The Communist Party of China (CPC) is arguably the strongest and most successful political party in the world today. The CPC has ruled China since 1949, which makes it the world’s second-longest-ruling party. The length of its rule is surpassed – by only one year – by the Democratic People’s Party of North Korea, which has much less to boast about. When the CPC won the civil war against the Nationalists and established the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, China was an agrarian nation with a population of 540 million, only 12 percent of whom lived in urban areas, and a per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of just over US$600.Footnote ¹ In the decades since, and notably after the party embraced economic reform and opening up to the world in the late 1970s, the party has steered the country’s dramatic transformation from a peasant society into a modern, urbanized industrial powerhouse. China’s population has more than doubled to 1.4 billion, of which nearly 65 percent now live in urban areas. Its per capita GDP in 2024 was above US$12,000, making China the second-largest economy in the world.Footnote ² The country’s remarkable economic development, particularly in the decades after Mao, has lifted hundreds of millions from poverty and propelled hundreds of millions more into the ranks of the middle classes. On the back of its economic might, the CPC is now overseeing China’s rise as a global power and consequential actor in international affairs. That makes the story of the party’s durability – its secrets and its challenges – essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary China and its role in the world.

There are many excellent books on the CPC, dealing with its structure and its governing strategies.Footnote ³ There are also volumes that examine the evolution of the party during the hundred years since its founding.Footnote ⁴ All of these works provide important insights into the history and contemporary operations of the world’s most powerful political organization. This book complements such volumes by focusing systematically on two key questions: How has the CPC succeeded in monopolizing political power in China throughout multiple decades of profound social and economic change? And how did a revolutionary party of class struggle evolve to govern the world’s largest economy (in purchasing-power terms) while maintaining popular legitimacy? The party’s multidecade durability defies simple explanation. Each of the essays in this book examines a different dimension of the durability of CPC rule. Read together, the chapters provide a comprehensive understanding of the reasons for the CPC’s unassailable monopoly on political power in China today. This introductory essay provides an overview of the sources of CPC strength and outlines the rich contents of this volume.

The book’s chapters are organized around four aspects of party durability: (i) ideology and discourse, (ii) organization, (iii) co-optation and policy responsiveness, and (iv) coercion. The first chapters examine the ideological and discursive basis of the party’s strength – that is, its formidable capacity to shape Chinese citizens’ understanding of the party’s historical role in leading the country from past humiliation to future glory. The second set of chapters analyzes the organizational strength of the party – how the CPC has built a modern and professional administrative apparatus to carry out its agenda and secure its grip on power. The third set of chapters explains how the party has won popular support by co-opting partners and by delivering policies that meet most people’s evolving expectations, particularly those of the growing middle classes. The fourth set reviews the party’s capacity to crush dissent and any shoots of political opposition, which is reinforced by an expansive domestic security apparatus and the party’s direct control of the military. The final chapter examines an inherent weakness of one-party rule and a future threat to the party’s durability – the problem of leadership succession.

Ideology and Discourse

A key feature of the party’s endurance over more than seven decades of profound change, including radical changes in the party’s governing strategies, has been its ability to adapt its ruling ideology to suit the times. According to official party history, CPC rule since 1949 can be divided into three distinct periods: the period of “socialist revolution and construction” (the Maoist period), the period of “reform and opening up” (the Dengist period), and the “new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics” (the Xi Jinping era). According to the party’s 2021 Historical Resolution, an important document that harnesses the past to serve the present, the period of socialist revolution and construction began with the party’s victory over nationalist forces and imperialists, allowing the Chinese people to “stand up.” Following victory, the party’s purpose was to “carry out socialist revolution, promote socialist construction, and lay down the fundamental political conditions and the institutional foundations necessary for national rejuvenation.” The party acknowledges that mistakes were made during this period, notably the Great Leap Forward and the people’s commune movement, which failed to bring about economic progress, and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), which “brought disaster to the country and the people.” According to the official narrative, the party corrected course in the years following Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, ushering in a new period that prioritized economic development over ideological dogma. According to the historical resolution, “the party came to recognize that the only way forward was to launch a program of reform and opening up; otherwise, our endeavors in pursuing modernization and building socialism would be doomed to failure.” In the period of reform and opening, the party would build the national economy and bring moderate prosperity to the people by introducing market forces and retreating from centralized economic planning. The party packaged its ideological shift as “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (you Zhongguo tese de shehuizhuyi). This new mantra, which remains the party’s bedrock principle to this day, allowed “socialism” to be infused with a variety of characteristics that suited the needs of the time, including the embrace of markets and private enterprise, which were once anathema to the party. China, according to party theorists, was still in the primary stage of socialism and needed to grow its industrial base before it could resume the journey toward communism. According to the party’s constitution, “the highest ideal of communism pursued by Chinese Communists can be realized only when socialist society is fully developed and highly advanced.” The transition to communism – a concept the party’s constitution does not define – would be postponed, as the current period of socialist modernization would “take at least a century.”Footnote ⁵

As Yingjie Guo observes in his essay in this volume “Nationalism as a New Source of Strength” (Chapter 2), the party’s ideological adaptability has been a key pillar of its durability. Most important, Guo notes, is the party’s successful reorientation from a (Marxist) party prosecuting class struggle on behalf of workers and peasants into a (nationalist) party representing the interests of the entire population. Although nationalism was interwoven into the party’s earliest doctrines and struggles, notably in the party’s promise to rescue the nation from the humiliation wrought by foreign imperialism, Guo shows us how the party has transformed itself from “an exclusive class party to an inclusive national party that seeks to forge a common identification with a nation in the pursuit of national rejuvenation.”

