better off. However, the modernization theory by its nature is a societal-level theory, and it has not yet been tested at the societal level in China. This study undertakes this task by examining the relationship between a province’s economic development and its political trust in the central government and its tolerance of public criticism of the government. The two provincial-level variables are estimated by Multilevel Regression and Poststratification using data from China Survey 2008, CGSS 2010, 2012, 2013, and the 2010 National Census. The results, which are corroborated by county-level Multilevel Regression and Poststratification, strongly support the modernization theory.

Social Constructionism and the Significance of Political Rumors in Contemporary China

Rumors are a set of collective discussions used by cadres or the masses to attain specific goals. Both political elites and the general public reveal their dissatisfaction or concern with the Chinese Communist Party regime through the dissemination of politically charged rumors, fueled by the party-state system’s habit of withholding information and amplified by traditional Chinese superstition.

30 Years After Tiananmen: Dissent Is Not Dead

In developments that form a stark contrast to the hopes that accompanied the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of thirty years ago, Xi Jinping's Chinese Communist Party regime has devised new ways to consolidate power and crackdown on dissent. Yet despite an ever-expanding surveillance apparatus and a burgeoning social-credit system, the political values and spirit of collective action embodied in the 1989 democracy movement have endured and even thrived. Indeed, while the Xi government may appear all-powerful, political fissures are widening, and there are many pockets of discontent. China may not appear to be moving on the right track-but we have not yet reached the end of Chinese history.

The Institution of Petition and Authoritarian Social Control in Contemporary China

This paper discusses the Xinfang institution of petitions (letters and visits) and explores the ways in which the Chinese Communist Party regime utilizes social control mechanisms to identify, oversee, and suppress socially discontented people with grievances in the post-Mao market reform era. This public-facing institution for managing participation and rightful resistance, which aims to oversee local officials and redress mass grievances, also plays an unexpected role in social control. Unlike the social control exercised by police patrols in police states, Xinfang functions first as a “fire alarm” in this authoritarian regime; then, if necessary, as a selective “police patrol,” collecting information on discontented people with grievances, monitoring them, quelling and even preempting their protests, and referring dangerous petitioners to higher levels of government to prevent disruption in politically critical regions. This argument is supported with a detailed institutional analysis of the nationwide structure of Xinfang and several case studies of Xinfang’s multi-layered response to petitioners to Beijing, during the Falun Gong incidents in 1999 and 2000 in particular. Several complementary case studies on the behavior of local petition mechanisms and statistical evidence are also analyzed.

Ruthless Manipulation or Benevolent Amnesia? The role of the history of the Fifteen-year War in China's diplomacy towards Japan before the 1982 Textbook Incident

AbstractExploring how the history of the Fifteen-year War was dealt with in pre-1982 mainland China is an essential step towards understanding the currently explosive Sino-Japanese History Problem; furthermore, this might shed light on various issues in the post-war history of China and Sino-Japanese relations. However, available research on the pre-1982 period is scarce and problematic. Earlier political scientists argue that the history of the war was ruthlessly manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party regime, while some recent studies believe that the war was conveniently ‘forgotten’ as Sino-Japanese friendship was vital for the government of the People's Republic of China. This article aims at providing an accurate and thorough picture of how the history of the Fifteen-year War was positioned in the diplomatic practice of the Chinese Communist Party regime in relation to Japan during the period.

The CCP's Learning System: Thought Unification and Regime Adaptation

In an attempt to mold itself into a “learning Party”, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has recently borrowed the theory of the “learning organization”, a concept derived from Western management. This article argues that, in the process of molding the CCP into a “learning Party”, President Hu Jintao has employed two functions of learning inherited from Party history—thought unification and regime adaptation—to reinforce his own political legitimacy and, accordingly, that of the entire CCP regime. In effect, Hu has created a “learning system”: from collective study by the Politburo, down to study sessions at every level of the Party, Hu is able to disseminate his personal concepts of governance and lay out doctrine for the entire Party. Although Hu Jintao's personal prestige is limited, and not all inner Party policies are guided by the “learning system”, this structure still smoothes the way for the implementation of many of Hu's policies.

Economic development and mass political participation in contemporary China: determinants of provincial petition (Xinfang) activism 1994–2002

Rapid economic development has increased mass political participation in market reform China. Many electoral authoritarian regimes with a good record of economic development have experienced the growing participation of elite/middle-class citizens. Under the Chinese Communist Party regime, however, the poor mass is the main group to participate drastically more. This is because despite rapid aggregate growth, the mass have suffered extensively from excessive exploitation with high levels of corruption and inequality, which benefits many local elites. The regime has evaded authoritarian election but channeled such mounting participatory demands into an extensive petition ( Xinfang) institution nationwide. As a result, the mass petition activism has rapidly increased since the early 1990s. This article finds the specific determinants of such petition activism with newly assembled data on provincial petition frequency and multiple case studies.

The Changing Role of the Popular Religion ofNuo(傩) in Modern Chinese Politics

AbstractSince the early 1980s, China's rapid economic growth and profound social transformation have greatly changed the role of popular religion in modern Chinese politics. In the case ofnuo, these changes have been directly responsible for the incorporation of this popular religion into the implementation of Party-state's policy on ethnic minority and the provision of evidence to support the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party's regime. Through manipulation and reinterpretation by local governments, the popular religion ofnuohas not only become the target of local socio-economic development, a common phenomenon in contemporary China, but has also played a key role in ethnic identification, which is an important step for a post-Mao's CCP to maintain political stability in ethnic minority areas. In addition,nuohas through the research of Marxism-influenced schools fundamentally altered its position from an officially unrecognized religion opposed to both socialist political order and atheist ideology to a politically favoured ‘living fossil’1of primitive culture. This proves the Marxist evolutionary theory in which socialism and communism are thought to be inescapable consequences of social development. The positive role played bynuoin modern Chinese politics has brought the popular religion much open support and endorsement from party-state officials at all levels, including top-ranking officials within the Central Committee of the CCP. Like any popular religion,nuohas over the centuries undergone significant changes, but never before has it experienced such dramatic changes in its relationship with an anti-religious and pragmatic central government, something which has significantly altered the course of its development.

Breaching the Great Firewall

Abstract Along with the rapid diffusion of Internet connectivity in China, many commentators, politicians, and pundits have speculated about the potential of the Internet to facilitate political change and undermine the dominance of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but the CCP regime has managed to stifle most attempts to use the Internet to promote political change. The centerpiece of its strategy for limiting what it perceives as the adverse consequences of the spread of the Internet has been the construction of a system of high-tech Internet controls, which have been dubbed the “Great Firewall.” Although it remains far from impenetrable, the Great Firewall has become increasingly technologically advanced and effective. Various parties outside of China have responded by developing technologies designed to circumvent these controls. For those trying to use technology to foster change in China, however, it is not simply a question of outsmarting the censors, but also one of dealing with more fundamental...