One-party State Research Articles

Rumours. Who believes them?

PurposeWhile psychology, sociology and communications studies hypothesise a range of independent variables that might impact on individuals’ acceptance or rejection of rumours, almost all studies of the phenomenon have taken place in environments featuring notable, and sometimes very deep, partisan divisions, making it almost impossible to isolate the impact of partisan influences on views on different rumour subjects. This study aims to remove the possibility of partisan influences on readers of internet rumours by testing the impact of independent demographic variables in China, a one-party state with no overt partisan divisions. The study provides an opportunity to strip away the influence of ideology and see whether this factor may have coloured previous studies on susceptibility to believe rumours.Design/methodology/approachAn empirical study was used to examine belief in false and true online rumours in a non-partisan environment. A large sample group was presented with rumours across four subject areas and respondents’ conclusions and demographic information was then subject to logistic regression analysis to identify relationships between factors and ability to identify the veracity of online rumours.FindingsUnexpectedly, the regression analysis revealed no statistically significant nexus between many independent demographic variables and patterns of believing or disbelieving rumours. In other cases, a statistically significant relationship was revealed, but only to a limited degree. The results suggest that once the role of partisanship in explaining the proliferation of and belief in false rumours and the ability to identify true ones is removed from consideration, no other independent variables enjoy convincing links with rumour belief.Originality/valueThe study tests in China, a jurisdiction featuring a non-partisan environment, the impact of independent variables on media users’ belief in a wide range of rumours.

The "Alito Hypothesis" in an Era of Emboldened One-Party State Rule

The "Alito Hypothesis" in an Era of Emboldened One-Party State Rule

Emergence of One-Party States in Africa, Tanzania and Burkina Faso in Perspective

Emergence of One-Party States in Africa, Tanzania and Burkina Faso in Perspective

Chinese Contemplations on Utopian and Dystopian Democratic Governance

Abstract This article addresses the Chinese debates on utopian and dystopian modes of democracy. It opens the black box of the one-party state and delves below the surface of the People's Republic of China's official statements on “democracy” (e.g., “people's democracy,” “democratic centralism”) by focusing on the often-overlooked “democracy” contemplations within the highly fragmented Chinese academic communities. These reflections indirectly respond to the debates and governance practices in other world regions—with the US being referred to as the main “mirror” image. The article mainly focuses on the first two office terms of Xi Jinping. Developments since this re-appointment as head of the Chinese party-state in 2022 (and 2023), however, indicate that the “democracy” frame continues to serve as core element of the Chinese role-identity narratives.

Business interest groups in a one-party state: the case of Vietnam

Business interest groups in a one-party state: the case of Vietnam

Who are the people? Populists’ articulation of “the people” in contemporary China

Discerning what populists mean by the people is crucial for understanding populism. However, the appeals populists make to the people differ across political systems, with distinctions particularly evident between democratic contexts and one-party states such as China. Articulations of the people in Chinese populist communication remain underexplored, which is a gap this paper addresses by clarifying how the people is constructed in the discourses that underpin Chinese populism. A total of 61 populism cases were examined through discourse and meta-analyses, from which three manifestations of the people emerged. First, the Chinese nation serves as an ideological glue to mobilize people to protest against those seen as betraying their Chinese identity or violating the sovereignty and dignity of China. Second, the mass is associated with an affective aversion to scientists and experts, but also with mass support for a satirical subculture that challenges the hegemony of elite-dominated cultural production and cultural institutions. Finally, socially vulnerable groups assemble powerless people in situations of economic impoverishment, political marginalization, and social vulnerability. The analysis reveals how these three conceptualizations of the people drive online Chinese bottom-up populism, allowing netizens to serve as mediators and pitting the people against corrupt elites and the establishment.

Universalism and national ownership in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): perspectives from Vietnam

This article articulates and analyses the tension between universalism and national ownership in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It focuses on the context of Vietnam as a one-party state, committed to the SDGs, that combines socialist commitments and capitalist aspirations. The SDGs have been critiqued from many angles, and ‘national ownership’ is pivotal to an evaluation of these competing perspectives. The article examines how far, in the tension between global commitments and national ownership, the SDG agenda itself is compromised. Using the set of goals, targets and indicators as well as cross-cutting foundational principles championed by the Agenda 2030, i.e. ‘leave no one behind’, ‘multi-stakeholder participation’ and ‘indivisibility’, the article sheds light on the dynamics of Vietnam’s national ownership of the SDGs and reflects on what this means for the SDGs.