Although Guo argues that Marxism has been turned into an “empty signifier” that the party has sinicized out of existence, this should not be taken to mean that Marxist-Leninist ideology and Mao Zedong Thought are no longer relevant today. On the contrary, the CPC’s interpretation of Marxism-Leninism serves to justify China’s statist model of political economy, its interventions in Chinese social life, and its suppression of dissent. And the party still celebrates the achievements of Mao Zedong, chief protagonist of the Communist revolution and engineer-in-chief of the class struggles of the party’s first era, because those achievements belong to the party and sustain its revolutionary legitimacy. This is why, despite the party’s reversal of Maoist doctrine, the party leadership demands adherence to Xi Jinping’s edict of the “two must not negates” (liangge buneng fouding). According to this edict, the Maoist period must not be criticized from the present standpoint since it laid the foundations for socialist modernization. And, in a warning to present-day leftists, the Mao era (of radical socialism) must not be harnessed to negate the present period (of recalibrated “socialism with Chinese characteristics”). Which is to say, no matter how much the party has changed course, never accuse it of forsaking its commitment to the revolutionary cause.

Just as his giant portrait towers over Tiananmen Square, Mao Zedong still looms large for the party because his contribution to its historical narrative is crucial. Mao is the spiritual progenitor of the party’s original mission – a supreme ancestor in a nation of ancestor worshippers. Mao is to the party as the Yellow Emperor is to the Chinese people in popular historical mythology. In his essay “Mao’s Long Shadow” (Chapter 3), Matthew Galway offers a detailed explanation of Mao Zedong’s significance for the continuation of CPC rule in China today. He also shows how Mao’s ideas continue to serve as an “ideological system” (sixiang tixi) for party rule. This system consists of ideological principles, a framework for analyzing political threats, and a vocabulary for waging political struggle against enemies near and far. As today’s party leaders reinterpret Mao and reprogram his thought into “socialism with Chinese characteristics for a New Era,” Galway reminds us that the elasticity of “ever malleable” Maoism has always been a source of party power, including in Mao’s own time. Malleable Maoism, helped by Mao’s varied writings and his own changes in thinking over the decades, can be plundered and repurposed to suit the times.

The party’s ability to legitimate its rule through ideological reinvention is made possible by its domination of public discourse in China. The party exercises creative control over the terminology used in China’s public spaces, including online, to explain the party’s role and policies and to discuss and interpret social, economic, and political phenomena. In her essay “Language, Discourse, and Hegemony” (Chapter 4), the linguist Fengyuan Ji explains how the party draws on practices of linguistic engineering that date back thousands of years to legitimate its rule. As she notes, Confucius advised that a ruler’s first task is to regulate terminology. For Confucius, “correct” terminology supported a shared and correct perception of reality: “If the names are not correct, if they do not match realities, language has no object. If language is without an object, action becomes impossible – and therefore all human affairs disintegrate and their management becomes pointless and impossible.”Footnote ⁶ Language was the basis for social harmony and good government. During the Mao era, the party introduced new terminology to motivate people to participate in class struggle. Specific language formulations were developed to glorify members of good (revolutionary) classes and vilify those from bad classes. The bad classes of “landlords” and “rich peasants” were joined by “Counterrevolutionaries,” “Rightists,” and “Bad Elements” in the “Five Black Categories” (hei wulei). As is common among enemy combatants in war, the party used language that dehumanized its political enemies, smoothing the path for it to mobilize others against them – they were “cow demons and snake spirits” (niugui sheshen), for example, a phrase borrowed from the ancient literary classic Journey to the West. Although the party today eschews the language of class struggle, it continues to weaponize language to target and eliminate threats. Such language appears in political campaigns such as in the “Campaign to Sweep Away Black and Eliminate Evil,” a nationwide campaign from 2018 to 2020 against organized crime, corrupt local officials, and other “flies,” or party-identified deviants.Footnote ⁷

Fengyuan Ji reminds us how the party’s ideological dexterity is underpinned by continual linguistic engineering – work carried out by armies of wordsmiths working within the party’s Publicity (formerly Propaganda) Department, which oversees the media and other party agencies such as the Central Party School and the Party Research Office. Following Mao’s death and the determination of the second generation of party leaders to dismantle the collectives and introduce market reforms, the party scoured Mao’s sayings for words and phrases that could be used to legitimize the shift in policy directions. As noted earlier, Deng Xiaoping, for example, repurposed Mao’s mantra to “seek truth from facts” to support more practical market-oriented reforms. Each successive leadership generation introduces new phraseology that is grounded in or connected to older terminology to maintain a semblance of ideological continuity (and thereby seamless historical legitimacy) even if the practical meanings represent a significant break with the past.

