Nomination as a decisive step: leadership suggestion, elite “fermentation,” and preview election

The core process of the election starts from the nomination of candidates. As earlier studies of the electoral system of the Soviet Union have found, “nomination is, in effect, the decisive phase of elections in the Soviet Union,” and “the election is, in effect, decided at nomination time.”Footnote ⁵² The CCP electoral system shares this Soviet feature, but it is not a copy of the Soviet system; it has its own institutional characteristics, including those in the nomination mechanism. This process, particularly in the form that was adopted at the Party Congress, is a highly centralized one in which individual voters rarely have an opportunity to nominate a candidate for the position of delegate, member of the CC, or member of any other leadership body, though they may be entitled to do so. The voters will obtain the opportunity, however, to discuss and comment on the candidates nominated by the incumbent leadership, which very much helps to create a “democratic” atmosphere in which delegates often feel, or are expected to feel, that they have been included in deciding the nominees. Keeping the balance between the actual leadership dominance over the election outcomes and the psychological satisfaction of the delegates in their participation is the niche of the politics of the institutional operation of China's Party Congress, including the elections which take place on this occasion. The nomination process is a critical step for both the leadership's control of elections and the creation of the democratic illusion among delegates; it is an especially intricate and devious part of the Maoist electoral system. Roughly speaking, this process goes through three major phases: the original initiation of candidates, voters’ deliberations, and the formalization of the candidate slate through preview elections. The investigation below presents a historical study of how the nomination practice went on at the Party Congresses in Mao's era, sketching a general process of candidate nomination along with some empirical details.

Historically speaking, nomination of the new CC was the big challenge to the 7th Party Congress elections, partially because the previous norms in which the Comintern dominated nominations were now a part of history,Footnote ⁵³ and partially, also relationally, because Mao and his leadership needed bottom-up legitimization to unite the fragmented “mountaintops” within the CCP.Footnote ⁵⁴ Claimed by the official Party history as “the first instance of democratic elections,”Footnote ⁵⁵ the 7th Party Congress successfully developed its nomination institutions to meet the challenges posed by the necessity for the mixed elements of delegate participation and leadership domination.

In practice, it was the Congress Presidium, which consisted of the Party's major leaders, rather than average delegates, who initiated the nominations of the next CC. While the Party Congress adjourned its meeting for six days (May 16–20, 1945),Footnote ⁵⁶ the Presidium held a joint meeting with directors of all delegations on May 17 to discuss electoral matters, primarily how many members the next CC should have and how to nominate them. The discussed options for nomination methods included: by the Presidium, by directors of delegations, or by a small group meeting within a delegation. In the end, the latter two did not become an option,Footnote ⁵⁷ as the meeting decided to appoint Ren Bishi, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Peng Zhen, and Li Fuchun to compose an “informal” committee to initiate, in consultation with delegation directors and on behalf of the Presidium, a full list of primary candidates.Footnote ⁵⁸ Four notes should be made here: first, the possibility that individual delegates nominate candidates was not considered an option from the outset. Second, all delegation directors, as examined in Chapter 3, were high-ranking Party leaders, and they were not democratically elected by their delegations; their accountability, therefore, was to the Party's incumbent leadership rather than to delegates and the Party Congress. Third, the five persons who composed the “informal” committee included three of the five members of the incumbent top leadership (the two who did not join the committee were Mao Zedong and Zhu De, as both at the time usually were not involved in daily administration), thus the committee can be viewed as the existing leadership's ad hoc task force on electoral matters. But, fourth, the Committee was said to be “informal,” which seems to have been a tactic or guise to avoid the impression that delegates might get regarding the leadership's domination of the nomination process.

Information about how this committee made nominations is unavailable. What we know is that, according to Zhou Enlai's later explanation to the Congress of the Election Code (xuanju fa), the Presidium suggested a list of primary candidates numbering one-third more than the CC seats, without differentiation between full and alternative members.Footnote ⁵⁹ The list was then sent to all delegations for delegates’ discussions, or, in CCP jargon, yunniang, a term literally meaning something similar to “fermentation.” At this point the electoral process comes to a crucial phase: to follow the metaphor, yunniang works as a chemical process in brewing or winemaking to convert sugar into alcohol,Footnote ⁶⁰ and it is, of course, a most crucial stage in determining the quality of the product in brewing or winemaking. It is no less significant for CCP elections, as it serves a similarly crucial function of transferring voters’ individual, “immature” predilections for candidates to the qualified voting preferences that are in accordance with the leadership's intentions. In other words, such discussions within this process of fermentation cultivate delegates’ support for the nominees that the Party leadership has suggested.

In brewing, the fermentation is often a mysterious process; in the medieval period, the brewing monks, having very limited knowledge of its effects, regarded fermentation as “a form of divine intervention that they called ‘God-is-Good’.”Footnote ⁶¹ At the 7th Party Congress such “divine intervention” did occur, as, before the delegates received the candidate list, Mao Zedong delivered an important speech to the Congress on the guidelines of the elections of the 7th CC, which this chapter has discussed. God was good; the fermentation went well, taking the form of small-group discussion (not discussion on the scale of a delegation), which an official CCP history views as a process with a “high degree of democracy.”Footnote ⁶² Indeed there are scattered records of dissident opinions having been uttered against individual candidates during delegate discussions, of which three examples will be examined below for the purpose of looking at how such a democratic discussion worked in the electoral process.

A well-known example is delegate Tao Zhu's opposition of Chen Boda as a candidate on the CC slate, which he openly expressed at a group discussion.Footnote ⁶³ Tao was known as an outspoken person; in such a scenario this might mean that those delegates who were not so brave, either by personality or by political caution, would choose not to follow suit. Anyway, Chen was kept as a candidate, and was successfully elected to the CC, which caused the surprise and admiration of many in Yan'an as Chen's seniority within the CCP was supposed to make him unqualified for the position. His election also made his close connection with Mao Zedong well known.Footnote ⁶⁴ That, of course, meant that Tao's opposition did not work at the 7th Party Congress, but the story does not end with this election. It stretches into the early years of the Cultural Revolution, when Chen was at the peak of power; the historical feud forced Tao to pay a price for his democratic articulation by suffering persecution until he died in miserable conditions.Footnote ⁶⁵ This example helps to indicate the difficulty, as well as the futility, at the 7th Party Congress of choosing to criticize a CC nominee who had been suggested by the Congress Presidium, let alone attempting to question the slate or make a different nomination.

Another case occurred with Bo Yibo, who was nominated a CC alternative member, but opposed by Chen Geng, a veteran CCP military leader. Mao Zedong, however, responded to Chen's discontent by suggesting that Bo be elected a CC full member. Then Mao's instruction was passed to all delegations prior to the elections, thus Bo “was smoothly elected” into the CC as one of the youngest of the full members.Footnote ⁶⁶ Bo himself, in memoirs in his latter years, comments that “this reflected Chairman Mao's way of making use of personnel,” but he does not explain what the “way” is. For this researcher, Bo's unusually close relationship with Liu Shaoqi explains Mao's response, as Liu was the most important political ally for Mao's domination of the 7th Party Congress.

There was an instance in which a delegate's opinion did work, in which Wu Xiuquan during the “fermentation” expressed his opposition to the nomination of Kai Feng to the CC, because Kai “obstinately resisted the decisions of the Zunyi conference.” Then, according to Wu's recollection, it was “sure enough” that Kai would be dropped from the list.Footnote ⁶⁷ Why “sure enough”? Because Kai was a major political ally of Wang Ming, and in his case delegates’ opinions might provide a good excuse to the Mao leadership to kick him out of the new CC. There is no available evidence to explain why Kai was initially nominated, but a reasonable speculation is the Mao leadership's consideration of showing off the unity of the Party and, as is later discussed in the case of Mao's campaigning for Wang Ming, of pleasing Moscow. The nomination of Kai, therefore, might have been a charade, as the leadership had been “sure enough” that such a nomination would be in vain but would pay off in a double way: displaying the leadership's political generosity, while giving delegates an opportunity to utter oppositional opinions.

In any case, all the above examples helped to enhance the democratic image of the 7th Party Congress, as at that time the delegates did not want to ask why delegates’ criticisms of Mao's political allies were unable to work in a similar way to Kai Feng's case in affecting the CC nominations. In general, “fermentation” does help to increase the delegates’ feeling of being involved in the nomination process, and, as emphasized earlier, this feeling of being involved in choosing the leadership buttresses the leadership's legitimacy. On the other hand, delegates to the National Congress are, without exception, experienced Party members who have already been well trained to accept the Party's decisions when the Party leadership deems it necessary, thus nobody would question Mao's message when he commented on the “fermentation” in concluding this phase of elections, in which he emphasized that elections were not an individual's business and that delegates must take the general interests of the whole (Party) into consideration (guquan daju).Footnote ⁶⁸ Therefore controlled participation took place via the process of “fermentation,” and the well-trained delegates simply appreciated the opportunity of such participation.

The most significant procedure for the nomination process, following the delegates’ fermentation, is the preview elections, or yuxuan, literally “preparatory elections.” Yuxuan is somehow similar to the primary election, but it is not the primary election of a democratic electoral system. The primary election under a democracy decides upon the tickets of the candidates, but yuxuan in the CCP electoral system, in terms of procedure, does not finalize the candidate slate. It is the Congress Presidium that has the discretionary decision-making power to determine, based on the preview election outcomes, the formal candidates for the final CC election. The preview election, however, is still very important for serving two significant functions: it serves as the final filter before the final candidates are decided; it also, on the other hand, provides an institutional occasion for voters to be formally involved in the process of deciding the final candidates – as the final, formal election will be conducted without choices among candidate (which will be discussed blow), this occasion can do much to further satisfy the voters’ desire to participate.

