➜ geographical distribution of power unitary state ➜ relationship between legislature and executive parliamentary ➜ executive president, chosen by the national people’s congress every 5 years ➜ executive election system unelected ➜ legislature unicameral: national people’s congress ➜ legislative election system unelected, chosen from lower regional congresses by nomenklatura ➜ party system one-party system, only the chinese communist party holds offices ➜ judiciary supreme people’s court
In 1989, most people thought it was inevitable that the crisis leading to the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union would lead to similar events in China. However, the Chinese regime cracked down on democratic dissenters and engaged in a program of gradual, structured economic reform to try to fix what was lacking in a communist economy. The result is the modern-day Chinese state: one-party dominant authoritarianism under the Chinese Communist Party but relative economic freedom for the new urban middle class. China is increasingly viewed as a rising superpower, with the world’s second largest GDP (behind only the United States), and an increasingly aggressive military posture toward the world.
Yet there are paradoxes everywhere within China. Political repression is mixed with economic freedom. Aggregate statistics of an economic superpower are mixed with a population in which more than two-thirds of the people still live in poverty. An aggressive military posture and reach into the West’s sphere of influence is mixed with an open embrace of globalization and cooperation on all manner of economic and humanitarian concerns around the world.
China has the largest population of any country in the world, with more than 1.3 billion people. This population enjoyed geographic protection and isolation from the outside world during its ancient history. Large mountain ranges, deserts, and the ocean prevented the intrusion of foreign influences. China’s east is divided from the west by a massive plateau, and today the vast majority of the people live in the east, especially in regions close to the coast.
The large navigable rivers that travel back and forth across China allowed for the mixing of people and culture from within. That, combined with geographic protection from outsiders, resulted in the expansion of a single dominant ethnicity within China: the Han people, who make up over 90 percent of the population. The climate and terrain are extremely different between north and south, so a cultural divide has remained persistent between those two regions. The people of the west are often not of the Han ethnicity, and remain basically isolated and unintegrated into Chinese society.
Ancient and modern traditions and historical events have worked together to shape a distinctively Chinese political culture. The main components include:
Chinese political culture emphasizes the good of the group over the individual, and the centrality of the Chinese people along with suspicion of foreign influence.
China is one of the world’s oldest civilizations, and while many of China’s ancient practices dating back to dynastic rule are still visible today, China endured a series of major upheavals in the twentieth century that brought about the modern Chinese state.
Chinese politics operated under a system very similar to European feudalism during the dynastic age (approximately 2800 b.c.e.–1911). A powerful ruling family with a large army claimed the mandate of heaven, basically ancestors guiding the destiny of the Empire from above through their collective wisdom. Positive results were seen as an assurance from the ancestors that the current dynasty still held the mandate, and power would pass down based on heredity peacefully, while droughts, famines, or military failures were interpreted as a “loss” of the mandate, and another powerful family with a large army would challenge for the right to rule. This system remained basically intact until European intervention during the age of imperialism in the late nineteenth century.
The Qing Dynasty ruled from 1644 to 1911, but was toppled by revolutionaries in 1911 because of its inability to modernize China and resist foreign influence. Losses in the Opium Wars against Britain, and the First Sino–Japanese War, led to uprisings against the Qing Dynasty across the country, and the 1911 Revolution established a new republic led by Sun Yat Sen. The early republic was quickly divided into two rival political movements; the Kuomintang (KMT) founded by Chiang Kai-Shek, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) led by Mao Zedong. Chiang Kai-Shek became president of China in 1928, and could not maintain Sun’s good relationship with the CCP. Chiang outlawed the CCP, and then waged a military campaign with KMT forces to root the CCP out of the country.
As Mao’s forces retreated across the country to escape the KMT, they engaged in a propaganda war to spread the values of Maoist communism to the peasant villages they traveled through. The Long March of retreat from 1934 to 1936 was a turning point, building a wave of support for the CCP across the peasantry, who would form the basis of Mao’s future vision for a Chinese People’s Republic. The two sides agreed to a truce to fight Japan together after Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1937, and Mao emerged as a national hero by the time of the Japanese surrender in 1945. When fighting between the KMT and CCP resumed, Mao’s forces were victorious, and Chiang Kai-Shek and his supporters were forced to flee to the island of Taiwan off the mainland. Mao declared the formation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, while Chiang and much of the international community insisted the KMT nationalists in Taiwan were in fact still the legitimate rulers of China. As a result, there were effectively “two Chinas” for much of the twentieth century. China today still sees Taiwan as an integral part of an eventually fully unified China.
Mao Zedong built a political culture and a party based on the principles he had espoused in his revolutionary writings. The main components of Maoism included:
Urban elites could learn from the wisdom of the peasants just as well. Economic development under Mao initially followed a modest version of the Soviet model of land reform through collectivization and redistribution of property. Civil reforms ending class distinctions and granting women new legal rights, such as the right to leave an unhappy marriage, were initiated. Five-Year Plans aimed not at industrialization, but rather ambitious agricultural goals were put into place. In 1956 and 1957, Mao was so convinced of the success of his programs, he launched the brief Hundred Flowers Campaign, encouraging intellectuals and leaders to speak openly and independently about the country’s problems, and so let “a hundred flowers bloom, and a hundred schools of thought contend” to revitalize Chinese arts and sciences. Mao believed these discussions would inevitably lead people to support his vision and programs as truly best for the society, but as dissenting voices started to gain attention, Mao quickly reversed course and cracked down against the dissidents, claiming he had “enticed the snakes out of their caves.”