Emergence of One-Party States in Africa: Tanzania & Burkina Faso in Perspective.

Emergence of One-Party States in Africa: Tanzania & Burkina Faso in Perspective.

On the History of the Restoration of a Multi-Party Political System in Kenya

On the eve of the declaration of independence in 1963, the specifics of the alignment of political forces in Kenya consisted in the struggle for future power between two large nationalist unions – Kenya African National Union (KANU) and Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU). The outcome of this struggle brought victory to KANU and largely determined the vector of the future political history of this country. Under its first President, Jomo Kenyatta (and Chairman of KANU), multiparty Kenya became a de facto one-party state after KADU was dissolved in 1964 and the activities of the opposition Kenya People Union (was emerged in 1965) was banned in 1966. Kenya became officially the one-party state under Kenyatta’s successor D. аrap Moi in 1982. In the process of further establishing the authoritarian regime, he used KANU to extend state-party control to all forms of socio-political life of the country (parliament, judiciary, trade unions, public organizations, etc.). The main guarantor of ensuring order was repressive measures against any forms of dissidence. After the adoption in 1991 of the amendment to the Constitution on the liberalization of the political system, Moi managed to remain as president twice more (after the 1991 and 1997 elections), thanks to the disunity of the opposition represented by parties created on ethnic grounds. Only in 2002, the opposition managed to create a multi-ethnic short-term alliance National Rainbow Coalition led by M. Kibaki. As a result, the first president was elected in Kenya, who was not a member of the party that had been in power for 39 years before. It also put an end to the 24-year «Moi era», which was characterized by the flourishing of corruption, the crisis in the economy, political repression and tribal strife. But the same challenges, and the unresolved land issue among them, again led to the unrest during the next presidential campaign of 2007–2008. The culmination was the largest ethnopolitical crisis in the history of Kenya, which was stopped only thanks to the efforts of international mediators. In 2010 a new constitution was adopted, in which an attempt was made to reform the political system in order to prevent the aggravation of interethnic conflicts in the future during presidential election campaigns in multiparty Kenya. The purpose of the main provisions of the Constitution is to make politics more inclusive, to expand the participation of the population in decision-making, to overcome of the population distrust to their results of a presidential elections.

Race and Diplomacy in Zimbabwe: The Cold War and Decolonization, 1960–1984 by Timothy Lewis Scarnecchia

<i>Race and Diplomacy in Zimbabwe: The Cold War and Decolonization, 1960–1984</i> by Timothy Lewis Scarnecchia

The Socialist Leader in Film: Sergiu Nicolaescu’s Hot Days in Romania and Post-Maoist China

ABSTRACT This article comparatively explores the reception of Sergiu Nicolaescu’s film Zile fierbinți (Hot Days, 1975) in socialist and postsocialist Romania and China. Received as a propagandistic film in one postsocialist context, the film is understood as a gesture toward social change in another. While the film began to be considered a paragon of propagandistic indoctrination in Romania after the fall of communism, in China Nicolaescu’s work was and continues to be interpreted as a celebration of the individual under socialism and, at the time of its screening, resonated with the restructuring of the communist system during the Deng Xiaoping reform era. Drawing on 1970s Romanian film criticism, the author shows that the postsocialist-era reading of the film’s protagonist as an authoritarian symbol of Romania’s political dictatorship misses that socialist realism and the film de actualitate genres played an important role in negotiating a working-class response to the one-party state, while also gesturing toward certain reforms of Romanian state socialism. The author also reinterprets the figure of the film’s protagonist, the socialist leader, as an invitation for more active political engagement and as a symbol of the potential restructuring of the Romanian economy along the more progressive lines of Yugoslavia’s “worker self-management” and Hungary’s “Gulash Communism.”