The preview election is an important institutional innovation of the 7th Party Congress and, in general, of the Maoist electoral system.Footnote ⁶⁹ In his report on electoral guidelines, Mao explicitly told delegates, “Today the election code will be adopted, of which the first clause regulates that there will be two rounds of candidate slates being nominated. The first round is for the preview election, and the second round, the formal election.”Footnote ⁷⁰ During the interval period between the two rounds, the leadership is able to do something to further persuade voters to accept the plan tailored by the leadership in the case of the fermentation having not yet convinced all delegates to tow the leadership's line, because in the preview election some delegates may dare to oppose an official nominee. In CCP electoral jargon this kind of persuasion is termed zuo gongzuo, or “doing work,” which will be investigated later in a discussion of “electoral campaigning.”

The preview election of the 7th CC took place on June 5, 1945, around which several puzzles revolve. First of all, it was held during the time when the Party Congress was announced as being in adjournment for a week from June 2 to 8.Footnote ⁷¹ Why and how was the preview election conducted during such an “adjourned” period? There is no original information or historical study to explain this mystery, though it can be speculated that such an announced “adjournment” might have helped to overthrow the outcome of the preview election (as it could have been declared illegitimate) if that outcome had not fit well with the leadership's plan. The second feature of the 7th Party Congress preview election is that it was organized by delegation unit.Footnote ⁷² In other words, a delegate attended a meeting of his or her delegation, rather than a congress assembly of all delegates, to cast ballots to elect the CC primary candidates – not CC members, and not even the formal candidates yet. Why did the Congress not hold an assembly to conduct this apparently important preview election? As revealed in Chapter 3, control of a delegation meeting is much easier than that of the Congress assembly. In addition, in the case of the 7th Party Congress, the announced adjournment of the Congress may also have been a strategic move to legitimize the preview election being taken at the delegation level rather than the assembly level, because the Congress, during adjournment, could not call for an assembly. Third, the preview election's ratio between candidates and the elected is unclear. A safe conclusion is that the preview election of the 7th Party Congress was an election with a number of candidates equal to that of the elected, because official studies of the Party Congress explicitly state that it was the 13th Party Congress in 1987 that for the first time in CCP history adopted the electoral method of having more candidates than elected postsFootnote ⁷³ – This issue of the candidate–post ratio will be emphatically investigated in a later section.

After collecting the preview election outcomes from all delegations, the Congress Presidium made the final decision on the formal candidates.Footnote ⁷⁴ Details of this decision-making process are not clear, but available information indicates that the Presidium did not simply endorse the preview electoral outcomes. Rather, it made “necessary adjustments” against the delegates’ collective decisions via the preview election.Footnote ⁷⁵ At the 7th Party Congress, the preview election was expected to name forty-five “formal candidates” for CC full membership and twenty-five for alternative membership, but the Congress Presidium eventually decided on a list of forty-four candidates for CC full membership and thirty-five for alternative.Footnote ⁷⁶ A CCP-sponsored study clearly states that the Presidium adjusted the list of alternative-member candidates that the preview election had selected, the adjustments including the listing of Wang Jiaxiang as the number one candidate, and the addition of several new candidates who had not been on the preview election slate.Footnote ⁷⁷ Such moves further reveal the incumbent leadership's discretion towards nominations and the emptiness of fermentation and even the preview election.

The 8th Party Congress, states an official history of the CCP, adopted a new method of nomination “for the first time in the Party's history,” which included the delegates freely nominating candidates without quotas, at which point these nominations “came together to make the general list” (huizong mingdan), and “repeated fermentations and discussions” were conducted through “several bottom-up and top-down rounds” (ji shang ji xia) before the preview elections.Footnote ⁷⁸ These official statements help confirm that the previous 7th Party Congress did not adopt the method of nomination by delegates, but did the CC nomination at the 8th Party Congress really follow such procedures? According to the suggestions made by the incumbent CC concerning the election of the next CC, it was still the incumbent Politburo and the heads of delegations to the 8th Party Congress who were responsible for deciding upon the CC candidate list for the preview election, after which the formal list should be decided by the Congress Presidium.Footnote ⁷⁹ The delegations did get the opportunity to make up their nomination lists, according to this official document;Footnote ⁸⁰ however, in reality the nomination of CC members had started much earlier, before the Congress delegations came to Beijing for the Party Congress meeting. Available data disclose that the incumbent Politburo decided on July 30, 1956, to set up a committee, composed of twenty high-ranking leaders, with Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping as heads, to be in charge of the elections of the 8th CC.Footnote ⁸¹ The committee was responsible for proposing the methods of Congress elections, the new organizational structure of the next central leadership, and the CC candidate list.Footnote ⁸² As the Party Congress did not open even its preparatory meeting until August 30 (the formal meeting started on September 15), this implies that the committee was not authorized by the Congress, and that, before the Congress delegations had had the opportunity to suggest CC nominees, the committee had already initiated its list. According to the official biography of Chen Yun, as the first convener of this committee Chen “did much research and preparation in proposing a proper list of the 8th CC candidates.”Footnote ⁸³ On August 22, when Mao Zedong told the high-ranking cadres that at the forthcoming Party Congress the CC nomination would start with delegations’ suggestions, and that the Party Center would not propose a list,Footnote ⁸⁴ he apparently lied by feigning ignorance of the already existing Chen–Deng Committee and its work on the candidate list.

What sets the 8th Party Congress apart in terms of procedure from all other Congress meetings is that it twice held the preview elections of the CC. On September 12, during its preparatory meeting, the Congress conducted the preview elections over the nomination list suggested by the incumbent CC; it later held the second preview elections at its formal meeting on September 24.Footnote ⁸⁵ The difference was that in the first preview elections the delegates were allowed to choose 170 persons from among a list of names that was greater than this number (the exact number of “candidates” is not clear), but in the second round they could choose 170 from among only 170Footnote ⁸⁶ – even a CCP-sponsored study thinks that this is a shortcoming of the second preview elections.Footnote ⁸⁷ Why such an arrangement? No answer is provided in any official source, but it can be speculated that the second preview elections were designed to plaster over the procedural flaw that the first preview election had been conducted prior to the Party Congress formally starting, but the first one, with its margin for delegates’ options in elections, could help to make the process seemingly democratic. We have already learnt such a trick from the experience of the 7th Party Congress, which held the preview elections during the adjournment of the conference; the logic is the same here: the first preview elections could be declared illegitimate if its collective choices did not meet the leadership's plan. Therefore the principle of the design is clear: when the delegates have some limited freedom to choose leaders, they actually do it on a not-so-legitimate occasion; when the perfect legitimate opportunity emerges, they have no choice in the elections. The subtlety, furthermore, lies in the combination of the two-in-one process, for the purpose of actualizing both leadership control and participatory legitimization.

The 9th, 10th, and 11th Party Congresses continued the Maoist electoral system with a process of nomination more centralized than those adopted by the 7th and 8th Party Congresses, in which the leaders’ suggestions overwhelmed other norms such as fermentation to directly decide who entered the CC. For example, on April 24, 1969, Zhou Enlai informed Li Zhen and Yu Sang, at the time respectively the number two and number three leaders of the Public Security Ministry, that the forthcoming 9th Party Congress “planned” to elect them to the CC, and disclosed to them some information about their nominations. It is said that Mao and Zhou intended to include a veteran police head in the CC, and that Zhou thus consulted with Kang Sheng on Yu Sang's properness (as Li Zhen came to the ministry from the PLA during the Cultural Revolution and, accordingly, he would be nominated to the CC by the PLA) and Kang agreed. Public Security Minister Xie Fuzhi (who became a Politburo member at the Party Congress) then commented that it was enough for Yu to become a CC alternative member, but Mao responded, “why not a full member?” Therefore Yu was elected.Footnote ⁸⁸ In addition, Wang Dongxing recollects that Wang himself recommended Yu to Zhou as a candidate to the CC,Footnote ⁸⁹ which connects the nomination process to an earlier stage at which Zhou collected initial recommendations from various leaders. In 1973 a music composer from Shanghai named Yu Huiyong was elected to the 10th CC as a “representative of the outstanding revolutionary ‘soldiers’ of literature and art.” His gratitude went to Jiang Qing,Footnote ⁹⁰ the “banner-holder” of the revolution who nominated Yu to the CC.Footnote ⁹¹

Such anecdotes also help to reveal a fundamental concern of the leaders in their nomination of CC members, which is to keep the CC in a complicated balance among different groups within the Party elite. In both Yu Sang and Yu Huiyong's cases (they are not relatives), different vocational backgrounds are taken into consideration for the sake of making the CC as widely representative as possible of the spectrum of social groups that the Party leadership views as important to its strong future. A similar principle is carried beyond vocational or social divisions but into historical, regional, and other differentiations. It also reflects the politics among the leadership, because in the CCP's power structure the leaders have their individual responsibilities to oversee (fenguan) differing matters, professions, regions, and spheres, and a leader in charge of a given aspect has the privilege of nominating the candidates from his or her sphere(s) of influence. That is why Wang Dongxing dared to recommend Yu Sang and why Zhou Enlai consulted with Kang Sheng on Yu's nomination, as Wang was a veteran in the Party's security affairs and Kang was the leader who oversaw this aspect of the Party's course for an extensive period.Footnote ⁹² Also, a method called daimao, literately “cap-wearing,” which can roughly be understood as earmarked nomination, is often used to send specific persons to the CC to represent specific groups, as Yu Huiyong's example demonstrates. In doing so, the leadership proposes qualification requirements for a candidate in such specificity that often no one except the leadership's favorite choice would be able to meet the requirements.

This incorporation of various sections is often viewed as being “democratic” in CCP politics, but, as a leading comparative political scientist insightfully points out in a non-CCP context, it explains the “appeal of leaders who present themselves as ‘above parties’, and of all-party or grand coalition,”Footnote ⁹³ which actually excludes political competition, as competition, “regardless of who wins, disrupts unity and consensus, and the idea that one solution can be good for everyone.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Mao presented himself as such a leader above factions, competitions, and struggles, especially when he came to celebrate his victory on the occasion of the Party Congress, and it was only he who was able to speak on behalf of the entire Party. This partially explains Mao's campaigns for Wang Ming's election to the CC, at both the 7th and 8th Party Congresses, a story we will examine next. In any sense, such nominations and their assured acceptance by voters make elections meaningless except in their function to symbolically legitimize the leaders’ choices.