In 1957 and 1958, Mao made a major break from the Soviet Union diplomatically, and launched a program known as the Great Leap Forward, a name that did not in any way match the results it produced. The Great Leap Forward attempted to force China’s transition from an agrarian society to a utopian socialist economy through rapid collectivization and industrialization. While farmers were previously merely encouraged to combine their property and join agricultural cooperatives with neighbors, the state would now force the collectivization of all agriculture. People in the countryside were forced to stay at “struggle session” meetings and lectures until they “volunteered” to give up their property and join a collective. All traditional religious practices were strictly prohibited and replaced with ideological lectures that attempted to inspire activism against all manner of social “evils,” including opium addiction and “counterrevolutionaries” who resisted the Great Leap Forward, but also “evils” like the Four Pests Campaign, which sought to eradicate rats, sparrows, flies, and mosquitos. The Great Leap Forward and its associated cultural campaigns were an unmitigated disaster. Agricultural workers who were relocated to cities for industrial work had no such training or knowledge for factory work, and factories had still not yet developed industrial capital machinery. The loss of workers from the countryside, combined with laws passed by the CCP, which mandated unproven agricultural practices, caused the Great Chinese Famine, estimated to have killed 20 to 45 million Chinese prematurely. The only period of economic recession between 1949 and 1985 was from 1958 through 1962.
The disastrous Great Leap Forward led to an internal Party inquiry about how to reconfigure Chinese policy to fix the economy. Mao was criticized at Party conferences, and was increasingly marginalized among the leadership. Moderate Politburo members Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping implemented market-oriented policies aimed at ending the food shortages, but Mao believed China was abandoning his egalitarian vision. In this context, Mao launched The Cultural Revolution aimed at purging all “bourgeois” elements from the entire Chinese society and CCP. Senior officials such as Liu and Deng were removed from leadership. Activists were mobilized to relaunch violent class struggle against all capitalist elements, subjecting them to public humiliation, confiscation of property, arbitrary imprisonment, and even torture. The image of Chairman Mao was built into a personality cult, with posters celebrating Maoist ideology adorning all areas of Chinese society. Bureaucrats with technical expertise at government management were replaced with cadres led by low-level CCP workers who could demonstrate their devotion to Mao by motivating the workers they oversaw to work their hardest and increase production. Scholars were sent to the fields to “learn from the wisdom of the peasants.” The Cultural Revolution also had relatively poor effects on the Chinese economy, and by Mao’s death in 1976, the CCP was divided into three factions:
During the Cultural Revolution, China moved from mere authoritarianism into totalitarianism, attempting to control the daily activities and beliefs of the Chinese people.
After Mao’s death, Hua Guofeng led the moderates to control of the Communist Party and the “Gang of Four” was arrested. By 1978, Deng Xiaoping outmaneuvered Hua to assume leadership of the CCP. Deng’s economic program was based on pragmatism and effectiveness of policies to produce growth, rather than labels and ideology. During the Cultural Revolution, a famous saying among Mao’s loyalists was that “a socialist train coming with a delay is better than a capitalist one that comes on time.” Deng, in direct contrast, said: “A good cat is not a black cat or a white cat. A good cat is a cat that catches mice.” Ideological purges were ended, and people were placed in positions of bureaucratic management based on their expertise and effectiveness rather than their ideological loyalty to the socialist vision. The goals of Deng’s program were summarized as Four Modernizations: to make China a modern society in agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology. While Russia attempted to modernize rapidly through shock therapy, Deng led China on a course of gradual economic and political transformation in many ways:
Deng Xiaoping enacted a number of reforms to liberalize and grow the Chinese economy, while maintaining strict political control under the Chinese Communist Party.
Deng’s reforms led to rapid economic growth in China, and lifted millions of people out of poverty, in addition to setting China on a course toward status as a global economic power. GDP per capita rose from under $300 in 1979 to over $2,100 in 1997. This astronomical growth has continued since Deng’s death, and in 2014, GDP per capita was over $12,700. This has also created new challenges for China, including rising inequality between the new urban middle class and the poorer rural countryside.
Reform, however, did not occur on the democratic front. In 1978, early in Deng Xiaoping’s rule, a movement grew in Beijing known as the Democracy Wall Movement, in which activists freely expressed their desires to modernize China with democracy through big-character posters displayed close to the offices of The People’s Daily, an official Party newsletter. One activist who went as far as to write that democracy was the “fifth modernization,” far more important than those that simply raised standards of living, was jailed for fifteen years. The most notorious example of China’s repression of dissent came in 1989, a “miracle year” for democracy across the rest of the world, but known for the Tiananmen Square Massacre in China.
In April of 1989, students from Beijing’s elite universities occupied a space in Tiananmen Square, a massive public space between China’s most important government buildings, demanding civil liberties and democratic reform. Over the next months, they were gradually joined by civil society actors from all walks of Chinese professional life, each with their own demands, but broadly unified by the idea of democratic reform. The Party, after initial toleration of the protesters, eventually decided to crack down with a military assault on the Square, as well as on hundreds of similar protests across the rest of the country. Estimates of the number killed range from 300 (the government’s official figure) to over 1,000 (according to Amnesty International and the Chinese Red Cross).
Before 2003, power transitions in communist parties would occur through internal party conflicts that led to instability, and often to temporary power vacuums such as the one between Mao and Deng from 1976 to 1978 (or examples in the Soviet Union). Since Deng’s death in 1997, moderates have emerged as the singular dominant faction within the CCP, and the Party has instituted rules and practices to organize the transfer of power. The transfer of power from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao from 2003 to 2005 was one of the smoothest in any communist country’s history, and the transfer from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping in 2013 was even more predictable and structured. With its politics stabilized at the highest level, and economic growth continuing, the Party has tremendous legitimacy among the Chinese people to continue their rule. The Party has implemented limited democratic reforms and has relaxed many of its restrictions on expression of dissent in response to public concerns about corruption and mismanagement, though it remains firmly in control of an authoritarian one-party state.
There has been a massive change in Chinese society since the days of Mao. While there was no independent civil society to speak of during the Maoist era, market reforms under Deng and beyond have given rise to affluence, inequality, and access to technology, which has made the diverse interests of citizens and their ability to organize and express those differences a regular part of Chinese political life. There remain substantial controls on the expression of certain ideas, but the Party’s ability to control these ideas has been eroding over time.