An important example of the party’s linguistic inventiveness can be seen when the party decided in the late 1990s to recruit private entrepreneurs into its ranks (and thus become a truly nationalist party, as Guo notes in Chapter 4, rather than a party of workers and peasants). That step, inconceivable in Mao’s day, was authorized and legitimized by Jiang Zemin’s formulation of “the three represents” (sange daibiao), which states that the party must represent (i.e., incorporate) the nation’s “advanced productive forces” (entrepreneurs and managers), “China’s advanced culture” (intellectuals and creative industry workers), and “the overwhelming interests of the Chinese people” (others previously excluded from the party’s ranks).Footnote ⁸ Importantly, linguistic engineering also helps the party to control its own narrative, including its role in history and destined leadership into the future. China’s leaders and their theoreticians today believe that one of the reasons the Communist Party of the Soviet Union collapsed was that the Soviets lost control of the narrative, especially in the period of glasnost (transparency) under Gorbachev, when people were allowed to openly discuss the horrors of the Stalinist period. Party leaders do not want any such reevaluation of Maoist catastrophes such as the Great Famine and Cultural Revolution. The party has even coined a term to remind citizens of the correct way to think about the party-state. To engage in criticism of the party, especially its past mistakes, or even to discuss them openly, is to engage in “historical nihilism,” which a leaked communiqué equated to denying the CPC’s legitimacy as China’s long-term rulers.Footnote ⁹

The party now presents itself as the savior and custodian of Chinese civilization, even though the party repudiated traditional Chinese culture during its rise and in the first period of its rule. At the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Mao Zedong called for the destruction of the “four olds” (old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas), mobilizing red guards to destroy cultural artifacts, literature, and temples. Red guards even exhumed and mutilated the corpse of a descendant of Confucius in a symbolic act of denigration toward China’s best-known philosopher.Footnote ¹⁰ The party now presents itself as the custodian of Chinese civilization and pays close attention to how China’s past (and the party’s role in it) is understood. By shaping the linguistic framework for talking and writing about, and therefore understanding, Chinese culture and history, the party retains control of the narrative. In July 2022, Xi Jinping published an essay in the party’s flagship academic journal Seeking Truth (Qiushi) titled “Advancing research on the history of Chinese civilization, and developing a keener awareness of history while building up cultural confidence.”Footnote ¹¹ In the essay, which was a summary of a speech he gave to the Politburo in May that year, Xi expounded on ideas related to cultural nationalism and the party’s role in guiding the country along its unique development path toward national rejuvenation. To consolidate correct thinking on the origins of China’s civilization and the party’s role as its savior, Xi called for a “discourse system” to sit alongside the nation’s academic and “disciplinary” systems. Together, the systems would foster and promote historical and developmental narratives that countered Western social and political theories and discourse.

Xi tasked the discourse system with providing a comprehensive lexicon for such correct thinking. The academic system was to provide its evidentiary base: an increasing variety of academic centers (and not just Party Schools) have been mobilized to give scholarly credence to party dogma, including seventeen research centers dedicated to the study of Xi Jinping Thought, which represents the current ideological consensus. The discipline system, meanwhile, ensures that party officials and other thought leaders, including teachers, writers, and public intellectuals, maintain the correct line of thinking, forming a bulwark against the threats posed by Western liberal thought. According to Xi, if allowed to spread, Western liberal thought can corrupt minds and lead to “peaceful evolution” (demands for political liberalization). Xi and many among the party leadership believe that “peaceful evolution” contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union and facilitated the emergence of “colour revolutions” in post-Soviet Eurasia as well as the Middle East and Africa.Footnote ¹²

In her essay “Patriotism as Commodity” (Chapter 5), Delia Lin notes that the party promotes a form of patriotism that embraces China’s cultural heritage (narrowly interpreted) and the party’s revolutionary history (carefully narrated) – fusing, as Yingjie Guo also points out, political and cultural nationalism into a “red nationalism.” Delia Lin highlights the powerful reach of red nationalism in China today by showing how entrepreneurs, artists, filmmakers, and media commentators increasingly commodify and market such forms of patriotism in China’s freewheeling market economy. Lin argues that they do so because it is politically safe and because “red-nationalist” products appeal to a growing appetite for narratives of China’s return to glory. Lin notes that “loving China” is a huge industry involving websites and social media accounts as well as movies such as the Wolf Warrior franchise, in which a Rambo-like solider rescues Chinese citizens from dangerous international situations. Just as Mao Zedong was a master at connecting passion to politics, Delia Lin reminds us that the Communist Party continues to excel in manipulating feelings “as part of a conscious strategy of psychological engineering.”Footnote ¹³ By commodifying red nationalism, party, nation, and profit become intertwined in people’s everyday lives. Loving the country becomes synonymous with loving the party, which becomes synonymous with entrepreneurial possibility. In this way China’s new entrepreneurial class has been mobilized to promote the party’s interests across a wide range of popular media and consumer products.

Organization

The party’s ability to control discourse within China is underpinned by a strong party organization. The party’s Publicity Department sets policies and guidelines for the media and oversees the internet. It sends out daily instructions to media outlets about which topics and terms are encouraged and which are verboten. It also licenses all media agencies and internet companies, including popular social media enterprises such as WeChat, Weibo, and Douyin (TikTok), and credentials, registers, and trains journalists. The Publicity Department has evolved from an organ of political propaganda into a formidable and sophisticated thought-policing machine. Its sophistication can be seen in its growing coordination of online discussion, where it acts not just as censor, but as an active player in shaping public opinion and popular narratives. Former journalist Shuyu Zhang explores the growing power of the CPC Publicity Department in her essay in this volume, “Manufacturing Consent and ‘Correct Collective Memory’: Digital Propaganda and Participatory Censorship” (Chapter 6). Zhang shows how the party shapes online debates by mobilizing media outlets, influencers, and key opinion leaders to sing from the party’s song sheets. Zhang’s case study focuses on Weibo (China’s Twitter/X), where official accounts and patriotic individuals converge to tell a good China story (jianghao Zhongguogushi) that reflects the party’s talking points. The party employs an army of online commentators, estimated to number as many as 500,000, to reinforce official positions and officially sanctioned perspectives and to promote unity and stability. Critics sometimes refer to the army as the “50 cent army” or the “50 cent party,” which is a reference to the payments posters receive for their contributions.

