Chinese Elite Politics Research Articles

An Empirical Study on the Promotion of Chinese Political Elites: A Case of the 20th Central Committee of the CCP

An Empirical Study on the Promotion of Chinese Political Elites: A Case of the 20th Central Committee of the CCP

중국 엘리트 정치의 여성 대표성 연구 – 시진핑 집권 3기를 중심으로 –

중국 엘리트 정치의 여성 대표성 연구 – 시진핑 집권 3기를 중심으로 –

Promoting socio-religious rights of Tibetan Buddhists in China in the 21st century: Legislators and political realities

Relevance. The study of the formation of relations between the Chinese political elite and Tibetan Buddhism in this period is critical for understanding the main aspects of political, interfaith and intercultural interaction in the region both in the 21st century and today. Purpose. The study aims to analyse how the social and religious rights of Tibetan Buddhist followers are ensured in modern China, taking into account the existing laws and political situation in the 21st century. Methodology. The study employs historical, comparative, and systematic methods to analyze legislative documents, official policies, and scholarly literature in order to examine the socio-religious rights of Tibetan Buddhists in China in the 21st century, considering both legal frameworks and political realities. Results. The study demonstrates the role and importance of international law in the context of the complex religious policy of the Chinese Communist Party. The author shows the influence of the reforms of the communist government on the process of changing the role of traditional religious institutions in public life. The study revealed the impact of reforms on the nature of interethnic relations in the region. The study examines aspects of the ethnic policy of the Communist Party of China on the subsequent process of formation of civil and religious identity in the region. Conclusions. The study concludes that relations between the Chinese Communist Party and Tibetan Buddhist leaders are complex, focusing on lama reincarnation, while government policies significantly impact Tibetan demographics, ethnicity, and culture. Keywords: international law; freedom of religion; conflict; soteriology; regional autonomy; soft power politics

Written directives and ministerial tenure in China: a novel gauge for political performance?

ABSTRACT While prior research on Chinese political elites has predominantly centred on local officials, assessing the performance of ministers may pose significant challenges. This paper uses written directives (WDs), a pivotal form of elite communication, as a metric for evaluating ministers’ political performance. We posit that a higher frequency of WDs received by ministers from top leaders signifies increased attention and enhanced political success, potentially bolstering their longevity in office and career advancement. To test this hypothesis, we analyse ministerial tenure in China from 1949 to 1976, a period characterized by the unparalleled influence of Chairman Mao Zedong, which facilitated the measurement of WDs. Our findings indicate that ministers who received a greater number of WDs, on average, enjoyed longer tenures, while those with a shared historical background with Mao did not. These results align with previous historical analyses demonstrating Mao’s adept consolidation of power within political elites. Moreover, the recent release of historical Chinese materials has unveiled a wealth of political communication among Chinese political elites, with WDs offering a novel avenue for gauging political performance. This research contributes empirical insights from China to the global literature on ministerial tenure, enriching the landscape of contemporary Chinese bureaucratic studies.

Social structure of the Chinese political Elite in the context of modernization. Key trends in its development

Social structure of the Chinese political Elite in the context of modernization. Key trends in its development

Manipulation without Resistance: Consensus Elections in Rural China

Abstract The Chinese Communist Party has been increasing its control over village elections since the early 2010s, yet this move has not triggered any widespread popular resistance. Drawing on ethnographic evidence from village elections held in 2017 in a county in Hunan province, I conceptualize a form of electoral manipulation I term “consensus elections,” in which the Party engineers a pre-electoral consensus with ordinary villagers on whom to select while deterring challenges from village elites. Consensus elections are rooted in the Chinese political elites’ ideal that favours electoral participation over competition. While participation increases regime legitimacy, competition threatens regime authority. Propaganda promoting this electoral ideal shapes the views of ordinary villagers, laying a basis of legitimacy on consensus elections. The villagers embraced voting as being oriented by a unitary common interest and developed a cynicism whereby campaigning was equated with corruption. Comparison of the processes involved in engineering consensus elections in five villages suggests popular support for such elections. Whereas popular resistance was mounted against the lack of participation, popular complicity helps the Party to deter challenges from village elites. Consensus elections have facilitated the fall of Chinese village elections without undermining the Party's legitimacy, but consensus elections will also encourage more political challenges from village elites through non-institutionalized channels.