China has a single dominant ethnicity, with more than 90 percent of the population identified as Han Chinese. Historical conquest and expansion have caused the Chinese borders to extend into territories of other ethnicities. China currently recognizes fifty-six minority ethnic groups within the country. These ethnic minorities only make up 8 percent of the population of China, but they inhabit large isolated territories of the west, and are often given regional autonomy in some matters, such as the use of a local language instead of Mandarin Chinese, and exceptions to the one-child policy, for example. Ethnic minorities living in relative isolation in China are not integrated into the modern economic and political structure, and top CCP leaders are exclusively from Han backgrounds. The CCP has made a concerted effort to bring minorities into leadership at the regional level. In 2008, for the first time, the governors of all five minority autonomous regions were of minority ethnicity. However, their power is limited compared to Party secretaries who oversee them (and these Party secretaries remain Han). The typical Chinese approach toward minority groups is to encourage economic development in their area while suppressing dissent. While most minority groups in China do not display any organized ambitions to secure independence from China, China has particular concerns about separatist movements among certain groups, notably the Tibetans in Tibet, and the Uighurs in Xinjiang.
The Han people of China make up more than 90 percent of the population and possess virtually all of the political and economic power in China. Minority groups are often concentrated in distant and remote parts of the country and are isolated politically.
Tibet was conquered by China in the 1950s, but the former government of Tibet, led by the Dalai Lama, a spiritual leader who also acted as the inherited head of state, refused to recognize the conquest. There have been regular uprisings and calls for Tibetan independence, usually resulting in Chinese military intervention, most recently in 2008. The Dalai Lama remains a voice for Tibetan autonomy and independence, and lives in exile from the country.
The Uighur people are predominantly Islamic, and while some are comfortable with their place in the Chinese empire, others support secession with the Uighur peoples in surrounding countries such as Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, and Turkey to create a new “Uighurstan,” or perhaps unification among other Muslims to create a pan-Islamic state. Many Uighurs are wary of becoming “too Chinese” culturally, and resent that the Han living in Xinjiang often have the best job opportunities despite their “minority” status in the area. Some Chinese policies are perceived by Uighurs as being anti-Islamic. Street riots and terrorist activity resulting in bloodshed against the Han are not uncommon in Xinjiang, and the Chinese government often responds with crackdowns and mass arrests, and a concerted effort to populate the area with Han people.
Economic reforms have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty, and have resulted in the development of massive cities across the east, and increasingly in manufacturing centers in the central part of the country. This new middle class of more than 700 million people is concentrated in the cities, and their concerns are often similar to people in developed countries. They want to make sure their kids can attend quality schools and afford to get into top universities. They want to secure nice apartments and homes in safe neighborhoods, and move up the social ladder. They are concerned about securing a quality retirement with access to good health care as they age. They are concerned about the poor air quality in the cities, and worry about its long-term effects on their health. Leaving the cities, however, for a visit to some of the one billion people living in the Chinese countryside would cause a person to wonder whether any of these supposed economic transformations are actually occurring. People in rural China are still living the life of agrarian peasants from hundreds of years ago; in many cases they have no access to electricity, plumbing, modern roads, the Internet, telecommunications, etc. Many peasants try to make a better life for themselves by migrating to the cities for factory work, and this movement of people from the Chinese countryside to the cities is sometimes referred to as the largest migration event in human history. Urban residents are suspicious of the effects that this wave of poor laborers moving into their neighborhoods will have (not unlike concerns in developed countries about immigration from poorer countries), and the Chinese government regulates migration with strict laws about how long and under what conditions migrants may remain in the city. Rural peasants also have to contend with being forced off of their land by real estate developers, in some cases, and corruption among Party officials is often cited in their complaints about the process. This divide has led to a redefinition of the term “Two Chinas,” still used to describe the nationalist republic in Taiwan and the mainland People’s Republic, but now also used to describe the glistening big cities with skyscrapers and modern lifestyles, and the rural countryside where over two-thirds of the Chinese population still lives doing manual agricultural work for less than five dollars per day.
The recent emergence of the new Chinese middle class of more than 700 million people is creating new political conflicts and new policy concerns for the state to consider.
During Mao’s rule, the Chinese Communist Party attempted to control all aspects of the political life and social life of its citizens. Even as recently as the early 2000s, a pseudo-religious group called Falun Gong (or Falun Dafa) was harshly persecuted by the state for no apparent reason other than the demonstration of their ability to group and organize 70 million Chinese practitioners without the support of the state. After 10,000 Falun Gong demonstrators gathered outside a government office to demand official recognition and an end to government harassment, the government imposed a major crackdown and arrested Falun Gong leaders across the country. More than 2,000 Falun Gong members are suspected of having died under harsh conditions in Chinese custody.
Chinese civil society, long disorganized and undeveloped due to corporatist state management, is growing as an independent force in the new economically liberalized China.
While many of these tendencies are still evident in some of the practices of the Party, popular social movements in support of religious freedom, democratic reform, curbing corruption, and various other causes have increasingly demonstrated the power to shape the direction of state policy. The biggest reason for this transition is technological. The growth of the modern economy has provided millions of Chinese with access to cell phones, laptops, satellite dishes, and other technologies that make it difficult for the Party to control access to information the way it could through propaganda in the early days of the People’s Republic. Generally, the CCP’s approach has been to crack down on any organizations or individuals who challenge the Party’s right to rule exclusively, but to allow, for the most part, voices that call for attention to a particular social problem or perceived need for reform (without challenging the authority of the CCP). There has been an explosion of civil society organizations in China. Groups with political causes, charitable causes, religious causes, and even recreational groups like Ping Pong clubs are easily visible all over the country. China recently began encouraging organizations to register, granting official recognition to groups whose existence was once forbidden. The number of officially registered NGOs in China has doubled since 2005 to over 500,000, and there are believed to be possibly up to 1.5 million more that are currently unregistered. Given China’s history, this may simply be the Party’s attempt to coopt the energy of these movements and preserve the centrality of the CCP, or it may be legitimate liberalization of the freedom of association. That question remains unanswered.