Zhang reminds us that the party’s domination of the online space is not just because of the paid “army,” but because the party has been able to mobilize patriotic volunteers to boost approved content and crowd out competing voices. As Zhang explains, online patriots, affectionately known as “little pinks” (xiao fenhong), “are a burgeoning population of young Chinese netizens who voluntarily consume and promulgate fervent nationalist rhetoric, traditionally propelled by Chinese political elites to promote CPC legitimacy.” Following Lin, Zhang highlights the party’s capacity to harness youth passions to bolster its legitimacy and promote its political agenda to domestic and international audiences.

The Publicity Department is one of the party’s three key departments. The other two are the Organization Department and the United Front Work Department.Footnote ¹⁴ The Organization Department oversees party-state personnel, including the appointment and promotion of party and government leaders, and the United Front Work Department oversees non-party social, cultural, religious, and economic associations and influential public figures to ensure such actors are aligned with and not antagonistic to the party’s agenda. The role of each of these departments as key organizational weapons of the party will be discussed, in turn, but let us first review the overall structure of the party and its relationship to the state.

The party center (dang zhongyang) resembles a pyramid structure with the General Secretary and the seven-member Standing Committee of the Politburo at the top. The Standing Committee is a secretive body that meets regularly to discuss the top political issues of the day, but the content of its meetings is not publicized. The Standing Committee is part of a larger twenty-five-member Politburo, which meets monthly to discuss major policy concerns, and its meeting agendas are often made public. The Politburo sits within an even-larger Central Committee, which meets approximately once a year in a more publicly transparent plenum, and whose 205 full members and 171 alternate members represent the party’s central and regional leaders as well as the military elite.Footnote ¹⁵ The Central Committee nominally elects the members of the Politburo, including the General Secretary, but the results of the elections are predetermined by the party’s top leaders. During previous administrations, retired party elders would play a role in top appointments. However, such consultations have disappeared during Xi Jinping’s tenure, as revolutionary party elders have died and as Xi concentrated decision-making authority in his own hands. At the twentieth party congress held in October 2022, Xi Jinping ensured that the Standing Committee and Politburo were stacked with people loyal to him.

The Central Committee and its senior executive offices, the Politburo and Politburo Standing Committee, constitute the party center where all high-level political and policy decisions are taken. The Committee operates according to the Leninist principle of “democratic centralism,” which allows for internal debate but requires members to fall in line behind any decision taken by the party’s leaders. The Central Committee rarely criticizes policy proposals from top leaders but will sometimes recommend minor adjustments. As the party’s highest organ of authority, its primary function is to legitimize top-level decisions.

Since the Central Committee meets only once a year, its work is administered by a permanent General Office. Under the General Office sits the powerful Central Discipline Inspection Committee, which polices the integrity of Party and government officials, the Policy Research Office, which is responsible for developing the party’s ideology and theories and drafting high-level policy proposals, and the Central Party School and Executive Leadership Academies, which train party leaders. The Central Committee also oversees the work of the party’s permanent departments including the Publicity (Propaganda) Department, the Organization Department, and the United Front Work Department.

The party carries out much of its political work through its own departments, but it governs the state through its wider control of government agencies, the military, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and other public institutions such as universities, and the media. The party sets strategy and policy priorities at the top in a system that has come to be known under Xi Jinping as “top-level design” (dingceng sheji). The party uses coordinating bodies known as leadership small groups (lingdao xiaozu) to develop guiding principles (fangzhen) for policy development. Implementing agencies then develop strategies and plans for putting policies into action. Party leaders have long used leading small groups as a vehicle of political power. Xi Jinping has expanded his personal influence by chairing the most important leading small groups, which are known as “commissions.” These include the National Security Commission, which coordinates all aspects of domestic and international security (with military representation) and the Central Commission for Comprehensive Deepening of Reform, which Xi Jinping created as a mechanism for overseeing reforms across all areas of politics, economics, and social affairs.

Party policies will sometimes be codified in laws produced by the National People’s Congress, but party policies set the bureaucracy in motion even without legislation. The party governs by managing the appointments and promotions of all leading cadres (lingdao ganbu), which includes all cadres serving at the level of county deputy and above (ranks one to nineteen out of twenty-nine civil service ranks). Leading cadres include not only party and government leaders, but also managers and administrators in SOEs) media organizations, universities, and other party-controlled agencies such as the Communist Youth League, the Women’s Federation, and the All China Federation of Commerce and Industry. The party, through its village branches, now also determines the leaders (cun zhuren) of China’s nearly 700,000 villages.Footnote ¹⁶ The party manages its estimated two million leading cadres through its Organization Department, keeping detailed dossiers on all personnel and implementing a system of reward and punishment based on routine performance evaluations.Footnote ¹⁷ Evaluations routinely assess political loyalty and diligence in implementing the party’s agenda.

