post-Deng Era Research Articles

Ideology Strikes Back: China’s Lessons of the Soviet Collapse, 1992–2022

ABSTRACT Drawing on Chinese studies of the Soviet collapse since 1992, this article examines the main arguments and relative influence of Sovietologists and ideological scholars from their publications in relation to the contexts of China’s political and ideological changes. The study finds that although Sovietologists dominated the academic discourse on the Soviet collapse during Deng’s lifetime, they were gradually eclipsed by the ideological scholars in the post-Deng era. As the Communist Party leadership expanded Marxist schools and allowed ideological scholars more room after Deng’s death, historical nihilism eventually displaced “irreformable structural failures” as the dominant school for the collapse of the Soviet Union in contemporary Chinese academia.

"Period of Strategic Opportunities": the Chinese Foresight Experience and Beijing’s Foreign Policy Perspectives

This article examines one of the established ideologemes of the post-Deng era, the "period of important strategic opportunities." It is concluded that this concept is at the center of contemporary Chinese strategic culture, as it is related to the PRC leadership’s medium- and long-term goal-setting. The concept is analyzed in the historical retrospective from the moment of its introduction in 2002 to the present day, and the factors determining the evolution of this concept under Xi Jinping are scrutinized. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there were two sources of China’s confidence that the coming twenty years would pass without turmoil for China – first, the state of its own economy, whose growth would be ensured by the dynamism of reforms and deeper integration into the global economy, and second, the long-term stability of its external environment, postponing for a long period the need for China to "come out of the shadows." Under Xi Jinping, the "period of strategic opportunities" is closely aligned with the core idea – "great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation." Created in the traditional abstract manner of Chinese "highest instructions," the concept acquires the features of a scenario approach, where the worst-case scenario for the nation is not excluded and is definitely taken into account. Today’s China faces incomparably greater pressure from its competitors, and the number of uncertainties affecting China’s rise has grown immeasurably. This determines the shift in the strategic thinking of the Chinese elite, which, along with a greater emphasis on ideology, will shape Chinese foreign policy.

Discipline the Party: From Rectification Campaigns to Intra-Party Educational Activities in China

How were the post-Deng Xiaoping "educational activities" tied to or different from the rectification campaigns of the earlier periods? What does this mean for the future of intra-Party governance in China? Through a comparison of rectification campaigns in the 1940s–1980s and intra-Party educational activities thereafter, the author concludes that the campaign method had been institutionalised as an integral instrument of intra-Party governance, forging a three-stage procedure to fulfil the dual aims of education and deterrence. Consequently, the Communist Party of China discarded the imposition of extreme sanctions in the post-Deng era but reinforced authoritative and distributive powers through less severe forms of sanctions.

Institutional Changes and the Possible Role of the Military in Transition to the Post-Xi Jinping Leadership

Two institutional conditions have driven the heavy involvement of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) in domestic politics after 1949. The first is "symbiotic" Party–army relations as evident in the extensive and entrenched personal networks in the PLA that Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping could count on for support in times of political crisis. The second is civilian governance failure that incentivised these leaders to leverage the military for domestic politics. This article shows major changes in these conditions in the post-Deng era, which reduced the PLA's role in domestic politics. With reference to these changes, the article explores the PLA's possible role in transition to the post-Xi Jinping leadership.

China in the Next Century

Mongolian Journal of International Affairs Vol.3 1996: 17-34

China’s Elite Politics in the post-Deng Era: Transition to ‘Institutionalization of Oligarchy’

China’s Elite Politics in the post-Deng Era: Transition to ‘Institutionalization of Oligarchy’

State and Secularism: Perspectives from Asia ed. by Michael Heng Siam-Heng and Ten Chin Liew (review)