While many outside observers take the incidents in Tiananmen Square and the crackdown on Falun Gong as evidence of the state’s intolerance of protest, protests are actually a common method of political participation in China. The number of “mass group incidents” (as the government refers to protests) has risen from 8,700 in 1993, to 87,000 in 2005, to over 180,000 in 2010. Most of these demonstrations are not an existential threat to the CCP, as they merely target perceived local corruption, environmental damage, or other issues they are hoping the national leadership will pay attention to and solve. The Party’s response to these protests can often be sympathetic to quell their complaints, such as anti-corruption drives. When the Party perceives a broader threat to their rule, the responses against organizers can range from suppression and censorship of their ideas to imprisonment and forced labor in “reeducation” camps.
The central component of the Chinese political system remains the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), even after reforms have revolutionized everything else about the country. The Party claims the right to rule not on the basis of the free choice of the people, but rather on the Party’s history of governing in the best interests of the Chinese population at large. (This is consistent with Lenin’s and Mao’s idea of democratic-centralism.) While the CCP is the only party allowed to contend for and win national office, that does not mean everyone in China is part of the CCP. As of 2017, it boasts 89.5 million members, making it the second largest political party in the world (it was the largest until the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of India recently surpassed it). This, however, is only about 6 percent of the Chinese population. There is a complex application process to join the Party, which is highly selective about whom it will admit. While ideological purity was once a condition for membership, reforms in modern China led Jiang Zemin to take the radical step in 2001 of allowing even business owners—capitalists—to join the Chinese Communist Party to better reflect reality of Chinese society. CCP membership is still required for top administrative and bureaucratic positions, so anyone with ambitions for high-profile public service must join the Party. While some Chinese still join out of a sense of patriotic nationalism, or commitment to the Party’s ideals, for many Chinese, Party membership is simply a great thing to have on the résumé when seeking to move up the social ladder into a good middle-class job, and an excellent way to build connections with the local elites. The Party is organized on a hierarchical basis geographically, with local village officials choosing who goes to the county assembly, the county assemblies choosing who goes to the provincial assembly, and the provincial assembly choosing who goes to the national assembly.
The CCP is at the center of the Chinese state, and the leaders of the party take top leadership positions across the Chinese government.
The Chinese Communist Party is organized based on a geographic hierarchy, with the structure generally based on the village or township at the lowest level, followed by the county, the region or province, and the central national party at the top. The geographic rules vary greatly from place to place, as some cities are not formally organized into counties or provinces, for one example. Each level of Party leadership is governed by a Party Congress, which is theoretically responsible for approving all major Party decisions, including approving the central leadership at each level. Practically, People’s Congresses are usually approving of whatever decisions have been made by central leaders of the Party. The Party Congress at each geographical level chooses the members of the central committee, who choose the members of the political bureau (Politburo), who choose the Politburo Standing Committee. At the national level, the structure looks like this:
Whereas the Chinese Communist Party Constitution explains a power hierarchy with the Congress at the top, empowered to pick the next level of membership and so on, the process actually works in reverse practically. Promotion in China happens through nomenklatura, where members at higher levels of leadership designate which lower-level members they would like to “call up,” and lower levels approve their decisions without dispute. This applies when moving up the pyramid within a geographic level, and it also applies to moving up into a higher geographic level. The power is most concentrated in the inner group of central leaders at the top of the national Party, the standing committee, which chooses one of their members to act as general secretary of the Communist Party. The general secretary recently has served concurrently as president of the People’s Republic, and as the chairman of the Central Military Commission. All three of these posts are currently occupied by Xi Jinping, chosen as general secretary in 2012, and then chosen as president by the National People’s Congress in 2013 and reelected in 2018. The Party structure runs parallel to the formal institutions of the Chinese state established in the Constitution of 1982. This parallel structure will be explained in more detail in the section on state institutions.
Transitions of power in the CCP are often discussed as changes to a new “generation” of leadership. These transitions involve major turnover in the top levels of Party leadership, most noticeably in the standing committee of the Politburo. Recently, leaders in the standing committee will be in power alongside the general secretary/president for the two terms of five years allowed by the Constitution, and then all step down from their posts simultaneously, with the exception of one younger member of the standing committee, who becomes the new general secretary/president, bringing up a new “generation” into the standing committee. The following chart shows how this looks in practice from generation to generation.
| Standing Committee Chosen at 15th Party Congress (1997) | Standing Committee Chosen at 16th Party Congress (2002) | Standing Committee Chosen at 17th Party Congress (2007) |
|---|---|---|
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| Standing Committee Chosen at 18th Party Congress (2012) | Standing Committee Chosen at 19th Party Congress (2017) |
|---|---|
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Notice that between the 15th and 16th Party Congress, nearly all of the standing committee turns over, with the exception of Hu Jintao, the new general secretary and president, who brings his own inner circle up into the standing committee as a new “generation” of leaders in 2002. Most of those leaders remain in place with Hu after the 17th Party Congress, but new leaders Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang are brought up as well. They are being groomed as the successors who become president and premier after the 2012 Party Congress, and a new generation of leaders joins them in the standing committee. Notably, Xi Jinping as part of his crackdown on official corruption, has purged many potential opponents from party leadership, and the 19th Party Congress chose loyalists to Xi for the highest posts. There is now no obvious successor to Xi as China’s next leader. So far, the “generations” of Chinese leadership have progressed in this manner:
China has held elections, though only at the most local level of government, since the 1980s as part of a program to help enhance the legitimacy of the 1982 Constitution and Deng’s reforms. No one would suggest that this indicates any kind of commitment to democracy or democratic values, though. The Chinese Communist Party reviews all candidates for municipal leadership or the village and township People’s Congresses to remove objectionable candidates, and state media often draws attention to the fact that a corrupt local official was “elected” into office, perhaps to deliberately undermine the idea of elections in peoples’ minds. Nevertheless, anyone over eighteen may vote for their local representatives in Local People’s Congresses (LPCs), and these LPCs choose representatives for the County People’s Congress, who choose the Provincial People’s Congress, who choose the National People’s Congress, in a system of indirect representation (with the candidate list tightly managed by the ruling party).