Dossiers (dang’an) are kept on all personnel and contain a wide range of information, including physical attributes, school reports, supervisors’ appraisals, membership of clubs and organizations, and “political history.” Missteps follow people through their entire careers. The party also maintains control over officials through the powerful Central Discipline Inspection Commission (CDIC). The party’s power to discipline and punish officials whose livelihoods depend on their careers has been a critical pillar of party durability. The CDIC investigates malfeasance and prescribes punishments ranging from expulsion from the party to criminal charges. Punishable infringements include failure to “conform with the party on major principles” (Article 44), “organizing secret groups within the party” (Article 48), “cultivating private power within the party” (Article 49), and “mocking the Party Central Committee’s major directives and policies” (Article 46).Footnote ¹⁸

Perhaps the most devastating weapon in the party’s disciplinary arsenal is the extrajudicial detention system known as liuzhi, which means “retention in custody” but is still commonly referred to by the system’s older, terror-inducing name, shuanggui. Shuanggui means “double designation”: a person must report to a designated place at a designated time after which they will disappear into interrogation for an unspecified amount of time. The main purpose of liuzhi, which is undertaken outside of any judicial process, is to extract confessions and information that implicates other wrongdoers.

Despite the formidable capabilities of the discipline system, which have expanded during the Xi era, informal practices within the party-state have periodically constrained the party’s centralized control of its officials. During the early reform era, the party decentralized its operations as part of its wider effort to stimulate growth and investment. The expansion of markets and private business created conditions in which party and government officials, who controlled land, licenses, and access to finance, could enrich themselves in collusion with the new class of entrepreneurs. Many officials became entrepreneurs themselves, setting up businesses in the names of family members to win government contracts or to invest in lucrative new opportunities that their access to internal information enabled them to identify.Footnote ¹⁹ Corruption became especially rampant during the 1990s and 2000s as China’s economy boomed. As officials became more interested in lining their pockets than serving a higher cause, some in the party started to fret about the threat of corruption to party legitimacy and to the party’s integrity as a governing organization. Throughout Chinese history, runaway corruption has been considered a portent of regime decay.Footnote ²⁰

By the time Xi Jinping came to power, it appeared the party elites had determined that something needed to be done to rein in corruption and rebuild dedication to the party’s cause. Xi Jinping launched an expansive anticorruption campaign in his first term (2012–2017). This was accompanied by expanded party control over disciplinary agencies and increased training and testing requirements for party officials. As Fengming Lu explains in his essay in this volume, “Maoist Sticks and Nationalist Carrots: How the CPC Maintains Party Cohesion in the New Era” (Chapter 7), Xi came to power determined to ensure that party officials took the party organization seriously. Not being corrupt was not enough. Fengming Lu cites an unpublished speech Xi gave to the CPC Central Committee. In it he stated:

The Xi administration has also sought to foster internal cohesion through positive incentives. Xi exhorts cadres to “not forget the [party’s] original aspiration” (buwang chuxin). Cadres are encouraged to rally around the party’s past achievements and harness the spirit of the revolution to achieve greater glories. Ahead of the party’s centenary celebrations in 2021, the CPC promoted “the spiritual genealogy of the Chinese Communists” (Zhongguo gongchandangren jingshen puxi), which, as Fengming Lu notes, covers ninety-one different motivational “spirits” including the “Spirit of the Jiangxi Soviet,”Footnote ²¹ the “Spirit of fighting COVID-19,” and the “Spirit of the women’s volleyball team” – China’s most successful national sports team.Footnote ²² A related concept to “spirit” is “struggle” (douzheng), which, freed from its earlier class connotations, indicates the unified determination party members must possess to fulfill the party’s historical mission. Fengming Lu observes that the “spirit of struggle” or “daring to struggle” is also identified as one of the ninety-one Communist “spirits.”

As noted above, party members are required to speak, write and internalize the “party line.” Although it is difficult to measure the extent to which this succeeds, during the Xi era party members are required to frequently demonstrate their knowledge of and fealty toward party values and priorities. Most of China’s 4.8 million party branches hold meetings twice a week, and attendance is now mandatory. Party schools also provide regular and intensive training sessions for party officials at every level of government.Footnote ²³ The party also fosters cohesion through continuous mobilization of its members via political campaigns in which party officials must work together to achieve political goals such as promoting “socialist core values,” eliminating “black and evil forces,” or struggling against “peaceful evolution.” At a more granular level, party branches organize various activities that promote solidarity and shared purpose. These include “party theme days” (zhuti dangri) at which branch members discuss Xi Jinping’s speeches or watch official documentaries before engaging in community service such as rubbish collection. Such activities are not new, but they have been reinvigorated under Xi Jinping, who has sought to strengthen the party organization and esprit de corps. Alibaba Group, one of China’s largest tech companies, developed an app called “study to strengthen China” (xuexi qiangguo), but the app’s name is a pun that can also be understood to mean “learn from Xi to strengthen China.” The app offers courses on political ideology and access to documentaries on the history of the CPC. A key feature of the app is a weekly quiz on the party and Xi Jinping’s life and thought for which study points can be earned. Party members and students are strongly encouraged to download and use the app.

Within every government agency is a party group or committee, which ensures that decisions, expenditure, and activities are in line with party priorities. In state-owned enterprises, all major business and investment decisions are screened by the enterprise’s internal party branch. The party extends its control beyond the constitutional order by controlling appointments to all key public institutions – universities, trade unions, media enterprises – and party branches within those institutions provide constant oversight. Influenced by Vladimir Lenin’s ideas, the party understands power to flow through social institutions as much as through the constitutional order. The party works to ensure that any person of standing in any organization of significance is either a party member or a reliable ally. Nonparty members with social standing are the responsibility of the United Front Work Department (UFWD), which sits alongside the Organization Department and the Propaganda Department as one of the three departments in the party’s own bureaucracy. Following Mao, Xi Jinping has described the UFWD as one of the party’s “magic weapons” (fabao). The UFWD was established to win the allegiance and cooperation of nonparty groups in society, including the private sector, faith groups, and ethnic minorities. It was instrumental in securing allies, including among minor democratic parties, during the Chinese civil war. Since then, the UFWD has grown to oversee a vast array of organizations and activities designed to promote CPC policies and perspectives.