Campaigning prohibited, campaigning promoted: the leadership's zuo gongzuo for specific candidates

The CCP electoral system does not allow candidates to campaign; it regards the individual, autonomous moves a candidate may take, without the organization's authorization, to try in any form of activity to win voters’ support as “de-organizational activities” (fei zuzhi huodong). For a Leninist party, “the organization,” vaguely referring to any organizational form within the Party or the Party as a whole, is unchallengeable, thus being “de-organizational” is major political wrongdoing. This does not mean that there are no measures to promote candidates, however; the leadership as the organizer of elections has the legitimate right to promote, from the top down, specific candidates. In the sense of persuading voters to cast their ballots for a specific candidate, such promotions are a kind of election campaign, a campaign conducted by the authority in charge of elections rather than by individual candidates. More importantly, it is not for the purpose of creating competition between candidates, but for making voters accept the leadership's intention to send specific persons to the elected posts. Technically, such a campaign does not usually run through the entire process of elections; it mainly takes place at a specific stage of the electoral process, most often during “fermentation” and the interval between the preview and the formal elections.

The preview election, besides its roles discussed above, is also designed to provide the leadership with a valuable opportunity to probe the delegates’ voting preferences, thus allowing time and space for the leadership to “campaign” for any unpopular candidates on the official slate (usually not for the leaders themselves). If the leadership senses anything from the outcome of the preview election that might lead the final election to stray from its expected outcome, campaigns are conducted to convince the delegates who have, in the “fermentation” and in the preview election, disclosed their dissident preferences against certain candidates to accept the leadership's nomination of these candidates in the final, formal election. In the CCP's dictionary of election terms, this is not called “campaigning” but zuo gongzuo, literally “doing work.”

Zuo gongzuo is sometimes included as a method or a round of yunniang (fermentation), but there are chronological and mechanical differences: yunniang is usually organized as the constituency's discussion at the initial stage after the leadership's nomination of candidates comes to voters’ hands, thus involving the constituency in general and covering all candidates; by contrast, zuo gongzuo often takes place at the stage following the preview elections, after which two specific targets become clear: the target candidate for promotion who is unpopular in “fermentation” and has perhaps lost the preview election, and the target delegates who have drawn attention to themselves through their expression of dissident opinions against the target candidate in “fermentation” and of voting preferences via the preview elections. Even more important is a political difference: though both yunniang and zuo gongzuo share the same goal of cultivating delegates’ acceptance of the leadership's nomination of candidates, yunniang provides an opportunity for bottom-up feedback in which the expression of voters’ preferences, including discontent, is encouraged; zuo gongzuo, however, means to “work” on those voters who have demonstrated their discontent in the preview elections until they change their voting preferences in the final election to obey to the leadership's will.

Mao Zedong's campaign at the 7th Party Congress for Wang Jiaxiang is a typical case in which the Party leadership openly persuaded the Congress delegates to vote for a specific candidate. It did not take place between the preview and formal elections, but between the formal elections of the CC full members and of the CC alternative members. It is reported that Mao felt pity for Wang's failure to be elected a CC full member, and therefore decided to “talk about comrade Wang Jiaxiang's credit.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Immediately prior to the final voting for CC alternative members, Mao delivered a speech, of which he devoted about three-quarters to highlighting Wang's contributions to the Party's courses, and on behalf of the Congress Presidium urged that “everybody vote for him.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Meanwhile, the Presidium relisted all candidates for alternative members by positioning Wang first on the slate. The result was Wang's election with the second-highest ballot count.Footnote ⁹⁷

Mao also campaigned for Wang Ming and Bo Gu in the 7th Party Congress election of CC full members, both being the major targets of the Yan'an Rectification campaign prior to the Party Congress and then being viewed as the leaders who took responsibility for the Party's setbacks in the mid-1930s. According to a CCP-sponsored study, many delegates voted for Wang simply because of the Party Center's “mobilization” and zuo gongzuo, while they explicitly expressed their opposition to electing Wang into the CC.Footnote ⁹⁸ Why such self-contradiction in their voting behavior? They said they simply followed Chairman Mao's instruction to, in some delegates’ words, “cast the ballot for Wang with pain.”Footnote ⁹⁹ A similar situation was repeated at the 8th Party Congress, when Mao again campaigned for those leaders who had made mistakes, including Wang Ming and Li Lisan.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ On both occasions Wang was elected, though with the second-lowest ballot count at the 7th Party Congress, and with the lowest at the 8th. This clearly indicates how effectively the leadership's campaigning can influence delegates’ voting behavior, even when it goes against these delegates’ own preferences.

For the later sessions of the Party Congress under Mao's domination, Mao adopted other ways to campaign for those younger leaders he favored in order to reduce the uncertainty of their being elected to the CC. For example, when Li Desheng, a junior PLA general who gained Mao's favor with his governance of Anhui Province, was invited to observe (liexi) the last plenary of the incumbent CC in preparation for the 9th Party Congress, Mao asked him to stand up and, in front of all CC members and other high-ranking leaders, had a chat with him for some time regarding Li's age, hometown, and experience.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Biographers of Li maintain that this was a rare scenario at such a meeting,Footnote ¹⁰² and that it surprised the cadres who attended the meeting and made them curious about this PLA general.Footnote ¹⁰³ The impact is not difficult to imagine: Li became well known among the elite as a pick by Mao and subsequently was elected to the CC and the Politburo. Another designated new Politburo member, Ji Dengkui, also gained the good graces of Mao in front of all delegates to the 9th Party Congress, as Mao looked for him at a delegate assembly and then introduced him to the delegates as “my long-time friend.” Delegates responded with enthusiastic applause.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Ji was even more junior than Li, but he was also elected to the leadership with a high ballot count.

Mao's campaign for Wang Hongwen at the 10th Party Congress was exceptionally powerful in “helicoptering” this thirty-eight-year-old local cadre to number three leader of the Party, junior only to Mao and Zhou Enlai. According to Xu Jingxian, Wang's colleague in the Shanghai leadership during the Cultural Revolution, when the Party elite met in May 1975 to discuss the preparation of the 10th Party Congress, Zhou Enlai announced that Chairman Mao had suggested transferring Wang from Shanghai to the center to join the work of the Politburo, and that Mao had proposed that Wang be in charge of the Party Charter amendment for the forthcoming Party Congress. This made Xu and other CC members sense immediately and clearly Mao's intention to promote Wang.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ When the next meeting was held on August 20, also in preparation for the Party Congress, Zhou announced Mao's new decision that Wang chair the Election Preparation Committee, with Zhou and other senior leaders, including Mao's wife Jiang Qing, as Wang's deputies, then Zhou abdicated to let Wang chair the ongoing meeting. The 104 participants, who included incumbent CC members and provincial leaders, in Xu's recollection, undoubtedly received Mao's message: Wang was chosen to be Mao's heir.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Mao's final act took place at the last assembly of the 10th Party Congress on August 28, at which the election of the new CC was scheduled. Mao did not attend the assembly, but Zhou, who chaired the assembly, announced that “Chairman Mao has asked for leave; Chairman Mao has authorized comrade Wang Hongwen to vote on his behalf to elect the members and alternative members to the 10th CC.” “Without any explanation,” Xu recalled in his memoir, “this made it extremely clear to all 1,294 delegates to the 10th Party Congress in their minds that Wang Hongwen was the person Mao trusted the most, and that Chairman Mao has chosen Wang to be his successor.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Wang was, of course, elected to the CC, then as its vice chairman.

In such cases, the Great Leader's willingness to promote a candidate could overcome any possible discontent and resistance from delegates. As recorded by Xu, such resistance did occur at a Politburo meeting prior to the 10th Party Congress in deciding the preview election slate of vice chairmen, as the meeting fell into silence when Wang's nomination was announced. Ye Jianying broke the silence by citing Mao's recommendation to emphasize the promotion of new blood; then the slate was adopted.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ This demonstrates that the leadership's campaign can be vital in sending controversial candidates to power.

It seems to have been Mao's privilege alone to promote a CC candidate in such a direct and dramatic way, however. For other top leaders, zuo gongzuo through the organizational network has been, and still is, the conventional norm in influencing voters’ final preferences. At the 11th Party Congress, for example, when the Presidium met on August 16, 1977, Deng Xiaoping spoke about the CC candidate slate, urging all leaders to “do work” to promote the slate. To quote Deng,

Apparently there is a self-contradiction in Deng's speech: though he still remembers the right that delegates possess to utter disagreement, his point is clearly focused on the agreement of the candidate slate and the request is for leaders to zuo gongzuo in order to persuade delegates to accept this agreement. This hypocrisy is typical of the CCP electoral system: as a voter you may, via “fermentation” or even your vote in the preview election, express your discontent with a specific candidate, but the organization will “work” on you to implement the leadership's election plan.

Such “work” will not end until you are persuaded to vote in accordance with the leadership's preference. This is one of the reasons why CCP elections have no publicly committed timetable and no openly announced date of voting. The flexibility gives leeway to the leadership that administers an election to discretionally prolong the time frame in which yunniang, or fermentation, and zuo gongzuo, or persuasion, are conducted, until it has ensured that its “intention of election” (xuanju yitu) has been well understood and well accepted. In one sentence, until every voter is ready to vote for the official slate, the voting will not be held.