The Rise of Xenophobia and Nationalism in China Since the COVID Pandemic: Insights from Discourse Analysis

Since the successful containment of COVID-19 in Wuhan in late March 2020, China had implemented a nationwide highly stringent and restrictive zero-COVID policy to manage the pandemic until the sudden swift away from it in early December 2022. How did the Chinese Communist Party discursively construct it as a ‘normal’ and legitimate policy? Using interpretivism and poststructuralist political theory, this paper examines how Chinese political elites constructed a discourse of danger for the COVID pandemic, with the dominant discursive narratives full of xenophobic and nationalist languages. The discourse framed ‘foreigners’ as ‘threats’ to Chinese people’s health, advocated that China should rely on home-made vaccines and medicines and, more importantly, argued that the Chinese Communist rule demonstrates ‘institutional superiority’ over Western governance. This xenophobic and nationalist discourse has lingered on after the dismantling of the zero-COVID policy. There are grounds for us to concern whether China is seeking self-reliance rather than integrating itself with the world. A Chinese decoupling from the world—a nationalist self-reliance policy similar with that in the Mao era—is not unthinkable.

Critical Han Studies Through the Lens of Internal Colonialism: China, Guangdong, and Hong Kong

When the concept of ‘internal colonialism’ has been applied to China, it has often been focused on the plight of ethnic minorities. The political and cultural subordination of non-Mandarin Han groups, however, has drawn little attention. We argue that critical Han studies, by posing a challenge to the state ideology of Han ethnic unitarism, provides a theoretical arsenal capable of broadening the application of the internal colonialism framework to the study of non-Mandarin Han groups and regions in China. To provide empirical support for our argument, we examine ethno-geographic representation among Chinese political elites. We find an internal heterogeneity and ethnic hierarchy between different Han groups who have integrated into the political ruling class of China, which is dominated by the Mandarins, to various extents: the Wu people of Shanghai and Zhejiang represent the top layer of the hierarchy; the Xiang of Hunan, the Hokkien of Fujian, and the Gan of Jiangxi constitute the intermediate layer; and the Cantonese and the Teochew of Guangdong belong to the bottom layer. These findings provide the basis for our discussion of internal colonization in China with a specific focus on Guangdong and Hong Kong.

Serving the People or Serving the Party?: The Utilisation of Lei Feng in Chinese Elite Politics

Comrade Lei Feng, a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army, is renowned in China as a national role model, famed for his routine altruism rather than for any acts of exceptional braveness or daring. Over the years, a number of national campaigns have been launched to emulate the behaviour of Lei Feng, with the objective of improving public morality. But the campaigns have also been an important source of political legitimacy, particularly for Mao Zedong. This is because Lei was widely propagated as an ardent Maoist who studied the ideas of Mao by night and implemented them by day, presenting a shining example of benevolent Maoism which assisted Mao’s return to the helm of Chinese politics during the Cultural Revolution. Less well-documented, and the focus of this article, is the utilisation of Lei Feng by Mao’s elite colleagues in their own personal quests for political ascent. In the internecine intra-party power struggle to succeed Mao as paramount leader, separate rival factions led by each of the Gang of Four, Deng Xiaoping and Hua Guofeng heaped praise on Lei Feng to demonstrate their own devotion to Mao. As the power struggles intensified, each of the candidates also used Lei to besmirch the political credentials of their opponents by suggesting that they were anti-Lei, by implication anti-Mao.

Beijingology 2.0: Bridging the “Art” and “Science” of China Watching in Xi Jinping’s New Era

In Xi Jinping’s China, the top leadership is getting even more closed, whereas their decisions carry ever more global weight. Ahead of the Chinese Communist Party’s highly important 20th National Congress to be held in the late autumn of 2022, the eyes of the global Intelligence Community are turning to Beijing. How to divine what exactly is going on in the black box of Chinese elite politics at this sensitive moment? This is the million-dollar-question facing analysts of Chinese politics. We argue that there is a gap asking to be bridged between the “art” and “science” of reading Chinese elite politics, or between on the one hand, the traditional Beijingology, and on the other hand, purely academically relevant research. There is a pressing need for a “Beijingology 2.0,” combining the traditional art of the China hands with the most innovative methods and tools derived from social science research into elite studies and text analysis, respectively.

Bridging State and Nonprofit: Differentiated Embeddedness of Chinese Political Elites in Charitable Foundations

How are political elites embedded in both civil and political domains? I studied 246 Chinese political elites who also served on nonprofit foundations’ boards from 2011 to 2015 and conceptualized a framework to understand the state-nonprofit relationship before 2015. The political elites can build horizontal connections with foundations, helping the party-state reach nonprofit actors. They can also build vertical connections with political groups, helping foundations access political resources. The dual-role elites’ connectedness with foundations and in the polity varies by their primary positions in the political system. Effective communication between the state and nonprofit actors requires elites to have strong connections in both the civil and political domains, but the situation in China is far from ideal—those embedded in foundations are disconnected from the polity, and those connected in the polity are marginalized in foundations.