I.V. STALIN’S TAKING THE POLITICAL ADVANTAGE IN THE PARTY INFIGHTING IN THE SOVIET STATE IN 1922–1936

The purpose of the article is to analyze the factors of transformation of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the AUCP(b) into the governing body of the Soviet state. The article has studied the activities of such party and state institutions as the Council of People’s Commissars, the Politburo, the Secretariat of the Central Committee. In this work, an attempt was made to consider the transformation of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the AUCP(b) headed by I.V. Stalin into a body for developing key decisions. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the fact that it describes the main events of the internal political struggle of various departments of the Soviet state in terms of their priority on the political Olympus at the time of the initial formation of a new one-party state. The article uses the methods of comparison and analysis of archival documents.&#x0D; &#x0D; A chain of various political events led to the fact that by the beginning of the 1930s, the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the AUCP(b), headed by the Secretary General I.V. Stalin, had begun to hold a privileged position in the political circles of the Soviet state. As a result of the internal political struggle, the interaction between the members and candidates for membership in the Politburo of the Central Committee of the AUCP(b) began to focus on the political position of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the AUCP(b), which since April 1922 was headed by I.V. Stalin.&#x0D; &#x0D; In a long and bitter struggle, I.V. Stalin gained a privileged position in political circles and got a stable majority of votes at party congresses. Considering various disputable situations that constantly arose between the opposing factions in the Bolshevik Party, it can be revealed that as a result of the internal political struggle, ideological principles were often pushed into the background. The primary task of one or another group of party leaders was to discredit political opponents and exclude them from the leadership, and then from the Communist Party. I.V. Stalin gained a preponderance of political power due to combining positions in the leadership of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the AUCP(b) and in the leadership of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the AUCP(b). The realization of this benefit took place through frequent changes within the Party and gaining the overwhelming majority of Stalin supporters’ votes at the plenums of the Central Committee of the Party, meetings of the Political Bureau and congresses of the Bolshevik organization. After I.V. Stalin had been promoted to the position of General Secretary in April 1922, the Central Committee Secretariat headed by him was gradually becoming superior to other political institutions. Stalin’s work in the above-mentioned party organ turns into a decision-making activity, and over time the nature of the documents emanating from him is transformed. As a result of the party infighting of the 1920s, such leaders of the October Revolution as Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky, Pyatakov were removed from the political arena. Their names had ceased to appear in the business correspondence of the central party organs. In the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, the factor of the informal system of political decision-making is gradually becoming crucial.&#x0D; &#x0D; The practical significance of the article is that the results obtained in the study can be used in the preparation of generalizing works on the history of Russia, as well as the history of party-state construction in the USSR. The prospects of the research consist in using the article by teachers and students of educational institutions in the framework of educational courses on the history of the Fatherland. The research materials and the conclusions obtained may be of interest to the heads of state authorities for the development and implementation of personnel policy, the implementation of measures aimed at improving its effectiveness, as well as the strategy of sustainable development of the state.