There are no elections for national office in China. Local officials such as village mayors and delegates to the local people’s congresses, however, are elected directly by voters, with the approval of the CCP.
The CCP dominates China as a one-party state and has no competition for leadership at the national level. However, the Party allows eight other “democratic” parties to exist, provided that they recognize the “leading role” of the CCP as a condition of their existence. Each of these parties typically represents the interests of a particular sector of society, such as the China Democratic National Construction Association, which is made up of entrepreneurs from manufacturing and finance. These eight parties have a combined membership of about 500,000 people, and they never compete for or hold national office. They serve mostly in an advisory role to the CCP on behalf of their interest, making them more like a corporatist interest group than a political party. Any independently organized political party faces strict suppression, censorship, and possible arrest under the Chinese Constitution’s prohibition against “sabotage of the socialist system by any individual or organization.”
Interest groups are not permitted to influence the state as they would freely in a pluralist system unless they submit to the authority of the CCP and get recognition through the official channels. The Party has formed associational groups to act as the monopoly expression of a group’s interests, such as the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, which is the official group representing the interests of factory workers. In negotiations between business and workers, only the All-China Federation of Trade Unions is allowed to bargain for the workers. This monopoly status gives Chinese workers a heavy incentive to join the organization (as opposed to any independent organization without this favored status), and also incentivizes the organization to support the continued rule of the CCP, or risk its position. In instances where there are multiple associations representing similar interests, the CCP will typically require them to merge, or disband some of them to ensure there is only one in order to prevent competition, and make it easier to monitor the group’s activities. China’s interest group system can be described as state corporatism. As civil society continues to grow in China, corporatism and interest group monopolies may increasingly conflict with the emergence of independent groups, requiring new reforms either toward pluralism, or restricting independent civil society.
There is a mix of state-owned and privately owned media in China, though their messages are all decidedly friendly to the CCP. Criticism on websites and microblogs is increasingly difficult for the Chinese state to control and censor.
From the founding of the People’s Republic until 1980, all media, whether print, radio, or television, was state-owned, and propagated a message approved by the Chinese Communist Party. Since the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping, a variety of independent media outlets emerged to compete with state media, though today, those state media outlets still hold large market share. The media market is competitive and vibrant, especially as it pertains to coverage of sports, business, entertainment, and celebrity. These topics face little to no regulation or government scrutiny. There remains intense political censorship over topics considered taboo by the Chinese government, such as questioning the legitimacy of the regime, or ethnic politics in Tibet and Xinjiang.
The Chinese government used to heavily subsidize state media outlets, but ended this policy in the 1990s, meaning media in China must fund itself through attracting readers and viewers, and by selling advertisements. The effects of this change on coverage have been profound. There has been a massive increase in investigative reporting and muckraking, especially against local Party officials. Lurid details of corruption and scandal have attracted irresistible audiences to the news organizations and tabloids that uncover them, and it seems as though most media outlets are so unafraid of retribution from the Party that they are willing to take the chance in order to secure advertising revenue. Meanwhile, national leaders with connections and political cover are not typically the subject of investigation, and are usually portrayed as the “saviors” who need to step in to fix local corruption problems. Broad issues of national policy concern are also rarely covered by comparison, though the media’s calls for civil liberties, rule of law, and other democratic reforms have been growing.
One area of particular concern to the state is the Internet, and the emergence of “micro-blogs” similar to Twitter or other social media messaging that are growing rapidly in use in China. China is known for its intense censorship and filtration of the Internet. While an Internet search of “Tiananmen Square” in another country would display pictures of the man standing in front of the column of tanks the morning after the Beijing massacre, the same search in China reveals no such image but, rather, lots of pictures of smiling tourists. However, China’s filters and censorship are not terribly effective in practice, since any Chinese person with a bit of tech savvy can get around the filters without much trouble. Furthermore, the state only has so many resources with which to pursue problematic information sharing, and the emergence of the Internet, text messaging, and microblogs means that anyone in China could be publishing criticism at any time. Given the difficulty of controlling information in the modern age, the government will often jail or fine journalists who report critically of the Party, or shut down newspapers and websites on occasion, in hopes that other journalists will self-censor in response.
As we examine the state institutions of China, it is important to remember that China is a party-state, meaning that because the Chinese Communist Party is entrenched as the central institution governing the state, practices within the Party determine how government works, and government institutions’ roles, powers, and responsibilities change as dynamics within the Party change. In 1982, a constitution was drafted for China defining the institutions of the state, and the processes to select their officials. There was, at the same time, a party constitution drafted that detailed how party leadership would be determined and the criteria for membership. Though the two are distinct documents, they are inextricably linked, as the processes explained in the party constitution effectively choose who wields power under the state constitution in a parallel structure. The state constitution is often amended to reflect the desires of the current Party leadership. The following chart illustrates the parallel nature of the Party structure and the state structure.
| Military | Communist Party | Chinese State |
|---|---|---|
| Central Military Commission Security-related Ministries (e.g., Ministry of State Security) |
Standing Committee of the Politburo Politburo Central Committee National Party Congress Provincial Party Congresses Local Party Organization |
President, Premier, State Council Central Government Ministries Government Ministries and Bureaus National People’s Congress Provincial People’s Congress Local People’s Congress |
Members in the Communist Party structure at each level typically serve simultaneously in either military or state institutions at parallel levels. For example, the current general secretary of the Communist Party is Xi Jinping, who serves concurrently as president of the People’s Republic of China (a state institution), and as chairman of the Central Military Commission (a military institution). Li Keqiang, another member of the Politburo standing committee, is the current premier.
