This chapter opens Part I of the book, focusing on social media as a digital participatory space. It examines the relationship between the state and platform firms in social media governance over two consecutive leaderships. It firsts map the landscape of social media platforms in China and the variety of participatory spaces they offer. Based on survey data, it identifies two platform companies that have evolved into important players in managing social media platforms with a significant reach in political information – Tencent and Sina. It then examines the significant changes in social media governance over two consecutive leaderships. Under Hu, social media governance was characterized by loose command and control with many choices for users, while popular corporatism emerged at the end of the Hu Jintao leadership and took off under Xi Jinping. Based on procurement data, the chapter elaborates on the state’s reasoning to rely on Tencent and Sina as the only corporations with the expertise and resources to provide key services in managing online public opinion. Its findings demonstrate that under popular corporatism large platform firms can leverage their superior expertise, data, infrastructure, and reach to gain concessions from the state due to their consultant and/or insider status.

This concluding chapter outlines the contours of the Party-state and develops a conceptual framework to explain its distinctive mode of governance. At its core is a dual normative system: a legal system grounded in popular sovereignty is overseen and constrained by a power-based normative system designed to uphold the absolute authority of the Party Center—an organizing principle essential to maintaining the structural integrity of the Party-state. The chapter argues that the governance logic of the Party-state is best captured by the theory of Normalized Political Prerogative (NPP). According to this theory, governance unfolds through a three-step process: operationalization, normalization, and regulation. Together, these constitute the formal institutional foundation of Party-state rule. The NPP framework elucidates the systemic proliferation of corruption as an inherent byproduct of this mode of governance, the role of the Party’s disciplinary apparatus as a self-correcting mechanism to mitigate its adverse effects, and the evolving dynamics between institutions and leadership that shape politicking and power struggles within the Politburo.

In this chapter, I analyze the methodology of the Party’s anticorruption program under Xi Jinping. This program has two goals. The first is to shock and awe. This goal has been achieved successfully through the anti-corruption campaign in 2012-2017, which is attributable to two main factors: leadership qualities of both Xi himself and the campaign’s chief director Wang Qishan and the institutional infrastructure provided by the Party’s disciplinary system that had been built by Xi’s predecessors. The campaign’s success also shows that the institutional performance of the Party is susceptible to leadership influence, under which the same tools, devices, and mechanisms can be employed and exploited to different effects. The second goal of Xi’s anti-corruption program is to provide long-term solutions to some of the perpetuating problems of the Party’s disciplinary system. This reform marks a significant transformation in the Party-state relationship: instead of undermining the state for its own preservation, the Party now strengthens its political governance by empowering the state and drawing legitimacy from it. Lastly, I also discuss two recent developments: the gradual decline of Wang Qishan’s influence and the retraction of power from the CCDI.

This chapter seeks to explain the recurrence of judicial corruption despite waves of reforms. To that end, I track major reforms launched by the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) over past decades and find a pattern: Most of them revolved on redistribution of judicial decision-making power. Instead of confronting the issue of institutionalized judicial partiality caused by normalized political prerogative, these reforms were designed to divide, centralize, decentralize, and recentralize judicial decision-making power. Since these measures are not geared to eliminate judicial partiality, they work best in redistributing rather than uprooting corruption. Recent reforms made efforts to set boundaries for the exercise of political prerogatives by banning “improper” interference while retaining “proper” interference. The reform may lift the costs of corruption, thereby reducing but not eliminating it, because the power that is most prone to corruption is the one that is entitled to “proper” interference. In the last section, I use a recent SPC scandal to expose the limits of the current judicial reforms and to illustrate the reach and the entrenchment of the prerogative-based judicial interference power.

This chapter delves into the political implications of data production on social media platforms on regime stability. It first investigates the meaning of political trust as a measure for regime stability. It then elaborates on political trust in China and lays out expectations about the role of benevolent leadership and citizens’ experiences on social media. The main empirical analysis concentrates on user experiences regarding space for online discourse and the diversity of opinions expressed on WeChat. The chapter finds that user experience of a less controlled and more diverse online discourse on WeChat is positively related to political trust in the regime. These empirical findings hold for political discourse, across digital platforms, and when content control undergoes changes over time. This analysis shows that user experiences greatly vary in terms of how much overt content control people encounter and the extent to which online discourse is seen as giving voice to diverse views and opinions. This variation feeds into how citizens evaluate the central government. Experiencing social media platforms as less controlled and more diverse aids in the creation of a positive vision of a benevolent central government, thus boosting support for the regime.

Unlike anticorruption institutions elsewhere, China’s anticorruption practices follow a self-regulatory model: it is regulated by the very institution that is targeted by anticorruption. Compared with its role in judicial affairs, the Party’s involvement in anticorruption investigation is much more forefront, direct, and prominent. In this chapter, I track the origin and institutional evolution of the Party’s disciplinary system during 1927-2012. I point out that the Party’s institutional design is founded on the cardinal principle to preserve the unified (absolute) command of the Party Center. Thereby, how to reconcile between the imperative to uphold this principle and the need to provide a measure of autonomy for disciplinary institutions to avoid capture has been the main theme of the disciplinary institution-building process. The introduction of a tiered interlocking disciplinary decision-making structure, the segmented investigation process, and the “dual-leadership” model are the direct outcomes of the Party’s efforts to balance the conflicting needs mentioned above. These arrangements had fueled the rise of the CCDI but also brought several problems and challenges, including legal deficiency, jurisdictional frictions, resource shortage, incentive issues, and abuse, which had set the stage for Xi Jinping’s unprecedented anti-corruption campaign and disciplinary reform upon his taking power in 2012.

I remember vividly the first time I heard this amusing little ditty. My late grandfather was an avid storyteller, and one especially hot afternoon during my summer vacation in Kolkata, he ventured to talk to me about the Second World War. He had been only a boy in Jessore (east Bengal) when the War struck, but he had remembered his abhigyata (that is, how he had experienced the War). It was not just a memory of being afraid of air strikes, what the Japanese would do if they actually came to Bengal, the horror of the famine of 1943 and the (later) tribulation of making a cross-border journey in 1947. It was also a memory of what he called ‘the sahebs being afraid’. This statement was followed by a chuckled reciting of the ditty quoted earlier.

This chapter introduces the analytical framework of the book. It presents a typology of two modes of governance – the command-and-control and popular corporatism logics – with examples from China. It presents each logic in its extreme form to emphasize their differences in the dynamic relation between the state, platform firms, and users. In the command-and-control logic, platform firms are intermediaries that follow and implement the policies of the state, while popular corporatism emphasizes the important role of platform firms. According to this alternative framework, large profit-driven platform firms have bargaining power against the state. That implies they not only refuse to comply without being authorized to do so by the state but also receive concessions from the state. The source of such business power stems from data that is produced by citizens. While positive incentives draw users to platforms, users may engage less or move to alternative platforms when given choices. In this way, users signal their bottom line to platforms through the actions taken on the platform. In authoritarian contexts, this dynamic may lead to conflicts with demands from political elites, thus motivating noncompliance and resistance by platforms.