Recoding Reality: The Rise of Digital Authoritarianism

Recoding Reality:The Rise of Digital Authoritarianism The SAIS Review Editorial Board The 2020s thus far have been defined by a pandemic, economic and physical insecurity, looming climate disaster, and violent conflicts around the world. The culmination of these dire circumstances has led to movements in all forms calling for fundamental change in existing political, economic, and social structures. Technology has been a bulwark and democratizing force in enabling masses of people to express themselves in a transparent and far-reaching manner. Amid these inspiring scenes lingers a more sobering reality. The global shocks already experienced in this decade have exacerbated the fading and inconsistent presence of major democracies on the international stage. State actors responded with repression, state-sponsored violence, and heavy jail sentences levied against prominent dissidents. Alarmingly, technology's potential as a democratizing force is equal if not less than its potential as a tool of repression. As China, Russia, and other one-party states begin to export this form of governance, an analysis of this emerging form of government is crucial. Digital authoritarianism's present threat to democracy is the product of 16 consecutive years of decline in global freedom. As this decade unfolds, allowing this form of governance to take root without critical analysis may be the death nail on democracy itself. This edition of The SAIS Review of International Affairs will address the ways in which state and nonstate actors stifle dissent with digital authoritarianism, defined as the use of information technology by regimes to manipulate, repress, and surveil domestic and international populations. Recoding Reality: The Emergence of Digital Authoritarianism seeks to not only explore this emerging phenomenon, but to juxtapose the emergence of digital authoritarianism with the declining relative influence of major democracies in the face of immense global challenges. The issue begins with an article by Ahmed Abozaid that highlights the growing concern surrounding Egypt's antiterrorism laws, which do not necessarily tackle the state's war against terror, but instead serves the interests of groups such as the armed forces, neoliberal elites, and the old regime. Dr. Abozaid argues that these laws complement other legislation that restrict journalists and reporters from freely expressing themselves online and offline. Egyptian authorities employ cyber and digital counterterrorism measures as [End Page 1] part of their "cyber Baltaga" (digital thuggery) strategy to demonstrate their way of preserving and advancing their domination of the public and cyber spheres. Years of repression have led to Egypt being ranked as one of the world's worst jailers of journalists. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has dominated conversations for the past year, causing many to reassess long held beliefs about power and conflicts, particularly in the digital space. This issue includes two articles focusing on the conflict, each approaching the impacts of Russian digital authoritarianism in different ways. Fabian Burkhardt and Mariëlle Wijermars discuss the ways in which externally imposed sanctions have disrupted Russia's digital mechanisms of control. States' reliance on foreign platforms and technology is a byproduct of the integrated nature of the digital sphere. Dr. Burkhardt and Dr. Wijermars argue that this reliance shapes the regime's ability to control and suppress domestically, focusing on the changes to Russia's repressive capabilities as these foreign technologies are restricted by sanctions. In examining the period from February to September of 2022, they find that while Russia has demonstrated enhanced capacity for digital authoritarianism in response to these sanctions, the conflict also threatens the future of the digital infrastructures necessary for repression. Where the prior article looked at the impact of external forces on Russia's capacity for digital repression, Jackie Kerr examines Russian internal digital dynamics. In tracing the relationship between the state and Runet (the Russian Internet), Kerr examines how the conflicts, contradictions, and communities formed as Runet developed affect the regime's actions, both domestically and internationally. She contrasts the Kremlin's repressive efforts with the digital communities that have evolved in response, offering insight into the future of Russian, and perhaps global, internet freedom. Hugh Harsono writes about the potential that Web3 provides for decentralizing the internet and the People's Republic of China's (PRC) attempts to manipulate its...

Airing the Gospel: Christian radio broadcast and multiple narratives in early reform-era China

ABSTRACT This article explores the influential role that international Christian broadcasting enterprises played in the conversion of the Chinese during the transition from the Maoist to the Reform era. Despite being an official tool of propaganda and information dissemination, the popularization of radio offered an opening for the Far East Broadcasting Company (FEBC) and the Seventh-day Adventists in the British colony of Hong Kong to air religious programs in Cantonese and Mandarin. These foreign radios created an invisible, electronic platform for Mainland Christians to form a listening community of believers, seeking spiritual or moral guidance from the outside world. Listening to Christian programs became part of the Chinese faith practice when the Maoist state closed places of worship and prohibited public religious activities throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Accessing valuable religious and secular information abroad emancipated the listeners from the confinement of socialist collectivism, especially when the Communist utopia lost its appeal in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Consulting dozens of Chinese listeners’ letters, this study highlights the ways in which the believers navigated a changing social and cultural landscape, from one monopolized by the one-party state to a more dynamic domain semi-regulated by the government and the market. Because the letters are constructed source materials at a particular moment in history, it is important to treat the listeners’ accounts as indicative of their efforts to theologize personal struggle and faith experience and to seek new modes of self-expression.

COVID-19, the Chinese communist party, and the search for legitimacy in the international arena

The emergence of COVID-19 in the People’s Republic of China, a one-party state, posed a severe threat to the political legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This threat had its origins in the context of a growing rivalry between China and the United States, prompting the CCP to launch an offensive to win the battle for narratives about the nation’s role in the outbreak. Through both traditional and social media, Chinese diplomats carried out an aggressive campaign to demonstrate that China was the solution and not the cause of the pandemic. In addition, the CCP generated a discourse about the superiority of the Chinese political system in containing the pandemic, contrasting it with the response of liberal democracies. This article concludes that although the primary goal of the Chinese media campaign was to shape a favorable opinion of the CCP at home, the party was also concerned with bolstering its legitimacy abroad by courting international approval for its handling of the pandemic.