The internal structure of the UFWD underscores the wide scope of its remit. There are nine bureaus. They cover party work (understanding and communicating party policies), ethnic and religious work, Hong Kong, Macau and overseas Chinese, nonparty cadres (officials), the (private) economic sector, independent (nonparty) intellectuals, and new social class representatives (e.g., entrepreneurs, artists, and celebrities). Tibet and Xinjiang each have their own department. Coordinating with the UFWD is the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Committee, an advisory body that meets every year at the same time as the National People’s Congress. Membership in this prestigious nonexecutive body is offered to nonparty elites such as ethnic and religious leaders, celebrities, entrepreneurs, and nonparty intellectuals to win their allegiance by providing them with recognition and a channel for influence. The UFWD also oversees the All-China Federation of Commerce and Industry, a nonindependent chamber of commerce for large private enterprises.

The UFWD is the party’s agency of political co-optation. That is, the UFWD and its affiliate agencies work with groups (domestically and internationally) considered to be potential allies or sympathizers – people and groups who can be brought around to the party’s way of thinking and aligned with the party’s agenda. Arguably the most important target group for co-optation under China’s business-friendly socialism with Chinese characteristics are entrepreneurs. Once persecuted as “capitalist running dogs” and counterrevolutionaries, private entrepreneurs are formally embraced by the party and allowed to join its ranks. The party encourages China’s “advanced productive forces” to help achieve the party’s nation-building goals, including the centennial goal of making China rich (high-income) and strong by 2049 – the party’s mission in the Xi Jinping era. The party’s relationship with private entrepreneurs is the subject of Minglu Chen’s essay in this volume, “Co-opting the Private Sector” (Chapter 8). Chen’s essay speaks to debates surrounding the “China model,” which challenges the conventional wisdom that democracy is the only ticket to national wealth. The party has successfully overseen decades of economic growth by introducing economic reforms, including market liberalization, while resisting political liberalization. What’s more, the authoritarian system has been strengthened by economic success, securing the approval of a populace that has enjoyed soaring incomes and standards of living. Economic opportunities have kept entrepreneurs on side. Minglu Chen explains that by successfully co-opting business owners, the party has prevented them from becoming a social force advocating for political change. A mutually beneficial and interdependent relationship has developed: business owners depend on the party-state for access to land and capital, and the party-state depends on the success of private business to generate jobs and wealth.

In recent years the Xi administration has shown preferential treatment of SOEs while cracking down on the activities (and profits) of some of the biggest private companies, including globally successful technology companies such as Alibaba, clearly wary of the potential challenge to its monopoly on power by rising tech giants and billionaires. The business community has complained that “the state advances and the private [sector] retreats” (guojin mintui). The party, in turn, has sent clear signals that the private sector is dependent on the country’s political masters. It has demanded that wealthy individuals and firms contribute to “common prosperity,” which is party-speak for reducing income inequality, by making significant donations to charities addressing economic inequality. Critics argue that such actions have populist appeal but do little to alter the structural causes of inequality.Footnote ²⁴ In the meantime, business leaders can only strive to please the party, whose economic model is built on state ownership of land and control of the financial system.

Administrative Capabilities and Policy Responsiveness

The party’s ability to steer the wider economy is the bedrock of its power. Over the decades, the party has shown a capacity to learn and adapt in its management of the economy and oversight of economic institutions, winning accolades, for example, for its handling of the 2008–2009 Global Financial Crisis. As Sarah Eaton and Wendy Leutert explain in their essay “China’s Adaptive State Capitalism and Its International Sources” (Chapter 9), the party has successfully borrowed a great deal from other economic models and policies, notably those of the East Asian tiger economies. The learning and adaptation began in the late 1970s, when party leaders looked to Japan and the World Bank for reform ideas. As Beijing negotiated to join the World Trade Organization in the 1990s, “Chinese leaders’ concerns about intensified competition with foreign firms motivated renewed efforts to build internationally competitive ‘national champions’ – large, central government-owned enterprises in strategic sectors.” Since the 2000s, Chinese policymakers have looked to Singapore, notably its powerful government agency Temasek, as a model for managing state assets and effective corporate governance. The results have been nothing short of astounding. As Eaton and Leutert observe, in 2020 China surpassed the United States for the first time on the Fortune Global 500 annual ranking of the world’s largest firms by revenue. Alongside the 121 American companies on this prestigious list were 124 Chinese firms – 92 of which were state-owned.Footnote ²⁵

Adaptation and learning can also be seen in the party’s increasingly sophisticated approaches to governing. In their essay “Digital Power: Technological Leadership, Smart Governance, and Ideological Control” (Chapter 10), Katja Drinhausen and John Lee argue that the CPC “is building a digitally capable state that is globally competitive in every single aspect – from use of new technologies in domestic governance, to development of digital infrastructure, and fostering innovation and standard setting.” The authors argue that the CPC “is advancing digitalization forcefully” to ensure the party “remain[s] at the vanguard of – and not just responding to – social and political development.”

