Conclusion: The role of China’s political institutions in the Xi Jinping era

In the wake of the Chinese Communist Party’s Nineteenth National Congress in 2017, a group of Chinese and Western scholars took part in a series of symposiums on the CCP. Some participants argued that the outside world should look at the Chinese regime in a different way. For example, Martin Jacques said: ‘There is a profound ignorance in the West about Chinese governance. The dominant attitude is still essentially dismissive.’ He gave two reasons for this situation: first, he said, Chinese governance is based on completely different values from those of the West, and second, he blamed the legacy of the Cold War. He suggested that most Western scholars expected that the CCP regime would suffer the same fate as its Soviet counterpart.¹ However, this expectation proved to be wrong. The discussions at these symposiums gave birth to the discipline sometimes known as ‘CCP-ology’.² Compared with Sinology or China studies, CCP-ology seeks to understand the workings of the regime and their possible impacts through analysis of the institutions of the CCP.³

In this book, we have examined how Xi Jinping is concentrating power at the centre through institution building. Focusing on leadership and policy promotion, we have sought to explain the impact of several of these political institutions. Our analysis has identified innovations and pinpointed some shortcomings in the CCP regime under Xi. Simply put, these institutions are the genes that determine the exercise of power within the regime. Unfortunately, there has been little discussion of this aspect of Chinese politics, mainly because of a dearth of information. We cannot continue to dismiss the CCP’s political institutions as a black box but must do all we can to shed light into the darkest corners of Chinese politics.

If we are to understand the Chinese regime’s decisions and behaviours during the Xi period, we must steep ourselves in CCP-ology, focusing especially on the institutional system established by Xi Jinping himself. As has been noted, Xi has introduced a high degree of political centralisation into the regime since coming to power. He has reverted to the Maoist style of operation, which is designed to enhance the party leadership’s control over the formulation and implementation of policy. It is evident that this has been facilitated by the lack of any mechanisms for restricting the power of the supreme leader in the PRC’s party-state system, and it may also be influenced by Xi’s personality and understanding of politics. The Xi Jinping phenomenon has aroused a great deal of curiosity in academic circles.⁴ In this book, we have examined how Xi has consolidated his political power through a process of institutional centralisation.

The CCP’s unique political system has its origins in China’s revolutionary war, and it subsequently absorbed elements of the Soviet experience. Since coming to power, the CCP has progressively refined its Leninist system. During the Cold War period when Mao was in power, scholars of China studies such as Franz Schurmann and A. Doak Barnett focused their attention on the CCP’s political institutions,⁵ and now, at a time when Xi Jinping is reconfiguring these institutions to facilitate the concentration of power at the centre and the creation of an institutional authoritarian regime, scholarly examination of the CCP’s political institutions and their likely effects is more important than ever.

Although Xi has borrowed many ideas from Mao, he differs from Mao in his exercise of institutional centralisation. Mao attacked the bureaucracy and destroyed official institutions by means of mass movements—notably, the Cultural Revolution. Xi, in contrast, is making use of a stronger bureaucracy and official institutions to achieve his political goals. The large-scale institutional reforms introduced by the CCP in 2018 and 2023 are reinforcing the party’s control over both government and society. Two newly created institutions are the Social Work Department of the CCP Central Committee—which oversees the party’s interactions with civic groups and the private sector—and the National Data Administration. The purpose of the former is to enhance the maintenance of social stability, while the latter is designed to facilitate data governance.

Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard argues that the CCP regime under Xi may have been transformed from a ‘party-state’ to a ‘state-party’,⁶ in which the party takes the lead in all political affairs. The combination of institutionalisation and party building may, in Patricia M. Thornton’s words, have turned the CCP into a ‘regime party’.⁷ All in all, as this book has shown, the party is controlling the country and society through institutions and regulations.

On 16 October 2022, Xi Jinping delivered his political report to the CCP’s Twentieth National Congress. In it, he said that many of China’s reforms over the previous five years had involved ‘systematic reshaping and overall reorganisation’ (系统性重塑、整体性重构). The purpose of this reshaping and reorganisation was to enhance the leadership of the party—something that has always been an important goal of the CCP’s reform efforts.⁸ After the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, the CCP’s approach to political reform became more cautious and conservative. Xi Jinping’s institutional reforms are similarly conservative and are based on the need to maintain the party’s leadership.

These are the political developments that prompted the publication of this book, which has examined four aspects of the reforms and illustrated them with evidence from 12 case studies. This has enabled us to point to some potential problems with institutional centralisation.

One important aspect of Xi’s reforms is the reorientation of the leadership system, including the establishment of cross-system leading groups and the absorption of the state supervisory bodies by the CCP’s Commission for Discipline Inspection to form an all-embracing supervision system. We have also explored how leaders—especially Xi Jinping—have used the secretarial (mishu) system and the CCP General Office to enhance decision-making and facilitate policy implementation. Starting with Mao, leaders have always made use of the General Office to enhance their authority. It is evident that under Xi Jinping, aides such as Ding Xuexiang have gained more power, of which Xi has made use. However, we have pointed out that at lower levels, mishu tend to lack all-round political experience and are prone to corruption.