Exploring Biographical Ties among Party and State Leaders in China: A Social Network Analysis

ABSTRACT This article offers a new perspective on Chinese elite politics in the Xi Jinping era by overcoming the drawbacks of the factional approach to the study of the Chinese elite. It analyses professional connections among 71 members of the category of party and state leaders of China based on information drawn from their official biographies and compiled by the authors into a single dataset. Four types of centrality – degree, betweenness, closeness, and eigenvector centralities – as well as the Louvain method for community detection, are applied to weighted and unweighted edge lists deriving from the dataset. The results reveal a positive correlation between the eigenvector centrality (unweighted) and the level of the formal political influence of a member of the Chinese elite. A distinct hierarchy of power is observed, with Politburo members and those coming from important areas, such as Shanghai, Fujian, and Zhejiang, ranking at the top. Louvain clustering (weighted) distributes members of the elite across institutional affiliation, while for the unweighted edge list it identifies both territorial and institutional, as well as mixed, clusters. The model reflects the formal political influence of the members of the elite and visualises the existence of informal groups.

RISE OF CHINA: GROWING STRATEGIC COMPETITION BETWEEN THE US AND CHINA

The emergence of China as a great power is indubitably one of the greatest perplexities in the international arena since the cold war era. Similarly, it poses challenges to the strategic position of the US. The economic and technological height of China has now become a big question mark for the US hegemony. The US has adopted some essential policies and actions like the B3W initiative and Strategic Competition Act of 2021, which label China a strategic competitor in multiple areas, including economics, technology, and military security. Such actions and policies by the US generate growing strategic competition between Beijing and Washington. However, the Chinese political elite has reservations that the US wants to curb the expansion of Chinese influence. This paper, therefore, analyses how strategic competition between China and the US increases with the rise of China, particularly after China’s BRI, and how China poses a challenge or an opportunity for the US. This paper employs the Power-transition theory as an analytical framework to investigate the power transition debated among policymakers in the US and China.
 
 Bibliography Entry
 Ali, Irfan, and Rubina Ali. 2021. "Rise of China: Growing Strategic Competition between the US and China." Margalla Papers 25 (1): 103-114.

A History of American Studies of Chinese Elite Politics

This review essay examines a historical process of knowledge construction in American studies of China. Before 1989, U.S.-based scholars argued that Deng Xiaoping consolidated power through struggles and negotiation with other factions inside China. In the 1990s, however, a strand of research focused on how Dengists were exogenously empowered by the American policy of engagement. I argue that what changed was not the objective status of Chinese elite politics (i.e., the distribution of power in Dengists’ favor), but rather the theoretical construct regarding what forces (internal or external) might influence elite interactions. This epistemic shift was shaped by changing U.S. China policy. Consequently, what had previously been understood as an indigenously driven Chinese elite outcome now became an exogenously influenced one. Despite this added nuance, the new thesis did not explain more phenomena of the same kind than the old one.

The Rise of Technocratic Leadership in the 1990s in the People’s Republic of China

The transformation of China’s political elite provides important insights into the nation’s political metamorphosis and the changes in cadre selection criteria. The current literature explains the composition of Chinese political elites by referencing cross-sectional biographic data and describing how the revolutionary veterans stepped down and were replaced by the technocrats who emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. However, explanations for the rise of the technocrats have largely been limited to socioeconomic factors. By analyzing the longitudinal data of Chinese provincial leaders during the period of 1990–2013, this article shows the rise of technocrats in Chinese politics in the 1990s but also provides an explanation for it from the perspectives of individuals’ career paths and the contemporaneous political and policy landscapes. These explanations were drawn from analyses of the expansion of higher education and faculty restructuring in the 1950s, graduate job assignments, the recruitment and promotion of young and middle-aged cadres, and the cadre policy known as the Four Modernizations of the early 1980s. This article presents the interactions among individuals’ career opportunities, group composition characteristics, and socioeconomic and macropolitical dynamics. It also reveals how the Chinese Communist Party legitimizes its ruling power and maintains state capacity and political order through elite recruitment.

The Origins of Chinese Nationalism in Twenty-First Century

Chinese nationalism began to rise when the Cold War ended in 1989. During the first two decades of twenty-first century, Chinese nationalism as strong force has impacted Chinese public opinion as well as government decisions to a large extent. In the eyes of Chinese political elites, nationalism is a force for unity that can keep China together as the communism has lost its appeal. This study explores factors which best explain the origins of Chinese nationalism in our era. For this purpose, I utilize qualitative analysis of nationalist discourse and deeds to gauge nationalist sentiment among the contemporary Chinese people and its political elites. The evidence suggests that nationalism in China mainly comes from Chinese great pride in its major economic achievements in recent decades, the perceived injustice and insults done to China when it was dismembered by the imperialist powers in nineteenth and the first half of twentieth centuries, the current provocative moves against the rising China, and the Chinese government’s propaganda campaign.