What is the problem represented to be in China’s world-class university policy? A poststructural analysis

ABSTRACT Underlying current research on China’s world-class university (WCU) policy approaches are analytical foci that privilege the agency of social actors and the problem-solving approach to policy analysis. Foucauldian poststructuralists draw our attention to policy document, which is seen as a discourse that organizes and administers society. Inspired by Foucault, Carol Bacchi’s ‘What’s the Problem Represented to Be?’ approach (WPR) views policy document as a technology of governmentality. As proposed solutions to a problem, policy text produces the very problem that it seeks to address. Carol Bacchi draws our analytical attention to the rationalities, technologies of governing and subjectification effects created by particular problem representations in the WCU policy. Using WPR, this paper shows that WCU is represented as merely a technical, managerial and organizational problem. Such representations naturally reify WCU in material terms, such as research output, and in a temporal form of state planning. Genealogically, the root of WCU can be traced to the neoliberal movement of knowledge economy. However, Shanghai Ranking overturned this center-periphery landscape in disseminating the concept of WCU. China’s one-party state means that WCU is pursued at the expense of sacrificing social sciences and subjecting academics and students to become ‘red experts.’

Pillars of the Soviet Dictatorship at the Local Level

Pillars of the Soviet Dictatorship at the Local Level Donald J. Raleigh (bio) Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk, Substate Dictatorship: Networks, Loyalty, and Institutional Change in the Soviet Union. 445 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. ISBN-13 978-0300230819. $65.00. Saulius Grybkauskas, Governing the Soviet Union’s National Republics: The Second Secretaries of the Communist Party. 226 pp. New York: Routledge, 2021. ISBN-13 978-1138391758. $160.00. The comparative and theoretical literature on dictatorships shows that deeply ideological one-party states such as the Soviet Union—especially if forged in civil war—not only tend to survive longer but also show more resiliency than other types of authoritarian rule.1 Despite the recent publication of archival-based biographies of I. V. Stalin, N. S. Khrushchev, L. I. Brezhnev, and M. S. Gorbachev that throw light on politics at the top, remarkably little research has been conducted on how local leaders governed under these rulers. Making substantial contributions to our understanding of how the USSR functioned at the regional level, the two complementary books under review draw on strategic archive-based research, memoirs, and the secondary literature (and, in Grybkauskas’s case, on oral interviews) to reveal how local leaders—first secretaries of oblasts (and of Soviet republics) and second secretaries in republic party committees—functioned after World War II and how their modus operandi changed as the USSR became less oppressive. [End Page 379] ________ Gorlizki and Khlevniuk’s impressive study comprises ten chapters, a conclusion, eight appendices, and a glossary. Building on the findings they present in their monograph Cold Peace and in related articles, especially that a number of key institutional changes in the highest party echelons occurred while Stalin was still alive, they in Substate Dictatorship focus on the scores of substate (Rogers Brubaker’s term) regional leaders tasked with managing the ruling coalition locally while thwarting revolts from below and dealing with pressures from above.2 Given the unfeasibility of examining all 139 possible units of analysis, the authors fashioned an inductive research design of 30 in-depth oblast- and republic-level case studies over a 30-year period and hired full-time researchers to tap local archival sources. Observing that from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, the Soviet political system “moved from being a repressive autocracy to an oligarchy with low to medium levels of repression” (5), Gorlizki and Khlevniuk argue that Stalin laid the foundation for this transformation that reflected the resiliency of the Soviet regime and its institutions. To chart the change, they identify and compare three models of local dictators: substate dictators (“little Stalins”—not their term) and contested autocrats (those challenged by other influential networks in the region) who prevailed in the late Stalin era, and party governors, who appeared under Khrushchev to become the norm in the Brezhnev era. Like substate dictators, party governors oversaw appointments to the local nomenklatura, but they ran organizations governed by a set of informal rules such as seniority and by adherence to systems of local practices that linked together the local political elite. To handle pressures from above and to foster local patronage systems, substate dictators employed three strategies to make followers dependent upon them: forms of exclusion (including expulsion from the party); the use of kompromat, sensitive or compromising material, as leverage; and overpromotion of cadres who remained indebted to their patron. Offering informative examples of how substate dictators used these approaches, the authors show how, in time, a stratification took place at the regional level as a system emerged of seniority marked by age, length of service, and levels of political education, reinforced by a package of benefits (salary, allotments of foods and goods, hard to get items, etc.) that undermined Moscow’s system of remuneration. [End Page 380] After the war, most oblast party committees (obkomy) fell into the hands of young substate dictators, who proliferated because of the need for regional leaders to assume decision-making powers during the conflict, the legacy of quasi-military forms of ruling, the trials of achieving uncompromising reconstruction quotas, and the fact that Stalin realized that he had to give them breathing space to meet state targets. Directors...