Reviewed by: State and Secularism: Perspectives from Asia ed. by Michael Heng Siam-Heng and Ten Chin Liew Peter van der Veer (bio) Michael Heng Siam-Heng and Ten Chin Liew, editors. State and Secularism: Perspectives from Asia. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Company, 2010. 364 pp. Hardcover $106.00, ISBN 978-981-4282-37-6. A book that comes out of Singapore offering perspectives from Asia on the state and secularism naturally raises the expectation that the particular nature of the Singaporean state is under consideration. This happens in one chapter by Kenneth Paul Tan. His emphasis is on the successful manipulation of cultural values in a managerial pragmatism that characterizes Singapore’s multicultural governance. Religion is seen as a potentially disruptive force that needs to be controlled but also as the basis of a civil religion of economic prosperity that is shared by all. He does not pay much attention to the actions and ideas of religious communities and their leadership in Singapore that would complicate his picture of a well-orchestrated society. What the rest of the book offers is a large number (eighteen chapters) of interesting reflections on the European philosophical literature on secularism, discussing the usual suspects, including Locke, Comte, John Stuart Mill, Rawls, Charles Taylor, and others. It is hard to discover any particularly Asian perspectives in these reflections except for the fact that the authors are Asian. Europe is also the subject of a couple of essays that deal with secularism in the European Union and, inescapably, with laïcité in France. These are all very competent accounts, but for the specialist there is hardly anything new here. The same is true for the essays on South Asia, but they do have the special charm that some of the major activists for an Indian brand of secularism, Swami Agnivesh and Asghar Ali Engineer, have contributed. The volume also includes essays on Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey, and Egypt. The latter about Egypt by Mona Abaza contains an important account of different positions taken by Egyptian intellectuals, including the exiled Nasr Abu Zayd, about religion and secularism. Perspectives from Asia can be best found in the essays on China. Zhao Litao notices the revival of religion in the post-Deng era. The state continues to repress unwanted religious expressions, but tolerates a larger range than before. He rightly points out that popular religion, rooted in local communities, falls largely outside of the contemporary state regulation that is focused on the five major religions. It is in this area that one has to look for interactions between secular politics and communal religious networks. In my view, a useful comparison in this volume could have been made with Communist states such as the Soviet Union or Easter European countries or Vietnam and North Korea in Asia rather than with liberal states like France, England, and the United States. This would have solved Tan Sor Hoon’s problem that the term “secularism” is seldom used to describe China. It is Communism’s atheism that is at issue here. His contribution in this volume raises the old problem of the essential secular nature of Confucianism. In his view, Confucian morality guarantees religious freedom, but this interpretation separates morality from state formation. Prasenjit Duara points out correctly that one might [End Page 333] want to think about the relationship between modern citizenship and old and new models of religious subjectivity. Such questions are not asked systematically in this volume, with the result that it remains a conference proceedings rather than an integrated volume. Peter van der Veer Peter van der Veer is director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Ethnic and Religious Diversity in Göttingen and professor-at-large at Utrecht University. He specializes in comparative work on nationalism and religion. Copyright © 2013 University of Hawai‘i Press

The Transitional Period toward the Post-Deng Era: Taking off from Reforms and Opening-up to the Outside World

The Transitional Period toward the Post-Deng Era: Taking off from Reforms and Opening-up to the Outside World

The International Implications of China's Fledgling Regulatory State: From Product Maker to Rule Maker