Voting without choices: the formalistic casting of the ballot in the lens of “confirmative legitimacy”

When the final, formal election comes to the stage, the task, institutionally speaking, becomes simple. All final and formal elections at all sessions of the Party Congress, from the 7th to the latest, the 18th, have adopted the method of deng-e xuanju: literally, elections with equal numbers of candidates and posts. Namely, after the Presidium has finalized the candidate slate in consultation with the outcome of the preview elections, the formal elections are conducted with no competition whatsoever among candidates, and the delegates have virtually no choices to make between the candidates when they eventually gain their opportunity to cast their ballots for the election of the national leadership committees.Footnote ¹¹⁰ For instance, the 8th Party Congress, claimed to be the “most democratic,”Footnote ¹¹¹ held the formal election of CC full members on September 26, 1956, for which the delegates were allowed to elect ninety-seven CC members from among ninety-seven candidates; when the election of the alternative members was conducted the next day, delegates were able to choose seventy-three favored persons from among seventy-three candidates.Footnote ¹¹² The description by a 10th CC member in fact applies to all formal elections of Mao's Party Congress: “As to the final elections at the 10th Party Congress, which were only a routine process, they resulted in all candidates being elected without question.”Footnote ¹¹³

This method is so apparently undemocratic that even after almost fifty years, one (at least) delegate to the 7th Party Congress, in his recollections, still registered his mild feeling of discontent in 1945 at finding that elections were conducted without more candidates than posts.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Thousands of delegates during and since this time, however, have not raised, at least not openly raised, a question about this electoral rule.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In this sense, elections have been totally simplified to become a small, physical action: casting that piece of paper called a ballot into the ballot box.

More often than not, however, a voter in an election does not even vote by ballot; instead, show of hands is used to vote. Early Party Congresses sometimes elected the central leadership by show of hands, but the Party Congresses since the 7th have made progress in always adopting the ballot in the final elections of the CC.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Show of hands, however, is still kept as a way of voting in some elections at the Party Congress, such as those of the Presidium, and for non-personnel decisions, such as those concerning political resolutions.Footnote ¹¹⁷ When a ballot applies, furthermore, it is not necessarily in the form of a “secret ballot.” Due to the shortage of available information, it is not clear how ballot writing took place during every Party Congress in Mao's era. What we do know is that at the 7th Party Congress a delegate was requested to circle those candidates he or she favored, and to write the names of any who were not on the ticket but were favored by the delegate in the reserved blank column.Footnote ¹¹⁸ But this has changed since the 9th Party Congress; as recalled by Xu Jingxian, Mao then suggested a way of ballot writing by which a delegate did nothing if he or she favored the slate, but only wrote a cross against the candidate whom he or she disfavored.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Thus at the 10th Party Congress, when Wang Hongwen was authorized by Mao to vote on his behalf, Wang did not need to actually write on the ballot (meaning that Mao favored all candidates, including himself) but simply came over to Mao's seat, picked up the ballot, in Xu's description “in two hands with great respect,” then “slowly walked to the ballot box.” Everybody in the hall watched him attentively, then applauded vehemently when he cast the ballot into the boxFootnote ¹²⁰ – the process is apparently, and even dramatically, ceremonial.

There is nothing in these elections like a polling booth, thus a voter has to write a ticket under their peers’ observation. A delegate has disclosed, and it is confirmed by Xu's statement cited above, that, as the voters were requested to make crosses against those names they disfavored while doing nothing if they supported the entire slate, those who took up their pens during ballot writing could easily be spotted by peer delegates or by conference staff. If any significant “accident” took place in terms of the election outcome straying from the leadership's expectation, it would be easy to discover the culprit who had made trouble for the election.Footnote ¹²¹ This continued at the post-Mao Party Congresses until the 16th Party Congress in 2002 adopted an electronic system of voting and ballot counting.Footnote ¹²²

Concerning the ballot count, the 7th Party Congress counted the ballots by delegation unit, while there was a ballot examiner group at work,Footnote ¹²³ and the later Party Congresses elected ballot examiners by show of hands to adopt the list suggested by the Congress Presidium.Footnote ¹²⁴ One information source discloses that the 7th Party Congress Presidium also participated in the ballot examiner group's final check of the ballot count.Footnote ¹²⁵ Many delegates still remember Mao Zedong's presence at the site of the ballot count at the 7th Party Congress, and Mao's special concern over the ballot count gained by Wang Ming.Footnote ¹²⁶ Some justify Mao's move as a show of the Great Leader's kind consideration of Wang's situation in particular and of electoral outcomes in general; such justifications seemingly imply, however, that they felt a kind of improperness in Mao's behavior. Regardless, the concept of fairness seems absent in the process.

Now the Party Congress comes to the point of celebrating the success of the elections in having realized the “intentions of the elections” – meaning that the electoral process and the outcomes have been achieved in terms of meeting the leadership's intentions. Anything out of sync with the leadership's plan is termed xuanju shigu, or “electoral accident,” literally the same word as in “car accident,” which especially refers to an outcome that does not fall in line with the leadership's goal. It can take place in more than one way, sometimes affecting not the electoral outcomes themselves in the sense of the designated leaders being elected or not, but rather the ballot counts that are received by the elected leaders, which can be an issue particularly when they involve prominent figures. In the election at the Provincial Party Congress of Sichuan July 1956, for example, Li Jingquan, the Provincial Party Committee's first secretary, failed to gain a full ballot count, but rather was shy by eight. Of course he was re-elected, but he was so angry over the missing eight votes that he responded in a number of ways, including spending two more days after the Congress in a meeting of middle-level cadres for the purpose of “making them adopt a correct attitude toward this significant incident,” and instructing the public security forces to carry out a secret investigation to identify those who had not voted for him. Technologies such as fingerprint dactyloscopy were applied to check both the ballots cast and some suspected delegates.Footnote ¹²⁷

Such a scenario can also occur at the National Party Congress, such as at the 9th, when Mao's wife Jiang Qing gained 1,502 ballots in the formal CC election, eight shy of the 1,510 total delegates participating the election.Footnote ¹²⁸ Jiang was outraged, and her political allies urged the Party Center to conduct an investigation. Zhang Chunqiao suggested that some delegates “made mischief” to deliberately humiliate Jiang, and that those who dared not to vote for Jiang “were definitely not small-potato delegates (xiao daibiao) but big ones (da daibiao).”Footnote ¹²⁹ Only after Mao responded by saying, “They may make such an investigation of the election problems, but I will not join anybody in violating the Party Charter,” did the crisis pass without further incident.Footnote ¹³⁰ However, at least one Chinese historian attributes the Mao–Lin split after the 9th Party Congress to this electoral incident, and maintains that due to Lin and his protégés voting against Jiang, Mao lost his trust in Lin and later took action which would eventually result in the split.Footnote ¹³¹

Despite his claimed respect of the Party Charter in Jiang's case, Mao himself once did a similar thing to Sichuan Party Secretary Li, though not in regard to the elections taking place at the Party Congress, but rather on an occasion to appoint the chairman of the Central Government when the PRC came to be established. Mao was the single nominee for the position, and he won 575 ballots of the total of 576.Footnote ¹³² Generally it was thought that, due to modesty, Mao had not voted for himself, but Mao knew that among those who applauded his victory and glory there was one who dared to disfavor him.Footnote ¹³³ While commenting that he did not care about the shortage of one ballot and that “anyone (of the voters) has the right to disfavor Mao Zedong,” he was secretly determined to single out who his enemy was and to exercise punishment. It is not clear how the investigation was conducted, but Zhang Dongsun was fingered as the enemy, and he fell into misery in later years (though the charge was something other than his 1949 vote).Footnote ¹³⁴

The stories related above reveal several points that deserve further discussion. First, although delegates are constitutionally allowed to oppose any candidate in an election, it is valuable to estimate the serious consequences of doing so – not the consequences it could have on the electoral outcome, but on a voter's own career and political life if he or she cast an unfavorable ballot. Second, experienced Party members have certainly learnt from history, and the negative responses from leaders such as Li and Jiang (if not Mao, since he did not openly express his real anger) would further scare off delegates from opposing any prominent figures nominated by the Party organization. And third, the Party Charter is, by virtue, a set of empty words, but leaders may cite it to support their own decisions whenever they feel it necessary, and such a citation will immediately finish a debate as nobody would openly challenge the legitimacy of the Party Charter, despite the fact that they may do so in practice.

The most significant point, however, is about “confirmative legitimacy.” Fundamentally different from democratic elections which furnish political legitimacy through competition and participation, or “participatory legitimacy,” as discussed in Chapter 2, China's Party Congress elections create “confirmative legitimacy,” which is accomplished by their ceremonial execution with as many favorable votes as possible. The turnout is also important, of course, but this is not an issue for the Party Congress, as delegates would not choose to be absent from voting for the CC except in a very few extreme cases (such as Dong Biwu's absence from the 7th Party Congress due to his trip to San Francisco for the inauguration of the United NationsFootnote ¹³⁵). CCP elections do not worry about the turnout; instead, they are much more concerned by the margin of votes won by a prominent candidate, even when the margin is far from affecting such a candidate's being elected or not. “Confirmative legitimacy” explains such a concern, and reveals the essence of elections as the ritual of transferring power to authority rather than as a competition to empower the winner. The dictator does not represent the majority of an organization or society; he or she is supposed to represent all and everybody in the organization or society. Elections must confirm this with votes, otherwise the elections are viewed as problematic or even as being a challenge to such legitimacy.