The second aspect of the reforms discussed in the book are issues related to the management of cadres, including party schools, the CCP’s Organisation Department and fast-tracked promotion. Considering Xi Jinping’s emphasis on ideological conformity, it is not surprising that the party school curriculum is much more tightly controlled than it was under Xi’s predecessor Hu Jintao, and that these institutions play an important role in indoctrinating cadres in Xi Jinping thought. Grassroots party schools also offer some practical courses on managing economic development and environmental protection—two subjects dear to Xi’s heart. As for the Organisation Department, its role is to sound the alarm when it detects that unsuitable candidates are being put forward for promotion. This is in line with Xi’s desire to recruit talented cadres and his insistence that party secretaries be held accountable if unsuitable candidates are promoted. Fast-tracked promotion for cadres is also part of Xi’s cadre management reforms. Those selected for the fast track include hand-picked recent ‘selected graduates’ (xuandiaosheng), technocrats and officials who have close personal ties to Xi himself. This reflects Xi’s three principles for governing the country: reinforcing grassroots governance, encouraging technological innovation and emphasising political loyalty.

The book includes three studies that illustrate the third aspect of Xi’s reforms, which is the way the party is extending its reach into all areas of state–society relations. The first study concerns developments in the party’s united front work, specifically the ‘pairing-up’ system, under which a party cadre is paired with a non-party member. The second study concerns changes in the status of the Communist Youth League, which is now restricted to youth work rather than offering a fast track to leading posts in the party and government as it did under Hu Jintao. Finally, we have examined how local party committees have formulated more detailed operational norms for ‘campaign-style enforcement’ like those of the Mao era, and how this style of enforcement is used to promote important policies, such as poverty alleviation. These reforms have been effective in some respects, but it seems that the drawbacks that existed in the past have not been eliminated. For example, the pairing-up system has merely been a matter of holding a minimum number of meetings each month and keeping a ‘work record’.

A fourth aspect of the reforms is the promotion of technological authoritarianism, the first example of this being the establishment and operation of ‘big data bureaus’. Gathering information is a crucial task for a modern authoritarian state, and that is why big data bureaus have been established at all levels of government. Another example of how technology is serving authoritarianism in China is the development of the smart city. Although this system originated in the West, the CCP has absorbed and adapted it. Smart cities have been helpful in policy promotion and law enforcement in China under Xi Jinping. Making life more convenient for the public is not the main purpose of the smart city in China. Its most important purpose is to facilitate the implementation of instructions issued by the centre and to serve the goal of achieving social governance and stability.

All the cases discussed in this book illustrate how Xi Jinping is using institution building to concentrate power at the centre, and we conclude that the operation of these institutions is making the CCP’s authoritarian system more resilient.⁹ We sincerely hope that our examination of the party’s modus operandi will inspire other scholars to explore and analyse these political mechanisms further, and to ponder whether they are providing China with the ability to develop its governance, recentralise the CCP regime and operate more robustly on the world stage.

Finally, let’s return to the debate between Fewsmith and Nathan mentioned in the introduction to this book. Xi Jinping seems to be weakening institutional arrangements around political succession to secure lifelong tenure at the top. However, in terms of the leadership system and policy implementation, institutions have been constructed in such a way as to strengthen the authority of the party centre and local governance. We cannot help but wonder whether this reshaping of political institutions will achieve its aim of preserving the CCP’s rule in perpetuity, or whether it will only strengthen Xi Jinping’s personal dictatorship. Will these changes really result in the rationalisation and modernisation of China’s bureaucratic system? Xi Jinping is now in his third term as paramount leader, but one important question remains unanswered: how long can a communist regime survive without democratisation?

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1. 1 Martin Jacques, ‘The Challenge that the CPC Presents the World as a Very Different Form of Governance in the Era of Globalisation’, Presented to Third Symposium on International CCPology, Fudan University, Shanghai, 24 November 2018, www.martinjacques.com/?s=The+Challenge+that+the+CPC+Presents+the+World+.

2. 2 Li Yongbo, ‘Wu Yiqing: The Beginning, Silence, Recovery and Rebellion of Contemporary China Studies in North America’, Sina, 5 July 2019, k.sina.cn/article_1644114654_61ff32de02000ncix.html.

3. 3 In the CCP’s party-state regime, the government and the party system are sometimes not clearly distinguished. Although this book mentions some relevant government institutions, the core of their operation is still embedded within the party system.

4. 4 Wu, ‘The Xi Jinping Phenomenon’, 1–15.

5. 5 Schurmann, Ideology and Organization in Communist China, 105–219; A. Doak Barnett, Cadres, Bureaucracy, and Political Power in Communist China (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1967).

6. 6 Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard, ‘China’s Political Order under Xi Jinping: Concepts and Perspectives’, China: An International Journal 16, no. 3 (August 2018): 1–17, at 15, doi.org/10.1353/chn.2018.0022.

7. 7 Patricia M. Thornton, ‘Party All the Time: The CCP in Comparative and Historical Perspective’, The China Quarterly 248, S1 (November 2021): 1–15, at 6–7, doi.org/10.1017/S0305741021000965.

8. 8 Shambaugh, China’s Communist Party.

9. 9 Fewsmith and Nathan, ‘Authoritarian Resilience Revisited’, 178.