The principal analytical lens through which Western decision makers and commentators have viewed China’s rapid rise in the international economy is the country’s impact on global market prices. China is already the world’s fourth largest trading nation and has the world’s biggest labour force, and the prospect of a possible consumer base of over a million people makes it the most attractive emerging market. Because of this economic might, in both production and consumption, China has begun to shape prices for a large array of goods and services. While analysts disagree about the specifics, no-one fundamentally disputes that this ‘China Price’ effect exerts considerable influence over current international economic dynamics. This article’s main thesis is that the ongoing transformation of the Chinese state is empowering the country’s leaders to influence the non-market environment of business as well, and that this route of influence has the potential of being at least as important as changes in relative market prices. A series of domestic institutional reforms have provided Chinese policy makers with the tools to shape the rules and standards that underlie international markets and the terms of competition within them. We show that the particular importance of foreign direct investment (FDI) as a driver of China’s economic development amplifies the effects of ongoing domestic institutional capacity building. Having established itself as a global ‘product maker’, the next round of competition could see China establish itself as a potent ‘rule maker’ in the global economy. Indeed, evidence is mounting that Chinese policy makers are beginning to deploy their expanding regulatory capabilities to set clear market rules at home and leverage the Chinese market to export them internationally. While China’s already impressive domestic market plays a critical role in this strategy, market size alone is insufficient. We argue that China’s ability to influence international market rules depends on policy makers’ ability to employ new regulatory capabilities that are the result of a political transformation initiated more than two decades ago. Through a series of administrative reforms, China has constructed a fledgling regulatory state that gives policy makers new

Book Review: Holding China Together: Diversity and National Integration in the Post-Deng Era

Book Review: Holding China Together: Diversity and National Integration in the Post-Deng Era

Holding China Together: Diversity and National Integration in the Post-Deng Era. Edited by Barry J. Naughton and Dali L. Yang. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xi, 304 pp. $80.00 (cloth).

Holding China Together: Diversity and National Integration in the Post-Deng Era. Edited by Barry J. Naughton and Dali L. Yang. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xi, 304 pp. $80.00 (cloth).

The Role of China's Bureaucracy in its No-Devaluation Policy during the Asian Financial Crisis

Analysts have generally offered two explanations for China's no-devaluation policy during the Asian financial crisis. The first is China's good economic fundamentals and the renminbi is not fully convertible. The second is China's foreign relations' imperative. China was endeavouring to seek favourable entry conditions into the WTO and improve relations with its Asian neighbours. At the same time it sought to exploit the undercurrent of resentment in Asia towards the role played by the US during the crisis. Policy making in China has become more institutionalized in the post-Deng era, but these explanations ignore the role of China's domestic bureaucratic actors in exchange rate policy making. This paper examines the exchange rate regime preferences of China's key economic ministries and their influences in exchange rate policy making and argues that Party leaders were able to adopt a no-devaluation policy throughout the crisis because China's key economic ministries actively supported or acquiesced to that policy.

The Nanxun Legacy and China's Development in the Post-Deng Era. John Wong , Zheng Yongnian

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsThe Nanxun Legacy and China's Development in the Post-Deng Era. John Wong , Zheng Yongnian Joseph FewsmithJoseph Fewsmith Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The China Journal Volume 49Jan., 2003 Published on behalf of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/3182203 Views: 8Total views on this site Copyright 2003 The China JournalPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Evolution without democracy: Toward a unified framework for understanding the success and failure of Chinese Communism

This paper establishes an evolutionary framework for studying the dynamics of the power struggle within the Chinese Communist Party in relation to the wider power struggle in the nation. It posits four essential conditions for the applicability of the framework and a prediction of consequences. If a political party meets all the key conditions, then the model predicts that the ultimate winner of the internal power struggle is one who has identified the optimal strategy for the party to win the national power struggle and who has demonstrated the ability of putting it to practical use. The theoretical framework is briefly applied to several periods of the modern Chinese history. One of the evolutionary conditions is that the norm of promotion based on merits, which I argue the CCP inherited from the traditional Confucian culture, figures as the basic rule of game in deciding the intra-party power struggle. Thus, “evolution without democracy” is essentially a continuation of the traditional political culture in the new social context. My basic observation is that the CCP before 1949 met most of the evolutionary conditions, with Mao Zedong emerging as the ultimate winner of the internal power struggle at the same time as the CCP won its national victory. After 1949, however, the CCP has gradually changed from a revolutionary party to a status quo party, with Mao himself the biggest status quo winner, and some of the evolutionary assumptions began to be violated. I suggest that, in the post-Mao (and especially the post-Deng) era, these conditions might begin to be satisfied again. These preliminary observations are to be tested further by extensive case studies.