For contemporary authoritarianism, which is often not manifested in the form of personal dictatorship but in some form of collective leadership, this issue can become even more complicated and politically sensitive. Within the same leadership, other authoritarian leaders should also win a kind of “confirmative legitimacy,” but they must not enjoy a degree of this confirmative legitimacy equal to that of their Great Leader. Lin Biao understood this game, as evidenced by his and his wife Ye Qun's ballots against Lin himself in the 9th CC election; thus Lin was, according to Lin's lieutenant Qiu Huizuo, elected two shy of the total ballot, not at an equal level with Mao, who gained a full ballot in the election.Footnote ¹³⁶ Lin might have learnt from the experience of Liu Shaoqi, who at the 7th Party Congress gained the full 543 votes when he was elected to the CC, the same number gained by Mao.Footnote ¹³⁷ It seems that at the 8th Party Congress Liu again gained the full ballot count that Mao did in the CC election.Footnote ¹³⁸ There is no direct evidence supporting the argument that Mao was unhappy with Liu's high electoral performance, but it is a historical fact that, after Liu was purged, something changed in the publication of ballot counts and the order of CC full members. The 7th and 8th Party Congresses listed the elected CC members (both full and alternative, but on separate lists) in the order of the ballot counts they gained; the 9th to 11th Party Congresses instead listed the members in order of their last names; while for the 9th CC Mao and Lin Biao were prominently listed before the entire list. Mao alone continued this privilege for the 10th, and Hua Guofeng for the 11th.Footnote ¹³⁹ The Party Congresses since the 9th (until today) have chosen not to publicize anything concerning the CC full members’ ballot counts, though one delegate to the 9th Party Congress recalls that the ballot counts received by each elected person were announced at the Congress meeting.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ This is echoed in the latest, 18th, Party Congress, at which, a delegate discloses, the ballot counts received by CC members were announced at the site of the election, and Xi Jinping, the designated Party chief who would become general secretary at the new CC's first plenary, received a full ballot.Footnote ¹⁴¹

An almost humorous story about Wang Baidan further highlights the attention that the delegates may give to the ballot counts the CC members receive. As an ordinary steelworker from Qiqiha'er, Heilongjiang Province, Wang was elected a full member of the 9th CC, winning 100 percent of the delegate ballot, the only one besides Mao Zedong to enjoy such full support. It is revealed as a “law” that, first, in such predetermined elections the less well known a candidate is, the higher percentage of ballots he or she might win,Footnote ¹⁴² because the delegates would not show their disfavor to a candidate they do not really know as long as this person has been put on the slate by the Central leadership (those national leaders, especially Mao, were of course exceptions to this “law”). Needless to say, this tendency of voters to favor strangers on the official slate well indicates the delegates’ blind trust of the incumbent leadership. The second practical “law” is in regard to a candidate's choice whether or not to vote for him- or herself, a tricky and often troublesome issue in such authoritarian, elite elections. In a large-scale popular election, whether democratic or not,Footnote ¹⁴³ it is very unlikely for a candidate to win 100 percent of the ballot, and a candidate voting for him- or herself seems natural and is, of course, legitimate. However, the situation is different in an election without choice and within a small circle, as in the Party Congress elections of the CC. Without competition, there is the theoretical possibility that all candidates could win 100 percent of support from all voters; this never happens in reality, however, because interpersonal relationships among the elite are never simple, smooth, or mutually friendly. Furthermore, it would also make trouble for the top leaders in terms of “confirmative legitimacy” if other, lower-level leaders equally enjoyed such full support from the voters. It thus becomes a tricky issue as the electoral outcomes then ought to be finely controlled not only in terms of sending all those on the slate to be elected but also in terms of the ballots’ politically correct distribution among the various candidates. In practice it may be not such a difficult issue because the bottom line is clear; in Mao's era, it had to be guaranteed that Mao Zedong win 100 percent support from every voter, while other leaders’ rates of support could be left to voters’ random decisions. To this end, Mao himself did discuss the issue of the self-favorite ballot with the delegates to the 7th Party Congress. Mao agreed with such behavior, and openly declared that he always voted for himself.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ One could interpret Mao in the sense that the Chairman is reminding you not to vote for yourself, because you know you are not Chairman Mao. However, Liu Shaoqi did not understand Mao in this way, and as a consequence Liu also gained a full ballot, including his own. In contrast, at the 9th Party Congress, Lin Biao took a different strategy, as discussed earlier. As a newcomer to CCP elite politics, Wang Baidan had not learnt these hidden norms as such, thus he voted for himself; as everyone else also voted for him, due both to the delegates’ blind trust in the official nominations and to Wang's being virtually a stranger in the game (thus no personal enemies yet within the circle), he equaled Mao by winning a full ballot. Not surprisingly, it did not gain him glory; it is reported that whispers immediately prevailed at the meeting hall after Wang's full-ballot election was announced.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Unfortunately, due to the pronunciation of his name, which could be quite strange and nasty, the new CC member quickly became a joke amongst the delegates;Footnote ¹⁴⁶ some delegates scorned him to his face by saying “you're an idiot – how can you be more popular than Vice Chairman Lin!”Footnote ¹⁴⁷

There is evidence that the leadership directly managed the distribution of ballots in the 9th CC elections concerning some prominent candidates. A study discloses that Zhu De, Chen Yun, and some other “old revolutionaries” (read: targets of the Cultural Revolution) gained “extremely low ballot counts,” slightly more than 50 percent, thereby electing them while simultaneously highlighting their unpopularity.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ In retrospect, this coincided with the lowest ballot count Bo Gu received in the 7th Party Congress's election of the CC, which was 50.64 percent.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ In the case of the 9th Party Congress, Xu Jingxian recalled that Mao had instructed that “these old comrades must be elected to the CC with assurance.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Qiu Huizuo divulges that Mao's instruction emphasized two goals: to guarantee these persons’ being elected, but to not let them gain high ballots. Qiu also explains some operational details on how to achieve these goals: Zhou Enlai had individual conversations with many delegates, and told the delegation heads to be meticulous in implementing the plan, to the degree that those delegates who would vote either for or against the candidates must be clearly and individually identified prior to the election. In the morning, before the formal election was held in the afternoon, Zhou again called for a small meeting to ask whether the outcomes would “be certain” and instructed some military leaders, including Qiu, to do the final round of “work.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ It might be bold to generalize that such operations existed for all sessions of the Party Congress during Mao's era, but it is clear that the ballot counts that the leaders receive in elections are not only an important issue but also one that is important enough to be subject to the leadership's manipulation.

Post-voting measures that may undo electoral outcomes

The CCP electoral process is not finished after the ballots are cast, collected, and counted; it extends to a post-voting phase, during which what can be termed “post-voting arrangement of elections” may work to the degree of undoing the electoral outcome. These arrangements usually include the ratification or approval of the electoral outcome by higher-level authorities; the political, ideological, and organizational training of newly elected cadres; and some administrative and political moves to invalidate the power and responsibilities of the elected leaders. These measures further reduce any possible autonomy expressed by the voters in elections; they empower the leadership with the final discretion to intervene and decide the electoral outcome when it is deemed necessary.

In the CCP electoral system the outcome of an election is subject to “sanction,” or official ratification by a higher-level authority. This usually applies to local-level rather than national-level elections, as there is no higher-level authority for the national leadership; thus the Congress elections of the central leadership, by nature, have no such procedure. Informal approval, however, in the form of the incumbent leadership's acceptance or recognition of an electoral outcome, can still be critical, as exemplified in Mao's attitude toward Jiang Qing's discontent with the 9th CC election. The almost perfect operation during Mao's era of all the electoral institutions discussed above was often effective enough to prevent any severe “accidents” from becoming reality, thus it was not necessary for the top leadership to be forced to accept, or to have to refuse to accept, electoral outcomes it had not expected to see. Post-voting interference in this regard was simply reserved as a last resort to which the leadership might turn in case the electoral outcome did not fully match its blueprint.

Political and ideological training of the elected cadres should also be viewed as interference in the electoral outcome, because it is the leadership, rather than the constituency, that sponsors and organizes such training for its political convenience. This arrangement was also put into place in 1945 after the 7th Party Congress, and continued thereafter. For example, following the 10th Party Congress, Mao instructed that “study classes” be organized to train CC members; each class at the time lasted for three months.Footnote ¹⁵²

During their elected terms, leaders in China can be transferred by higher-level authorities to other posts without authorization from the organizations that elected them; this frequently happened in Mao's era. For lower-level leaders in such cases, job transfer is often used by higher-level authorities as an effective way to interfere and change an electoral outcome.Footnote ¹⁵³ This does not apply to the CC members elected by the Party Congress, but it is still relevant to the CC when a cadre under job transfer is a CC member. A Party cadre is elected to the CC often due to his or her affiliation to the post he or she occupies when the election is held; the post transfer thus breaks this connection. In such circumstances the cadre always keeps his or her CC membership, despite the connection being broken. In this sense, the electoral outcome is, at the very least, not respected. It is actually naive to talk of such a concept as “respect” in Maoist politics in regard to electoral outcomes, as political purges frequently happened to cadres despite whether or not they had taken their positions by election. From the viewpoint of institutional analysis, purging is also interference in electoral outcomes, and often a most powerful factor, through which CC members can easily be removed from posts and even become enemies of the Party during their elected terms.

Opposite to those measures which negatively intervene in the electoral outcome after voting, there is another side of CCP institutions that reduces and changes the impact of elections positively; being “positive,” so to speak, means the elected leader's staying in office beyond the elected term. Mao's era was notorious for the absence of term limits and the persistence of leaders’ life tenure, which obviously undid outcomes of elections.

Maoist elections are far more institutionally sophisticated and politically significant than those early CCP elections, but it would be misleading to exaggerate a discontinuity of the principle around which the CCP electoral system was first constructed. In fact, the political spirit remains the same, which is to employ elections in the form of ballots cast by voters to endorse, not to choose, the candidates for the leadership organizations. In other words, voting as an empty, formalistic, and wholly symbolic action has always been the essence of CCP elections, pointedly excluding candidate competition and voters’ autonomous participation. Nevertheless, Maoist institution-building in the congressional elections has focused on the design of procedures and their implementation for the purpose of making such noncompetitive elections the unquestionable reconfirmation of the existing leadership's legitimacy while boosting voters’ perception of the significance of their involvement in endorsing the leadership. In terms of historical change, Maoist efforts in this regard can be described as the institutionalization and sophistication of the earlier practice of formalistic elections. From an institutional and political point of view, the latter is achieved with significant, yet subtle, innovations for the purpose of increasing the certainty of this reconfirmation while simultaneously fabricating and displaying the “democratic” atmosphere of elections in order to provide a more convincing legitimization. That is why, despite Party historians’ emphasis on the CC elections at the 7th Party Congress as being “the most democratic in the Party's history,”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Mao commented that the elections were more democratic than all previous elections in the Party's history but that they were also “highly centralized.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵

Dictatorial victories with an electoral democratic veneer are not easy to achieve, however. As the Party's historians point out, “In the institutional building of the intra-Party electoral system, the 7th Party Congress made a significant breakthrough.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The investigations above have confirmed that the 7th Party Congress provided the major institutional test bed for such a system, developing a series of institutions to make elections a part of such semiotic performance and the principal tool of ritual inauguration of power and legitimacy. The elections at subsequent Party Congresses during Mao's reign continued the institutions and practices of the 7th Party Congress, with two contradictory elements embedded in the electoral system, namely its “democratic” appearance and its “centralized” essence. Working together to shape the CCP electoral system, intrinsic tensions could sometimes develop to the degree that, depending on the political factors at work in given historical circumstances, the system went in divergent directions in different elections: some were influenced by a growing attempt to add a more “democratic” flavor to the process, such as, in some ways, the 8th Party Congress in 1956; others were overwhelmed by further achievements in the “centralization” of electoral conduct, which applied to most cases, including the 9th, 10th and, after Mao's death, the 11th Party Congresses.