The National People’s Congress (NPC) has almost 3,000 members, chosen from the provincial people’s congresses, who were chosen from county people’s congresses, who were chosen from local assemblies such as those elected at the village/township level discussed earlier. These delegates meet once a year for about a week, most recently at the 13th National People’s Congress in 2018. Theoretically and constitutionally, they are the top of the “power chain” in China, empowered with choosing the president of the People’s Republic of China along with other senior leadership, and enacting reforms initiated by the Politburo. Practically, they are essentially rubber-stamping decisions already made by senior Party leadership at the Party Congress held the previous year. When Xi Jinping was named the new president of the People’s Republic at the Congress in 2013, it came as a surprise to no one. He had been named general secretary of the CCP at the Party Congress five months earlier, and that decision had been publicly discussed by senior Party leaders in the standing committee for years prior to the Party Congress. In 2018, 99.8 percent of the delegates voted to reelect Xi president. The National People’s Congress is only given one candidate presented by the Party as a choice for president, and standing up against policies of the Party can quickly end the career of any ambitious NPC delegate. The NPC is far too large and meets too infrequently to function as anything like a real legislature.
The president of the People’s Republic of China is the ceremonial head of state, constitutionally chosen by the National People’s Congress, but practically chosen by outgoing senior leaders of the CCP Politburo standing committee. The president serves a five-year term, which may be renewed by the National People’s Congress. The president used to be limited to two terms, but this limitation was abolished in 2018. While the constitutional powers of the president are limited, and the exercise of these powers must be approved by the National People’s Congress, modern Chinese presidents hold three positions simultaneously. These positions include the presidency (making him the ceremonial head of state), general secretary of the CCP (making him the country’s most powerful political leader), and chairman of the Central Military Commission (making him commander in chief of the armed forces). The transition and ascension into these three roles is increasingly smooth, organized, and predictable, with leaders publicly “groomed” for years in advance to move into these positions in an orchestrated set of ceremonies. The current president is Xi Jinping, elected by the National People’s Congress in 2013 and reelected in 2018.
One power of the president is the appointment of the premier, the head of government for the People’s Republic. The appointment requires the confirmation of the National People’s Congress at their meeting, and he serves a five-year term, which the president and NPC can renew for one additional term. While the president can theoretically appoint anyone over the age of forty-five to the post, every premier has concurrently served in the elite seven-member Politburo standing committee, so it appears only powerful senior Party leaders are practically eligible for the post. The premier oversees the State Council, which is the gathering of thirty-five ministers and governors who direct the bureaucracy of the Chinese state. The current premier is Li Keqiang.
The Chinese bureaucracy is a hierarchical structure mirroring the geographical organization of the Communist Party. Most bureaucrats are Party members, but they do not necessarily have to be. Since Deng’s reforms, China has placed a greater emphasis on hiring qualified technocrats to manage bureaucratic agencies (such as people with degrees in engineering and water management to work in the Ministry of Water and Conservancy), as opposed to insisting that Party officials hold every position.
Chinese bureaucrats are hired based on party connection and merit, but local bureaucrats often abuse their office for corrupt personal gain.
Bureaucrats are not always competent or well intentioned in the conduct of their jobs (as is the case in any country). Many low-level local bureaucrats are often resistant to new directives from the national central government, as embodied by the famous Chinese saying: “the mountains are high, and the Emperor is far away.” Bureaucrats in China are known to treat their position of authority as a personal fiefdom for bribe-taking and corrupt deals with local businesses, especially in areas far removed from the major cities and centers of government. China ranked 77 out of 180 countries studied on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index in 2017. Historically, cracking down on bureaucratic corruption was often a talking point of the Chinese Communist Party as it attempted to assuage the concerns of the people and maintain its place in power; though the few high-profile corruption convictions (and executions) may have been nothing more than window dressing on a problem too big for the state to fully root out.
Xi Jinping’s administration has changed this historical approach by making a crackdown on official corruption a centerpiece of his presidential agenda; he has pledged to come after both “the tigers and the flies,” meaning high-ranking and low-level officials alike. More than 1.5 million Chinese Communist Party members have been disciplined in the crackdown, with punishments including loss of party membership or offices, prison sentences, and even execution. Most of these party members and officials have been local or provincial figures, but the campaign has even ensnared some of China’s highest-ranking national leaders, including former Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang. As a result, since the start of the campaign, China’s ranking in the Corruption Perception Index has improved, but many inside and outside of China fear that the real intention of the campaign has been to purge the party of potential opposition to Xi Jinping.
The People’s Liberation Army has long been a central source of the power of the CCP. Mao Zedong once told a Party Congress in 1927 that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” to justify the necessity of armed struggle against the KMT as the means of achieving the communist vision. Mao also asserted that “our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party.” The PLA is commanded at the top by the Central Military Commission, which is chaired by the general secretary and president of China, currently Xi Jinping, but also includes top generals who serve concurrently in the Politburo of the CCP.
Despite Mao’s assertions, there is more evidence of a politically influential military in China than there ever was in the Soviet Union. While no senior military officials served concurrently in senior Party leadership in the Soviet Union, it is common in China for at least two top generals to serve in the Politburo, shaping national policy.
Military service is mandatory according to Chinese law; however, there are consistently enough volunteers for service to meet the military’s needs that forced conscription has never been necessary in the People’s Republic. There are currently almost 2.3 million enlisted soldiers in the PLA, making it the largest military in the world, though this is only 0.18 percent of the population of China. Military spending in China has risen by about 10 percent a year for the last fifteen years, and in 2018 its budget was $175 billion, second only to the United States in annual spending.
As China’s economy and military budget have grown, China has increasingly projected power throughout the region in Southeast Asia. Most recently, there has been a massive buildup of the PLA Navy’s presence in the South China Sea as China lays claim to territories that have been disputed with Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, Brunei, Malaysia, and the Philippines. One example involves a dispute over the Senkaku Islands. The discovery of oil and other valuable natural resources on these various otherwise uninhabited islands have exacerbated the tension in the region. Chinese ships have taken to ordering small fishing vessels out of the waters previously unpatrolled, and have even fired warning shots at boats that did not immediately comply.