China in the Post-Deng Era (review)

China in the Post-Deng Era (review)

Watchdogs on Party Leashes? Contexts and implications of investigative journalism in post-Deng China

Although investigative reporting is not new to journalism in China, a number of important transformations in the political and media settings have contributed to the tentative institutionalization of a form of watchdog journalism that is both popular with media audiences and instrumental to the Party leadership in the post-Deng era. While media organizations and journalists have commercial and professional imperatives, the central Party leadership has promoted a media watchdog role to reassert control over a dysfunctional bureaucracy and expose elements of bureaucratic capitalism that had become so ruthless that they have threatened the very existence of the state bureaucracy itself. By exposing officially denounced problems, calling individual transgressors to account, and drawing attention to the need for specific reforms, watchdog journalism promises to strengthen the Party's hegemony by smoothing the rough edges of the ongoing Chinese transformation and policing the political, economic, and social boundaries of an emerging authoritarian market society.

China after Deng Xiaoping: Implications for Japan

While there exists mistrust between China and Japan stemming from the legacy of the Second World War, the two countries are making efforts to build mutual trust through bilateral dialogue. Growing bilateral interdependence and common interests will likely ease the mistrust and overcome obstacles to a political partnership between the two countries. In the post-Deng era, this article argues that Japan and the West should help China integrate with the world economy if they want China's support in preserving a peaceful world order. Sino-Japanese bilateral cooperation and interdependence are not only beneficial for the two countries and the Asia-Pacific region, they are also of significance for promoting global cooperation and economic development. Thus, this article emphasises China's importance to Japan and the West in the twenty-first century.

Political Developments in the Post-Deng Era and their Impact on China's Relations with Taiwan and Hong Kong

Abstract Indicators suggest that the post-Deng era and the associated leadership succession process have already begun. While the probability of chaos and the splitting up of the country after Deng is not high, control in the ideological arena will likely be tightened. After his electoral victory Lee Teng-hui will initiate measures to improve relations with Beijing and to reduce tension across the Taiwan Strait, leading to direct mail, trade and transport. But Lee will not give up his pragmatic diplomacy which will further provoke Beijing. The Chinese leadership's major difficulty is that it has upped the ante a number of times, and has no results to show to facilitate its climb down the ladder of escalation. With the approach of 1997, the Chinese authorities' influence on Hong Kong has become increasingly significant. The community reluctantly accepts the lack of consultation. About 1.2 million people, however, have the opportunity to emigrate and they adopt a wait-and-see attitude. Meanwhile, economic integration between the territory and southern China has made much progress.

Beijing’s Taiwan policy in evolution

This article examines the changing nature of Beijing’s Taiwan policy: from Deng Xiaoping’s strategy of “peaceful unification-one country, two systems” to Jiang Zemin’s “Eight Points”. In view of the factors of China’s national sentiments, strategic calculations and internal power struggle, as well as Washington’s iteration of one China policy and Taipei’s conciliatory gesture yet limited concession after the presidential elections, the article concludes that Beijing might halt military intimidation against Taiwan, but will remain inflexible on the Taiwan issue in the early period of post-Deng era. In other words, Beijing will not deal with Taipei in a friendly manner without some substantive concessions from the latter.

Party-Army Relations in China: Retrospect and Prospect

It is axiomatic among observers that in the transition to the post-Deng era, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) will play a pivotal role. This is understandable. Until now, the army has been a central force in Chinese politics owing to the unique Party-army relationship that has existed since the founding of the Communist regime. Although this relationship will change in the near future, the importance of the military will not: they will remain indispensable backers of the new leadership. This is because they command the forces which may be used to determine the outcome of an elite power struggle, displace rebellious local figures, put down a mass uprising or even carry out a coup.