Changes of institutional detail in practicing congressional elections accordingly occurred during Mao's reign, as did the formalistic significance of elections in Maoist politics. In Mao's initial years of gaining congressional endorsement of power and authority, especially at the 7th Party Congress, elections provided a legitimate mechanism to distribute prestigious positions and, to a lesser degree, to distribute power among the Party elite belonging to different “mountaintops” that had developed within the CCP due to factors such as cadres’ different training backgrounds and divided base-area experiences. It helped to smooth and strengthen acceptance of the top leadership's decisions on personnel arrangements and political programs by these different, often informal, groups. Once Mao's authority and power reached their zenith through the Cultural Revolution, the political demand for congressional legitimization declined, and Party Congress sessions held at the time thus paid much less attention to “democratic” decoration, going so far as to exclude relevant norms and procedures while often directly controlling the conduct of elections.

Such changes, however, concern only the degree of sophistication, while manipulation remains the crux of the electoral system. In general, the subtle mechanism of electoral manipulation and the political endorsement of the leadership are mutually supportive in CCP congressional elections. Hidden manipulations work to absorb and reduce voters’ possible autonomy and to channel their “participation” towards accepting and confirming the leadership's preferences; these formalistic “democratic” measures are institutionally designed and practiced to facilitate the manipulation of elections. Over the years, the Maoist electoral system was institutionalized, consolidated, and further centralized for the purpose of minimizing any possible room for bottom-up expression of interests leading to voters’ autonomy and discretion in elections.

Institutionalization in post-Mao Party Congress elections and its limits

The most visible change of Party Congress elections during the post-Mao era has been the regularization of the electoral schedule. The irregularity and infrequency of the Party Congress meetings and the corresponding elections has become part of history since the 1980s; the Party Congress now meets every five years and, accordingly, conducts elections on the same regular basis, though non-congressional changes of leadership still take place sometimes. In contrast to Mao, whose's charismatic legitimacy gave him room to delay Congress elections, post-Mao leaders have increasingly needed these congressional endorsements of their legitimacy and authority; the regularization and frequency of congressional elections have helped in this regard, which might indicate a positive connection between weak leaders and the regularization of Congress elections. This regularization, however, has not so far reached the degree of fixed meeting dates, rather than years, being programmed and stipulated by legal documents, as Chapter 3 discussed. Here it should be emphasized that such a flaw in institutionalization can have significant implications for Congress elections, because, as everybody knows, in leadership politics, particularly during a sensitive time of leadership change, the length of a day may allow much political maneuvering to be conducted to profoundly alter voters’ preferences.

The number of seats of the leadership bodies has also not been institutionalized, leaving space for political manipulation. Take the Politburo Standing Committee as an example: as Table 6.1 shows, there has been no norm in this regard since the 12th Party Congress; it is not pre-planned regulation but rather power struggles and political considerations within the given context of a Party Congress session that determine how many people should compose this supreme decision-making body. Accordingly, pre-congressional discussions of specific candidates to fill positions are always interwoven with decisions of how many seats to set up. Procedural and substantial issues are scrambled together in the political process; when a specific person wins or loses in the battles concerning personnel arrangements, the number of seats which he or she has been designated to occupy becomes debatable. As decisions in this regard are left to political negotiations on a case-by-case basis, when there is no paramount leader like Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping it becomes a new arena of power struggle.

Furthermore, no reform or institutionalization has been initiated or implemented concerning case-by-case guidelines in the post-Mao electoral system of the Party Congress. Yes, electoral laws are made for some other elections, including village elections and elections of People's Congress representatives at various levels, but no legal documents or lasting regulative procedures have been made for intra-CCP elections in general, nor for those surrounding the Party Congress in particular. For example, the 12th Party Congress adopted its own “electoral methods” on September 8, 1982,Footnote ¹⁵⁷ and the CC elections followed immediately.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The 13th Party Congress continued the practice, making its own “electoral methods,”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ and the CC elections also immediately followed the adoption of the document.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Similar documents for those later meetings of the Party Congress are not available to the public, but strong evidence has confirmed the issuing of ad hoc guidelines for the election of Congress delegates. In sum, preparation for Party Congress elections in the post-Mao era basically followed the Maoist approach, with the exception of the regularization of the frequency of Party Congress meetings and elections.

For the nomination mechanism, the principle remains the same as that during the Mao era, which is to implement top-down domination rather than bottom-up expression of voters’ autonomous preferences. As before, the nominations of CC members (and higher-level leaders) are monopolized by the incumbent top leadership through its control and management of the Central Organizational Department; there are virtually no nominations from congressional delegates. But now that a dictator like Mao no longer exists among the top leaders, the decline of the real (let alone nominal) number one leader's authority has been observable. When the paramount leader Deng Xiaoping was alive, the dual leadership structure featuring a division between front-stage leaders and the back-seat old revolutionaries often left Party chiefs Hu Yaobang, Zhao Ziyang, and, until early 1997, Jiang Zemin with little power in the CC nominations, but the old guards, such as Deng, Chen Yun, Li Xiannian, and a few others, were more influential.Footnote ¹⁶¹ In the post-Deng era, collective bargaining has become a norm for CC nominations, with the top leadership often being described as a corporate board at which leaders exercise their power according to their different shares, though it is a secret to an outsider of this small collective who has the more or the fewer shares and how they negotiate with each other.Footnote ¹⁶²

Relevant historical documents reveal some activities of the top leaders in arranging the new leadership as the Party Congress agenda has been prepared. For example, when preparing for the 13th Party Congress, Deng frequently met other leaders to discuss “personnel work” (renshi gongzuo) or “personnel arrangements” (renshi anpai), with the earliest of such meetings dated February 4, 1987, almost nine months prior to the Party Congress meeting.Footnote ¹⁶³ In some of these informal meetings, Deng gave explicit instructions about how to organize the next CC,Footnote ¹⁶⁴ though there is no concrete information concerning the nominations of specific persons. In a similar vein, Chen Yun was also very active in meeting other leaders in the period from January to October 1987, the months just leading up to the 13th Party Congress.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Although there is no direct evidence to confirm that all such meetings were about personnel issues in general and CC nominations in particular, common sense leads to the conclusion that, at such a critical stage in the preparation of the next Party Congress, personnel arrangements were, at the very least, one of the most important topics during these frequent conversations. In addition, leaders like Deng also utilized meetings with foreign visitors to express the leadership's political views, including opinions on personnel issues, which helps to confirm that during such a period their central concern was the organization of the next CC and higher-level leadership. For example, on October 16, 1987, Deng told a German politician who came to visit China that the next leadership would be an arrangement for ten years into the future, rather than five,Footnote ¹⁶⁶ totally ignoring two facts: such a decision should be made, constitutionally, by the Party Congress; and the constitutional term of a central leadership was five years.

Senior leaders like Deng and Chen were, of course, greatly concerned about the composition of the next Politburo and the PSC rather than the CC; in fact they decided upon the composition of the Politburo and the Secretariat.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ But those designated Politburo members would have to first enter the CC, thus the paramount leaders’ domination of the nominations of Politburo members can be viewed as part of their enormous influence over the CC nominations. They are equally powerful in the nominations of other central leadership organizations such as the Central Advisory Committee and the Central Military Commission.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ For example, on the eve of the 13th Party Congress, Deng approved Yu Qiuli's request to be removed from the candidate lists for both CC and Politburo membership, but nominated Yu as a member of the Advisory Committee's Standing Committee.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ When the 14th Party Congress was held in 1992, it was still Deng, now without any official position, who suggested to the Party Center the composition of the next Central Military Commission.Footnote ¹⁷⁰

These leaders, after all, were able to dismiss the Party chief without congressional action; equally they could appoint the new Party chief without calling for a meeting of the Party Congress or the CC plenary. Such changes took place three times within a decade: Hua Guofeng, Hu Yaobang, and Zhao Ziyang, as Party chiefs with congressional blessing, were forced to step down on non-congressional occasions in 1981, 1987, and 1989 respectively. In Zhao's case, after he had been elected general secretary of the Party for only about one and a half years, on May 20, 1989 Deng Xiaoping called an informal meeting with senior leaders and PSC members to propose Jiang Zemin to replace him.Footnote ¹⁷¹ It is worth mentioning that Song Ping was not a PSC member yet but he was included in the meeting; one month later Song was elected to the PSC by the CC, which might mean that on May 20 at the latest Song had already been nominated to the position. According to Li Peng, Jiang Zemin insisted that, instead of being directly appointed by such an informal meeting, he be elected general secretary by the CC via a plenary, and this is the reason for the gap of time between these new nominees, including Jiang and Song (as well as Li Ruihuan), coming to office in late May and their being legitimately elected in late June.Footnote ¹⁷² Li Peng also discloses that in this round of reorganization of the PSC, Deng preferred that the plenary be held after the PLA had gained control of Beijing,Footnote ¹⁷³ another piece of evidence supporting this book's central argument that power overwhelms legitimacy in CCP politics, while legitimacy is simply a show to ritualize power.