Successful economic policies have given the party an important new source of legitimacy in the postrevolutionary era. This performance legitimacy has been buttressed by the party’s increasing capacity to develop and implement policies that respond to evolving public demands. As Bingqin Li explains in her essay in this volume, “Social Stability through Responsive Social Policy” (Chapter 11), a key pillar of the party’s strength lies in its capacity to respond to people’s material, social, and environmental needs. Li notes that the “people’s livelihoods policy” (minsheng zhengce) occupies the lion’s share of each year’s government work report by the State Council. Her chapter highlights the party’s responsiveness to public opinion, noting that each General Secretary of the CPC since Mao has publicly cited the Confucian philosopher Xunzi’s aphorism: “The ruler is like a boat and the people like water. Water can support a boat and also capsize it.” This observation reminds us of party leaders’ sensitivity to history, including the imperial concept of the mandate of heaven, which rulers lose if they fail to serve the people with sufficient benevolence.

Coercion

The party is concerned with public opinion and seeks approval. But it also cracks down harshly on dissent and on individuals and groups that cannot be easily co-opted or appeased because they seek policy change that the party is unwilling to make. In the spring of 1989, students began protesting against corruption and cost of living pressures that were by-products of the early years of market reforms. The protests began drawing in workers, intellectuals, artists, and other citizens who were equally anxious about the country’s direction. Protests spread to hundreds of cities, morphing into large-scale prodemocracy protests that directly challenged the party’s monopoly of political power for the first time since 1949. The party ultimately responded with force, declaring martial law on May 20 and infamously deploying the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), which the party controls, to extinguish the protests in and around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3 and the morning of June 4. There are no accurate figures on the number of resulting deaths. Estimates ranging from several hundred to more than 2,000 are based on first-hand accounts by journalists and diplomats.Footnote ²⁶

The student protests of 1989 were arguably the only existential external threat the party has faced in its more than seven decades in power. Following the crackdown, the party tightened its domestic political security to ensure that future protests did not snowball into threats to the party’s grip on power. The party now oversees an extensive domestic security apparatus, which includes the People’s Armed Police, political security units within the police force, and agents within the Ministry of State Security. Other administrative structures further serve the party’s goal of “stability maintenance” (weiwen) and maintaining its own political security. These include dedicated party committees at different levels of the system and grid management practices which task community members with monitoring and reporting on citizens’ activities.Footnote ²⁷

In the decades since Tiananmen, the party has learned to accommodate localized protests that allow people to let off steam while ensuring that protests do not become a coordinated movement. In 1999, when adherents of the Falun Gong spiritual movement assembled en masse in Beijing to protest the group’s treatment, authorities cracked down harshly, forming a dedicated security agency (Office 610) to identify, surveil, punish, and reeducate practitioners. When protesters emerged in multiple cities in the autumn of 2022 to oppose the harsh lockdowns under China’s Zero-COVID policy, police initially allowed them to vent their frustrations. However, when protester demands turned political, with some calling for Xi Jinping to step down, the crackdown was swift. Some protesters quoted from the banners hung by Peng Lihua on Sitong Bridge in Beijing on October 13. One banner called for an end to lockdowns, and another called for elections and replacement of the current leadership.Footnote ²⁸ Many protesters held aloft blank sheets of paper to signify their lack of voice and political censorship, lending the protests – the largest since 1989 – the popular moniker “A4 protests.”

Despite their scale and intensity across multiple cities, the A4 or “white paper” protests were easily suppressed by the party’s security apparatus, with many alleged ringleaders arrested.Footnote ²⁹ Protesters or dissenters such as Peng Lihua who demand greater political, cultural, or religious freedom, or who promote narratives that contradict the party’s, typically receive harsh sentences, which serve as a warning to others.

In Xinjiang and in Mongolian and Tibetan areas where local populations have sometimes opposed party rule, including violently in the case of some fringe groups in Xinjiang, the party has responded with some of its harshest measures of surveillance and control. Xinjiang became the focus of an increasingly intensive crackdown following street protests in 2009. The crackdown was further intensified from 2014 following deadly terrorist attacks by Uyghur militants, including a bombing at Urumqi Railway Station while Xi Jinping was visiting the region and a knife attack at Kunming Railway Station.Footnote ³⁰ From that time, the party pivoted from a counterterror approach targeting militants to a broad-based crackdown on what party leaders perceived to be the root of the problem: Islamic fundamentalism and ethnic nationalism.Footnote ³¹ Heeding Xi Jinping’s call for more aggressive action, party bosses in Xinjiang began outlawing a wide range of Islamic practices including the wearing of headscarves and giving babies Islamic names. The policies were designed to extinguish ethnic consciousness (minzu yishi). Local authorities greatly expanded electronic and physical surveillance of the population. They also began rounding up Uyghurs deemed insufficiently loyal to the party’s “socialist core values” and subjecting them to forced detention. By some estimates, between one and two million Uyghurs were sent to detention camps for varying periods to undertake “political (re)education” and various types of vocational training designed to raise levels of Uyghur participation in the Han-dominated socialist market economy, presumably to foster integration and conformity but under conditions some have described as slave labor.Footnote ³²

Reeducation camps are an old party tool used to discipline and punish. Until the practice was abandoned in 2013, “reeducation through labor” (laogai) was routinely used to punish a wide range of dissenters and “deviants” from Falun Gong practitioners to drug users. In their final year of operation, there were an estimated 350 such “camps” across China.Footnote ³³ Those in Xinjiang were not formally classified as laogai camps, and, for a time, the party denied their existence.