The Chinese Tradition of Administrative Law

For most of the time during the last two millennia, China was a dynastic empire ruled by an emperor with the assistance of a highly developed mandarinate of imperial organs. “Administrative law” in the modern sense of a set of legal norms enacted by the legislature or developed by the judiciary that simultaneously empower and constrain state organs and officials for the purpose of protecting the rights and liberties of subjects or citizens did not exist in traditional China. But there did exist for more than two millenniums elaborate and sophisticated rules regulating the powers and functions of each component of the highly complex and extensive machinery of imperial organs and officials, and prescribing in detail the duties of officials as well as the multiple and complicated monitoring, supervisory and disciplinary mechanisms applicable to the exercise of powers and performance of duties by officials in different state organs. By the late 19th century, Qing China’s increasing subordination to Western imperialism and semi-colonialism convinced significant numbers of Chinese political and scholarly elite that there was a desperate need for China to “save” and strengthen itself by pursuing modernization. In the legal and political domains, this generally meant extensive borrowing or transplant of Western political and legal institutions. After China's defeat by Japan in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, Japan’s experience of successful modernisation was widely admired by Chinese intellectuals, and the Japanese model was perceived as one that China should imitate in its self-strengthening efforts. This essay will therefore begin with the introduction and reception of Japanese administrative law in China in the late Qing Dynasty. It will then survey the study of comparative law and the influence of foreign law on the development of Chinese administrative law in the Republic of China era (1911–1949) and after the establishment of the People's Republic of China (1949-). Major developments in Chinese administrative law in both the Republican era and the Communist era will also be briefly outlined as the context of administrative law scholarship. It will be seen that the story of the study of comparative and foreign administrative law in modern China is very closely intertwined with the story of the development of Chinese administrative law itself.

La Guerra de Corea y la República Popular China: una aproximación constructivista

This article aims to analyze the Foreign Policy of China in the Korean War based on a constructivist theoretical approach. So, I analyze the relationship between China’s identities and interests and its impact on the Chinese political elite to decide their participation in the Korean War. I employ documentary research to examine the relationship between China’s identities and interests and its impact on the Chinese political elite. As a result of the research, I conclude how the reformulation of identities reflects the mutually constitutive relationship between material and non-material structures. In this way, this article provides some elements to understand how in the decision-making of Foreign Policy the identity also influences the decisions and actions of the leaders.

THE RISE OF THE PRINCELINGS IN CHINA: CAREER ADVANTAGES AND COLLECTIVE ELITE REPRODUCTION

AbstractHow have China's princelings benefitted from their family backgrounds in their careers? This study seeks to answer the question and, in so doing, to add to the existing factionalist and meritocracy approaches to Chinese political elites. Based on biographical data of 293 princelings, quantitative analyses show that princelings have various advantages over non-princeling officials on the Central Committee. This is not simply familial advantage, however, as regression analysis finds parents’ rank and longevity do not significantly affect princelings’ career outcomes. Rather, the findings suggest that princelings benefit from membership in an affiliative status group, which differs from factions. The qualitative analysis find princelings’ status is formed and reproduced in a “collective” manner: (1) princelings’ status and early advantages originated in the state's centralized resource allocation system; (2) princelings’ education and career choices are intertwined with the state's practical and ideological goals; (3) princelings’ shared life courses strengthens their collective identity; (4) princelings’ career advantages are secured by the party-state's cadre management system. These factors combine to reproduce princelings’ elite status within the party and state, what I term “collective elite reproduction.”

The Impending Rise of the “Tsinghua Clique”: Cultivation, Transfer, and Relationships in Chinese Elite Politics

ABSTRACTThe Tsinghua clique is highly influential in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) politics. But in the past, alumni from other elite universities, such as Peking University and Renmin University of China, also occupied positions as senior cadres, so Tsinghua did not have any more influence than they did. However, since 2002, Tsinghua University has developed a ‘cultivation/transfer’ system whereby the school, in a purposeful, calculating, and organized manner, selects and trains talented students and then places them in political posts after graduation. After these students enter officialdom, they strengthen their ties with other alumni through their connections with the Tsinghua authorities and the Tsinghua Alumni Association. With this system in place, Tsinghua alumni account for the majority of ‘post-1980 generation’ county-level leading cadres. The authors therefore predict that the ‘Tsinghua clique’ will gain even stronger political influence, and Tsinghua University will likely become the most significant university for cultivating senior cadres.