As leaders like Deng enjoyed the ultimate power to dominate the Party leadership, above even the Party Congress, it was, of course, easy for them to nominate leaders and have them accepted by the Party Congress. They often consulted the veterans on more specific nominations, particularly those nominations relevant to a veteran's “sphere of influence.” For the 12th Party Congress, it was Yang Shangkun who initially put together the composition of the Central Military Commission, but it was Deng alone who made the final decision, while also instructing Yang “to ask the opinions of the Three Marshalls, Chen, Li, and Zhao.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ What deserves mention is that Deng's decision was made on September 10, 1982; on September 12 the relevant elections were conducted to endorse Deng's list, leaving little time for the delegates, numbering over a thousand, to carry out such things as “fermentation” and discussion.

To avoid frontline leaders and formal decision-making procedures, the Central Group on Personnel (Zhongyang renshi xiaozu, or CGP) was usually organized during the preparation for the next Party Congress. Retired or half-retired Party veterans could be appointed to such an informal group, while the formal Party leaders were often excluded. Such a group was empowered, with no constitutional base, to handle concrete matters regarding the nominations of the next CC members and to organize the relevant background investigation of the possible nominees. When the 13th Party Congress was in preparation, the political atmosphere was, at that point, in favor of the old guards due to the antibourgeois liberalization campaign and the stepping down of reform-minded Party chief Hu Yaobang;Footnote ¹⁷⁵ the composition of the CGP thus well reflected this advantage gained by the older generation, as members included Yang Shangkun, Bo Yibo, Yao Yilin, Wang Zhen, Song Renqiong, Wu Xiuquan, and Gao YangFootnote ¹⁷⁶ – all were revolutionary veterans while not a single member came with a reform background, and none sat in the existing PSC. Bo Yibo was in charge of the investigation of the candidates to the CC, and as early as March 1987, about six months before the Party Congress met, the CGP completed its report on the results of the investigation;Footnote ¹⁷⁷ this indicates that the nomination slate had virtually been decided upon by this time rather than during the Party Congress. In an earlier case at the 12th Party Congress, according to Zeng Zhi, then a deputy minister in the Central Organization Department, she joined an ad hoc team to undertake these investigations of Congress delegates and the nominees for the CC; her thinking that such investigations were extremely serious and handled with great care helps to confirm that the nomination of CC candidates taking place at the Party Congress meeting is simply formalistic.Footnote ¹⁷⁸

As always, nomination of CC candidates by delegates or by CC members of higher rank rarely occurred, and, in the case that anyone dared make such a suggestion, currently available data indicate that none was accepted by the top leaders. For example, when the first plenary of the 12th CC discussed Politburo candidates, the PLA group suggested adding Zhang Aiping to the nomination list, and Party chief Hu Yaobang agreed. But Hu had to ask for Deng Xiaoping's instructions; he got the answer “no,” and the explanation was, “better that the list stay without change.”Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Yunniang, or fermentation, therefore, rarely influences nomination, because the candidate list and background investigations have already been made, and, as revealed by Deng's response concerning Zhang Aiping, the leaders at this time preferred “no change” to the list. But fermentation continues to play a significant role in creating consensus among voters, or, more exactly, in convincing voters to accept the leadership's consensus about candidates. In fact, it has become even more significant as the process has now become longer by extending to the preparation stage of the Party Congress, as investigation of the electoral processes of the 17th and 18th Party Congresses will later show in some detail.

The preview election remains a critical step in finalizing the candidate slate, but a major reform has appeared in the preview election: it now adopts a method of election in which the number of candidates is greater than the elected posts, or cha-e xuanju, as opposed to deng-e xuanju in which there is no difference between the number of candidates and the number of those elected. It seems that between the preview and the final elections zuo gongzuo no longer prevails as it did during Mao's era, probably because of its obvious contradiction of the preview election's adoption of a multiple-candidate competition. But the spirit of double-targeted persuasion continues and is implemented in new ways, which will be investigated in the next subsection, together with the introduction of cha-e xuanju.

In terms of the technical method of voting, a cast ballot is utilized in the preview and formal elections of the CC, as well as for other important leadership elections, while, as official documents or Xinhua reports have confirmed, show of hands is still widely adopted in voting on resolutions, procedural issues, and some equally critical decision-making. Taking some of the latest examples, it is disclosed that the 15th, 16th, and the 17th Party Congresses all adopted show of hands to decide upon the Congress Presidium, the Congress Committee of Delegate Qualification Examination, the Congress Secretariat, the Congress agenda, the resolution on the incumbent CC's report, and other resolutions. The Congress Presidium also went the way of show of hands to make decisions on, for example, the composition of the Presidium Standing Committee, the preliminary list of the CC candidates (which is for delegates’ discussion and fermentation), the final candidate slate (which is decided upon after the preview election and for the purpose of formal election), and the other candidate slates.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ In addition, and especially relevant to the Congress elections of the CC and other central leadership committees, hand-clapping is also adopted as a way of voting, usually for delegates’ agreement with the list of ballot examiners, which is proposed by the Congress Presidium.Footnote ¹⁸¹

The post-Mao electoral system has witnessed some major reforms and changes in the “post-voting arrangements,” primarily including a great reduction in the number of political purges and the establishment of institutions concerning cadres’ retirement. Still, some leaders have been elected to significant positions, including three Party chiefs (as discussed above), and a number of Politburo and Secretariat members and some CC members have been disgraced from power without the constituency's agreement or a re-election, but a diminishing curve of frequency and intensity in this regard can be observed from the Mao era through the latest period. Such a change, though resulting in growing institutionalization, is not driven by any respect for the electoral results or for the Party Congress, but is mainly due to the evolution of political dynamics within the power elite.

At the same time, the introduction of cadre retirement means the termination of life tenure,Footnote ¹⁸² which yields rather complicated implications to the post-Mao electoral system. First, it imposes various age limits on the candidates for positions at different levels of the party-state hierarchy. For example, after an evolution of many years, for CC members the current age ceiling for nomination is set at sixty-three years; for members of the Politburo and the Central Secretariat, sixty-seven.Footnote ¹⁸³ Second, it seems that CC members and those above them, after being elected, can complete their elected term despite having reached and surpassed the age ceiling during the term, but lower-level elected leaders, such as the members of a provincial Party committee, have to retire during the elected term once they have reached the age ceiling of their post, which is sixty years for the cadres at and below the deputy provincial level, and sixty-five for those equivalent to a provincial Party secretary. Simultaneously, there are some special age requirements for positions such as secretary of a provincial-level Party disciplinary committee.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Third, a series of variations and contradictions can appear in this regard, as in the example of a provincial Party secretary, who is usually a member of the CC: he or she must resign as provincial secretary when he or she reaches sixty-five years of age but can still keep his or her membership in the CC until the next Party Congress elects the new CC; he or she can still be elected to the new CC if he or she is designated to be elected by the new CC to the next Politburo (as the age limit for a Politburo candidate is sixty-seven years of age), otherwise he or she will lose the qualification to become a candidate even for new CC membership.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ It is unclear why these cadres, all elected leaders in the constitutional sense, can have different positions within their elected posts in terms of age limit, unless one accepts the explanation that the elections simply have nothing to do with deciding upon their posts.

Age limit is not widely adopted as a candidate qualification in democratic electoral institutions, therefore it is perhaps a Chinese characteristic of the electoral system; the absence of limited terms is another difference that CCP elections have from other elections, even from non-CCP elections in today's China. In state politics, limited terms started to be implemented in the 1980s, and those who take parliamentary and governmental positions at the national level usually encounter a limit of two consecutive five-year terms. For positions within the CCP, however, this rule does not apply, though there might be some informal consensus among the elite. For example, Hu Jintao was elected to the CC for six terms from the 12th to the 17th Party Congresses, being a full member for a total of twenty-seven years from 1985 to 2012.Footnote ¹⁸⁶

Some other post-voting measures have either been maintained from the Mao era or revitalized in recent decades after the 1989 political crisis. Post-election job transfers of elected leaders have prevailed in the post-Tiananmen era, and in the most recent decade have become even more frequent and intense for local leaders, including the provincial leaders who have seats in the CC.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Also, the post-Tiananmen leadership has, since the 1990s, restored the Maoist tradition of post-Congress training classes for CC members.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ All of these, as pointed out in earlier discussion, illegitimately intervene in electoral outcomes, sometimes to the extent of totally undoing elections.