In her chapter on “Dealing with Dissent” (Chapter 12), Anna Hayes notes that “a key source of CPC power has been its ability to manage or eliminate any form of dissent, and to weaken, co-opt, or destroy any organization or individual who does not express or demonstrate loyalty to the party above all else.” Hayes notes the party’s preference for co-option over coercion, though the party is ready to coerce whenever that’s deemed necessary, whether dealing with human rights lawyers, feminists, or ethnic minorities. As Drinhausen and Lee note in their earlier chapter, the party-state has dramatically enhanced its surveillance and monitoring capabilities. Anna Hayes picks up on this discussion to explain how the party’s digital surveillance capabilities empower it to identify and stifle potential dissent – what she calls “preemptive policing.” Hayes situates the new technological capability within historical narratives and practices, including before the party came to power and in the early years of the People’s Republic, to remind us that digital technology is a new tool deployed in the service of old practices and institutions. We are reminded that technologies merely augment the party’s powerful ability to surveil, which still relies heavily on human labor, including domestic security agencies and networks of informants within communities, schools, universities, enterprises, and online.Footnote ³⁴

Although the PLA has been less involved in domestic affairs in recent decades, it remains a potent pillar supporting the party’s monopoly of political power. As Mao Zedong famously said, “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” In China, the army belongs to the party, not the state. Historically, many party leaders were also PLA leaders, and the organizations have been joined at the hip since the early revolutionary years. Every military unit has a party branch, and each level of command has a political commissar who is a trained party cadre. In his chapter in this volume, “The Party and the Army” (Chapter 13), Ji You explains the intricacies of the relationship between the CPC and the PLA, and how the PLA emerged as a powerful force, loyal to the party but immune to civilian oversight. The institutional arrangements are a result of Maoist design: the Politburo would manage the country’s political affairs and the Central Military Commission (CMC) its military affairs. Since the CMC was comprised of professional soldiers and enjoyed an equal status to the Politburo, over time the PLA became a relatively autonomous institution. According to Ji You, PLA autonomy reached its zenith under the administration of Hu Jintao (2002–2012). Ji You notes that since coming to power, Xi Jinping has exerted more control over the CMC and PLA and has stacked the ranks of top brass with his loyalists. Significantly, for the first time in PRC history, senior military personnel have become the targets of anticorruption probes. The most famous case was CMC vice chairman and Politburo member General Xu Caihou, who was charged with corruption, court-martialed, and jailed in 2014. His crime was selling promotions – a widespread practice that reformers considered a major obstacle to the modernization of the military. Ji You asserts that Xi Jinping put the PLA under firmer control but asks to what extent this is a product of Xi’s personalization of power rather than a solution to the fragmented nature of political and military power in China.

The Future of One-Party Rule

Xi Jinping’s personalization of power has raised new questions about the future of one-party rule in China. From the 1980s through the 2000s, the party was led more collectively, with the party’s top bosses serving as first among equals in the Standing Committee of the Politburo and sensitive to the views of retired party elders. This development was in part a response to the excesses of the Maoist era and the calamities that resulted from Mao Zedong’s domination of the party. Xi Jinping has bolstered the role of the CPC within the state and across China’s economy and society, but he has also used a stronger party organization to channel power toward him at the top of the party pyramid. He has methodically removed potential rivals and their supporters from within party ranks, including at lower levels. Such rivalry among the elite might have caused instability at different times (and the party formally forbids factionalism), but the existence of rival elite-linked networks served as a means of regulating political competition within the party and contributed to the consensual model of decision-making which underpinned political stability during more recent times.Footnote ³⁵ Having eliminated rivals and persuaded the party to abandon term limits for the office of secretary-general, Xi has set himself to rule indefinitely, or at least until he decides to step down. As a result, personal loyalty to Xi has become the most important criterion for elevation to top party, government, and SOE posts, and the Chinese political system is orienting itself around the top leader’s preferences. Xi’s unsparing and interminable anticorruption campaign, which has targeted individuals and networks of suspect loyalty as well as straightforwardly venal officials, has caused widespread anxiety across the system. As local officials worry about the changing rules of the game, “bureaucratic slack” has set in: The dynamism which drove local officials to grow their local economies in recent decades has dissipated as they become more risk averse.Footnote ³⁶ A concentration of power risks limiting the information and feedback available to party leaders, as officials scramble to comply with directives and tell the boss what he wants to hear.Footnote ³⁷ During the Great Leap Forward, the CPC leadership followed Mao off a cliff, after the brave General Peng Dehuai was purged for daring to voice concerns. With power concentrated in the hands of one man, such a calamity could happen again.

A major pitfall of a system which allows power to concentrate in the top leader, causing the entire system to orient itself around the top leader, is the risk of instability and conflict in the event the leader dies or becomes incapacitated. It is very often the failure to solve the problem of leadership succession that brings authoritarian regimes unstuck. As Jude Blanchette and Richard McGregor note in their essay in this volume, “After Xi” (Chapter 14), under Xi, the party has abandoned the consensus model for leadership succession. Blanchette and McGregor argue persuasively that although Xi has stacked party, government, military, and domestic security agencies with his loyalists, this is now such a large group of people that differences in interests and ideas are likely to coalesce into competing groups. It is far from clear that the party has the mechanisms in place to manage a smooth transition from Xi Jinping to his successor, whenever that should need to occur. Equally troubling, the party clearly lacks the mechanisms to constrain its leader and is unwilling to allow nonparty or even state institutions to provide such a check. As Xi Jinping approaches the end of his third five-year term (2022–2027), his party remains firmly in command and its monopoly on political power in the PRC appears unassailable. At the same time, the limits of one-party rule are becoming ever-more apparent.