China’s judiciary is organized into four levels of jurisdiction. The highest court is the Supreme People’s Court in Beijing, which acts as the court of last resort for all appeals in China, except for Hong Kong and Macau. Local people’s courts make up the remaining three levels, at the provincial, county, and village/township levels, and they act as the original jurisdiction courts where civil and criminal cases are heard for the first time, or as an appellate court, depending on the case. Courts of Special Jurisdiction take cases in specified areas, such as those arising from the military or water transportation. Hong Kong and Macau have their own separate court structures with their own separate laws and legal system, dating back to their status as British and Portuguese colonies before returning to China.
The Chinese legal system has undergone significant reform since the 1980s to accommodate the conversion to a more liberalized and market-based economic system. The criminal system remains largely unchanged in its denial of legal protections to criminal suspects.
Perhaps no institution in China has undergone more meaningful reform in the last few decades than the Chinese judiciary. Once little more than another political implement of the party-state, globalization has necessitated the creation of an entire legal framework and community of lawyers and judges familiar with Western legal practices in order to settle disputes over points of law that arise in business. The number of lawyers in China rose from under 10,000 in 1980 to over 100,000 by 2000. There was a similar explosion in the number of lawsuits and legal cases heard by Chinese courts in the same time period. Chinese judges have demonstrated a remarkable independence and sense of justice in civil cases, especially given their history, and about as many cases involving labor disputes are decided or settled in the workers’ favor as those in the employer’s favor.
China has also made significant strides in legal reforms to protect intellectual property, such as copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. China had earned a reputation for theft of intellectual property for failing to prosecute violators, such as those who pirated or bootlegged movies or made knockoffs (imitations) of expensive brands of handbags, and for directly hacking Western firms to steal technology. Globalization and pressures to bring foreign investment into China pushed the government to take steps to address these abuses. Western firms had been deeply wary of doing business in China because their intellectual property was not protected. In addition, the tremendous economic growth of China has meant that there are now many large Chinese firms with valuable brands, patents, and trademarks, and these firms want the Chinese government to protect them. While China is not protecting intellectual property at the same level that most advanced Western countries do, it has made meaningful reform on this front.
In criminal law, meanwhile, reform has never really begun. While the Party regularly promises major reform, justice is hard to come by for criminal suspects. The courts place the burden of proof on the accused to prove their innocence, rather than the “innocent until proven guilty” axiom of liberal democracies. More than 99 percent of criminal charges in China result in either a conviction or a guilty plea by the suspect. Rule of law, seemingly on the rise in civil matters, is regularly abused by authorities in the criminal system. Judges will sometimes issue sentences longer than the law dictates is maximally allowable. Political critics sometimes get harassed by local police, or charged with unrelated white-collar crimes that are difficult to dispute in court. Ai Wei Wei is an international artistic icon, and the architectural designer of the famous “Bird’s Nest” Beijing National Stadium at the 2008 Summer Olympics. Ai is a regular critic of the government, and famously used his artwork to draw attention to corruption of local authorities who took bribes to overlook shoddy construction techniques, which resulted in the deaths of nearly 5,000 students after schools collapsed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquakes. Ai began an effort to identify all of the earthquake’s victims, whom the government refused to name officially. Ai was regularly harassed by local authorities, with surveillance cameras placed outside his home and offices, and frequent visits from uniformed officers, who once beat him up in a darkened elevator. His blog, which posted the names of victims as Ai’s team learned about them, was shut down in 2009. In 2011, he was held in jail for eighty-one days without any formal charges on suspicion of unnamed tax crimes. While it is getting easier to discuss social issues openly in China, Ai’s case and the thousands of others like it make it clear that civil liberties and rule of law are not yet protected by the Chinese legal system.
Policymaking in China is attempting to balance the ambitions of a large and increasingly powerful state to shape affairs in its favor on the world stage, and the needs of a massive population that is still largely poor and rural. The world is watching China’s choices closely, as its responses will have important consequences for the world going forward.
Since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping brought limited market economics to the country, China has gradually implemented reforms to move closer and closer to full capitalism, while retaining many of the large state-owned companies established during collectivization and industrialization under Mao. The Maoist welfare state was often referred to as the iron rice bowl, an iron-clad guarantee to citizens that the state would provide work, housing, health care, and retirement to every person consistent with Mao’s egalitarian vision. This vision was never realized, especially as programs such as the Great Leap Forward failed miserably.
In the rural agrarian community, Deng reformed collectivized farms with the household responsibility system. In this system, families would pay the state the taxes and contract fees they owed in exchange for working the land (since the state owned the land after collectivization), and then the family could use or sell the crops they grow, keeping all of the profits of their sales. The system remains in place in the Chinese countryside today. It is essentially a market economy without private land ownership, and China has not experienced another catastrophic famine such as during the Great Leap Forward since these reforms.
In industry, Deng allowed small private enterprises to start up and compete alongside the large state-owned industries started under Mao. The private companies in consumer-related industries, such as manufacturing and retail, have been far more successful and profitable than their state-owned counterparts, and the Chinese economy is increasingly privately driven, though the state-owned sector today is still around 35 percent of the GDP. As part of the attempt to grow the Chinese export market, China created special economic zones (SEZs) in 1979. In these designated areas, manufacturers were given special tax rates and were provided with modern infrastructure. Foreign firms massively expanded their presence in China, taking advantage of the large, low-wage, disciplined work force. The success of the experiment led China to create many more SEZs in subsequent years. The opening of trade with the outside world has led to a large presence of multinational corporations contracting with Chinese manufacturers to make their products, and demands from Western firms seeking to expand into China have led to many of the reforms detailed in the section on the judiciary.