Pandemic crisis: Old repressions renewed amid anti-Covid-19 lockdown in Zimbabwe, c.2020 - 2022

This study discusses how during the Covid-19 pandemic, government agents in Zimbabwe controlled and supervised Zimbabwean citizens through repressive methods that were meant to entrench the position of President Emmerson Mnangagwa. It posits that since Covid-19 took place in a conflictridden Zimbabwean environment, it paved the way for new conflicts to emerge while the existing ones were reshaped. Furthermore, it argues that Covid-19 offers an interesting case to examine how international relations and geopolitical considerations influenced the initial stance and reaction to Covid-19 in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe’s initial reaction to the outbreak of the Coronavirus was largely dictated by its narrow foreign policy rather than epidemiological/immunological considerations. It concludes that the Covid-19 lockdown facilitated the Mnangagwa regime’s intention to make Zimbabwe a de facto one-party state, as witnessed by the closure of democratic space under the guise of enforcing lockdown regulations.

The Failure of Former African Liberation Movements to Transition to Democracy after Ascension to Power: A Descriptive Analysis of Eritrean People’s Liberation Front

This paper investigates the perplexing issue of the democratic deficit in Africa's post-liberation states. It seeks to answer why former African liberation movements failed to make a genuine transition to democracy during the second stage of the national liberation struggle, instead of leaving behind authoritarian military regimes and one-party states that disappointed people. The paper's primary goal is to study the transitional path of former liberation movements in Africa and examine the factors that contribute to the failure of the transformation process from armed resistance to conventional politics. The research is descriptive and analytical in nature, conducted using the qualitative research method. The findings show that former liberation movements in Africa failed as governments due to a variety of factors, the most important of which is elite resistance to democratisation, which led to the transition to dictatorship, the absence or weakness of political institutions due to the persistence of the liberation era's political culture, and the tinkering with the constitution and failure to put some of its key principles into effect. Furthermore, the study showed that anti-colonial revolutions in Africa only liberated the state, not the people. Finally, the paper ends with some recommendations i.e. several steps to be taken in order for African countries to overcome the dilemma of the liberation movement's democratic transition failure

An Anatomy of Satirical Cartoons in Contemporary Vietnam: Political Communication and Representations of Systemic Corruption in a One-party State

ABSTRACT Satirical cartooning in Vietnam is subject to a complex dynamic: an increasingly liberalised and internationalised economy, and the rise of social media in a one-party state. This article examines what state-sanctioned satirical cartoons can reveal about the representation and management of political criticism in such a context. We find a growing trend of depicting corruption as a systemic problem, which is present in 45 per cent of the sample and in 70 per cent of the 20 most-viral cartoons in one of Vietnam’s most popular magazines, Tuoi Tre Cuoi (Youth Humour). This trend can be interpreted as a change in the sensibility of audiences and a shift toward a more tolerant media landscape. The trend, however, may also be a worrying sign of the dual dangers of cynicism in Vietnamese politics: the development of apathy among audiences and the cynical use of art by authorities. Despite these concerns, we argue, political cartoons in Vietnam provide an important public avenue for collective political reflection and everyday social solidarity.