The reduced, but still strong state sector of the economy is sometimes viewed as part of the complex patron-client network of the Chinese state. China is best described as a state capitalist economic system, as opposed to a market socialist economic system. Revenues from state-owned companies are retained by the companies themselves, paying high salaries and bonuses to the top executives, rather than collecting the profits into the general fund of the state for redistributive social welfare programs. These executives are usually personally connected into the Communist Party leadership structure. Many of these companies are inefficient, and wouldn’t survive real competition in the private market, if not for the large subsidies they receive from the state.
Social, environmental, and economic problems in China during the 1970s led to the formation of the family planning policy, more commonly referred to as the one-child policy. This name is somewhat inaccurate, as only about 36 percent of Chinese were ever actually subject to a policy requiring one child only. The policy placed fines and tax incentives in place to attempt to manage population growth, strongly encouraging families to limit their size. The government provided contraceptives, abortions, and sterilizations to help with compliance. The policy is part of the urban-rural divide in China, as urban families were more content to comply with the policy since a small family better suited a middle-class lifestyle, while rural families depended on children as part of the necessary agricultural labor to support their family. The policy has been relaxed and modified to comport with the needs of rural Chinese, and minorities in autonomous zones are exempted altogether from the policy.
There have been significant demographic consequences in China as a result of this policy. The birth rate dropped from 2.63 births per woman in 1980 to 1.61 in 2009. One fear arising from this trend is known as the “4-2-1 problem,” which imagines a scenario in which two couples (four people) give birth to two children, who marry and gave birth to one child. As time passes, the oldest generation (the four) and eventually the middle generation (the two) will age and cease working, depending on retirement savings and their working descendants (the one grandchild) to sustain their standard of living. As life expectancy continues to rise, this problem could get much worse, with fewer and fewer working adults trying to sustain a larger and larger set of elderly dependents. The CCP relaxed the one-child policy in response to this problem in 2013’s National People’s Congress, allowing families to have two children if one of the parents is an only child. This relaxation mainly affected urban couples since most rural families were exempted from the one-child policy all along. In 2015, China further relaxed this policy by raising the limit to two children. Some have called this reform too little and too late, while others doubt the policy will have much effect at all, given how the one-child family has become embedded in Chinese urban social culture. While the effects of this reform are yet to be seen, there are highly visible effects on gender balance in China resulting from generations of the one-child limit.
Another major demographic consequence of the one-child policy is the phenomenon sometimes referred to as China’s “missing girls.” The sex ratio of male to female birth was 117:100 from 2000 to 2013, indicating a likely selective bias favoring males among Chinese parents. Given that many couples could only have one child, it appears parents were either selectively aborting girls once discovering the gender, committing infanticide after birth, or failing to register the births of girls, perhaps to put them up for an informal adoption outside of the country. This is likely because of Confucian tradition, which prefers males in many ways, but also may be caused partially by the weak welfare-state guarantees in China. For many Chinese couples, the child is essentially the retirement plan, as working adults are expected to care for aging parents. Girls who were traditionally excluded from good paying jobs are still earning considerably less than their male counterparts, so having a boy is in many ways “safer.” Regardless of the reason, it is estimated that there will be thirty million more men than women in China in 2020, and early signs of changes in dating and courtship dynamics are already appearing in the culture.
Chinese policy after 1980 focused almost exclusively on economic growth, at the expense of almost anything else that stood in its way. Today, China is dealing with the consequences on the environment of unrestricted development. It is estimated that 20 percent of all Chinese farmland and as much as 60 percent of all groundwater in China is polluted. China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gasses, surpassing the United States in 2006, and the two countries now combine to emit 50 percent of the global total.
While water pollution, lead contamination, and soil contamination are all severe problems in modern China, perhaps no environmental issue affects Chinese citizens on a day-to-day basis quite like air pollution. The Asian Development Bank found that by their measure, seven of the world’s ten most air-polluted cities were in China. While the World Health Organization recommends that air should contain no more than 25 micrograms per cubic meter of air particulates, Chinese cities such as Beijing have posted measures as high as 993. These problems may come to cause severe respiratory problems for Chinese residents, ranging from asthma and bronchitis to lung cancer. As these problems emerged, the Chinese government’s initial responses were denialist and defensive. In one instance, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing reported record high levels of air pollutants on a Twitter feed, which the Chinese government requested to be removed as “inaccurate and unlawful data.” Meanwhile, readings at the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau continued declaring the air as “good,” with microgram levels between 51 and 79, compared to the U.S. Embassy’s reading of over 500, excess of which could not be measured on their equipment. China has often responded to demands to reduce CO2 emissions with blunt declarations that the developed world industrialized first, then worried about fixing the environment later, but wants to pull the ladder out from behind themselves before developing countries like China have a chance to catch up.
Recently, internal pressure from environmental groups and frustrated residents of air-polluted cities has prompted the government to respond, following over 50,000 reported environmental protests by citizens in 2012. The government invested 277 billion dollars to reduce air pollution by 25 percent by 2017 compared against 2012 levels, and President Xi declared “war on pollution” at the opening of the 2014 People’s Congress. A new law was enacted empowering government bureaus with new enforcement powers to arrest, fine, and “name and shame” polluters who exceed new limitations established by the law. Environmental groups are guaranteed additional freedom to report and publicize problems without fear of retribution from local officials. This is the first revision to the main Chinese environmental protection law since 1989.
*Note: Terms with an asterisk (*) are those that consistently appear on the AP Comparative Government and Politics exam as tested concepts.
Political power in China is frequently gained and exercised through
One enduring legacy of the Chinese Revolution of 1949 is
The results of Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1958) included
Which of the following accurately describes changes of leadership succession in China from the 1980s to the present?
Which of the following describes the status of minority ethnic groups within China?
The Chinese state’s power to control and restrict civil society organization
The highest-ranking members of the Chinese Communist Party hold positions in
In China, public elections
The media in China
Market reforms in China have necessitated