The fate of a democratic experiment: cha-e xuanju and its containment

The most significant reform of the Party Congress electoral system since 1945 has been the replacement of deng-e xuanju (election with equal numbers between candidates and posts) with cha-e xuanju (election with more candidates than posts) in the preview elections. The 12th Party Congress adopted the reform measure in the election of Congress delegates; the 13th Party Congress introduced it to the elections of the CC and the CDIC. In November 1987, when the delegates to the 13th Party Congress participated in the preview election of CC full members, they were given a choice between 185 candidates for 175 to be elected, a difference of over 5 percent. Those who won the election, upon the Congress Presidium's approval, would become “formal candidates” to the final election of the CC. In the following steps, they practiced the same procedure with larger number differences, electing 110 “formal candidates” for CC alternative membership out of 126 primary candidates, and sixty-nine for the CDIC out of seventy-three. This was the first time in CCP history that the Party Congress had adopted a competitive electoral mechanism to decide the central leadership bodies.Footnote ¹⁸⁹

Yet the competition was limited: it did not mean that more than one candidate could contest a post; the margin of competition was much smaller than two candidates for one seat. Moreover, the scope of its application was restricted: the preview election of the Central Advisory Committee did not adopt it but continued the Maoist electoral method of deng-e xuanju.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ More importantly, the preview elections were not omitted, the formal elections of these central organizations were not reformed to adopt cha-e xuanju, and the higher-level leadership bodies such as the Politburo were not under such reform even in their preview elections. In the formal, final election of CC full members, for example, delegates “chose” 175 members from among 175 candidates.Footnote ¹⁹¹

Despite these limitations, the small margin did empower delegates to choose their preferred members of the central leadership organizations. For the CC full-member contest, ten cadres lost their elections, prominent among whom was Deng Liqun, a member of the 12th Central Secretariat who had been designated to enter the 13th Politburo. It is disclosed that more than 500 delegates among the total of 1,953 disfavored him in the preview election.Footnote ¹⁹² Deng, in his memoir, highlighted that he still gained more than two-thirds of the total ballot, definitely a majority.Footnote ¹⁹³ But in this election anyone who gained a ballot ranking 176th or below among 185 primary candidates lost, as the number of seats was fixed at 175 – this helps to highlight the importance of deciding upon the number of seats. With almost no uncertainty in the outcome of the formal election, those who survived the preview election would, essentially, become CC full members; moreover, the uncertainty of election to the Politburo by the CC plenary would be even less. The political significance of Deng's loss in the preview election, therefore, meant that he accordingly lost the opportunity to enter not only the CC but also the Politburo. More importantly, the result was not simply Deng Liqun's personal failure in his political career; it also made it difficult for the incumbent leadership to achieve its well-tailored plan for the next top leadership.Footnote ¹⁹⁴

We know that the procedural design of the preview elections is for the leadership's convenience in intervening, influencing, and eventually changing voters’ preferences in order to ensure that the leadership's intentions are met in the formal election. With the practice of cha-e xuanju in the preview election, however, a practice such as zuo gongzuo would simply undo the choices made by voters, thus making the cha-e xuanju preview election meaningless. In other words, these two measures, cha-e xuanju in the preview elections and zuo gongzuo following the preview elections, are simply incompatible with each other. At the 13th Party Congress, the leadership thus had to give up zuo gongzuo; they chose not to intervene in the outcomes of the CC preview election, although both the pressure and the possibility to intervene did exist. According to Deng Liqun's own account, Wan Shaofen, another leading cadre who lost the election, tried to lobby Wang Zhen, a veteran revolutionary who reportedly had influence with the paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, to xiang banfa (search for a solution) to change the disappointing result.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ This indicates that intensive behind-the-curtain efforts to alter electoral outcomes unfolded immediately after these outcomes were announced. However, the paramount leader Deng responded by saying, “recognize [the legitimacy of] the election without making changes,”Footnote ¹⁹⁶ thus zuo gongzuo did not take place following the CC preview election at the 13th Party Congress.

The leadership tried other ways, however, to remedy this severe “electoral accident.” Deng Liqun was added to the candidate slates for both the CAC and, at a later stage, its Standing Committee.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ He was elected to the CAC, but again failed to be elected to the CAC Standing Committee, even without competition. Of 187 ballots casted by CAC members at its first plenary, Deng gained eighty-five, less than a half of the total.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ It is reported that the person who gained the next-lowest number of ballots in the CAC Standing Committee election was Hu Qiaomu, but Hu was favored by 135 ballots, thus he was elected.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Both Hu and Deng were known as conservative, ideological “tsars” of the CCP in the 1980s.

Elections with multiple candidates have since become a norm for the Party Congress preview elections of the CC and CDIC.Footnote ²⁰⁰ No further move has been taken, however, to extend this electoral mechanism to the elections of the higher-level leadership apparatus such as the Politburo or the PSC, though the margins of choice for Congress delegates in choosing CC formal candidates have since, as shown in Table 6.2, increased by small percentages through the past quarter-century.

“Electoral accidents” happened again at the 14th Party Congress, with two senior cadres failing to be elected CC full members in the preview election and, accordingly, losing their qualification to be appointed to the higher-ranking positions that otherwise awaited them. They were Xiao Yang, Chongqing mayor at the time but designated to enter the 14th Politburo, and Yu Zhengsheng, mayor of Qingdao, who was designated to become a member of the new Central Secretariat.Footnote ²⁰¹ Both were reported to be Deng Xiaoping's favorites, but Deng was unable to help them in such circumstances. Additional “electoral accidents” of this kind were reported in local leadership elections during those years, with candidates to local government nominated by the Party leadership failing even non-competitive elections on various occasions.Footnote ²⁰²

This sounded an alarm to the post-Tiananmen CCP leadership.Footnote ²⁰³ In conjunction with other political elements such as the recentralization of party-state power, a series of new measures have been invented, restored, or strengthened since the mid-1990s for the purpose of squeezing out the autonomous ballot-casting at the Party Congress and in other elections, while cha-e xuanju has been allowed to continue as the prevailing method of various preview elections. Obviously it is a challenge to channel voting behavior in order to meet leadership-planned electoral outcomes under this limited competitive electoral mechanism, but post-Tiananmen leaderships took it on successfully. These measures – or, more precisely, countermeasures – to constrain and contain the impacts of cha-e xuanju can be analyzed from two angles: institutionally some measures are innovated to prolong the process of nominations, particularly emphasizing pre-Congress “fermentation” with the introduction of certain proto-democratic elements; politically a series of strategic moves are taken to tighten control of delegations, discipline delegates, and create favorable circumstances for those designated Politburo and PSC members to be elected to the CC.

The strengthening of pre-Congress consensus building regarding candidates to the CC and CDIC can be regarded as a major institutional measure taken recently to deal with the pressure that the multiple-candidate election method brings to the leadership. Such a pre-Congress process of candidate selection, as part of Maoist electoral institutions, has existed since the 7th Party Congress, but the CCP's latest version has revitalized it in three ways: first, the process is advanced in terms of the timetable, often starting more than a year prior to the forthcoming Party Congress meeting. As the next section will focus on how the entire electoral process, including such advanced consensus-building, occurs with regard to the latest 18th Party Congress, some earlier experiences can, at this point, be briefly cited to demonstrate how such a practice has existed for years as a norm leading the preparations for the Party Congress. For the 17th Party Congress held in October 2007, the recommendation, examination, and nomination of liangwei (“members of two committees,” namely the CC and the CDIC) started in June 2006;Footnote ²⁰⁴ for the 16th Party Congress in November 2002 the process began as early as May 2001.Footnote ²⁰⁵ The prolonging of the process allows sufficient time for consensus-building regarding the nominations of CC and CDIC members, but, more importantly, because this is by nature an informal process taking place before the Party Congress is summoned, it gives the leadership the necessary institutional room to manage and manipulate the nominations. Accordingly, it effectively reduces the time and space for Congress delegates to discuss, and “ferment” on, nominations during the Party Congress session.

Second, this pre-Congress process of consensus-building around the next leadership bodies is entirely and legitimately dominated by the Party Center, in contrast to the potential, less controllable, legitimate expressions of delegates’ autonomous preferences at the Party Congress when they are given the opportunity for “fermentation” on CC and CDIC candidates. For the 16th and 17th Party Congresses, the Party Center dispatched, respectively, fifty and more than sixty examination groups to entirely cover the party, the state, and the military for the purpose of investigating liangwei candidates.Footnote ²⁰⁶ As will be detailed later in a case study of the 18th Party Congress, these groups for the 16th and 17th Party Congresses also worked under the Party Center's leadership. For the 16th, Party Chief Jiang Zemin chaired twelve meetings of the PSC for the purpose of listening to and discussing the examination reports;Footnote ²⁰⁷ for the 17th, the PSC met nine times to perform a similar job.Footnote ²⁰⁸

Third, the process involves the political elite on a wider scale in building consensus over candidate selections, and some proto-democratic measures have been put in place for such involvement of lower-level organizations and cadres. These measures mainly include “democratic recommendations” (minzhu tuijian) and public-opinion surveys (minyi diaocha), for which the process prior to the 16th Party Congress was extended to involve Party secretaries and governors at the county level, thus including, nationwide, a total of more than 30,200 cadres, in order to record their comments;Footnote ²⁰⁹ for the 17th Party Congress the process for the first time adopted the method of “public-opinion” surveys among leading cadres, which was carried out by circulating over 33,500 survey forms among the political elite, on average more than 1,000 being involved in each province.Footnote ²¹⁰

It should be emphatically pointed out that Congress delegates are often not elected out at this stage, and those who have been elected or might later be elected as delegates speak in this process in the capacity of Party cadres within the Party's hierarchical structure. As yunniang (prior to preview elections) and, to a much greater degree, zuo gongzuo (following preview elections) become somehow illegitimate against the backdrop of multiple-candidate preview elections, and thus are often troublesome in practice at the Party Congress, it is a smart option to have the “fermentation” virtually completed outside of the context of the Party Congress before the delegates can speak in that capacity. The essence of this prolonged pre-Congress process of liangwei nomination, therefore, is the adoption of such (at most) “informal democratic measures” to contain the supposed formal democratic process at the Party Congress. As it is greatly dominated and highly manipulated by the incumbent leadership, it does help to prevent “electoral accidents” from happening in the later Congress preview elections.

On the other hand, individual campaigns, or jingxuan, are still prohibited. The Chinese jingxuan, the candidate campaign in the democratic style, literally means “competition for being elected,” but “competition” is strictly prohibited in CCP politics. Deng Liqun, who lost the CC election at the 13th Party Congress, accused some delegates of campaigning against his election;Footnote ²¹¹ Li Rui, who was the major target of Deng's criticism, confirmed that before the Congress meeting he did write a letter to the leadership expressing his concern over Deng's entry into the Politburo or even his taking of a higher-level position (the rumor was that Deng would become Party chief), in which Li disclosed how Deng, who in Yan'an during the 1940s was responsible for conducting a political examination against Li, took advantage of his power to seduce Li's wife.Footnote ²¹² Such information became known to some delegates and, together with delegates’ repugnance at Deng's hardline ideological policy, this caused Deng's failure to be elected. Deng viewed this as a political plot against his candidacy.Footnote ²¹³ It certainly becomes a question for even limited competitive elections: do voters have the right to know more about candidates in order to make more informed decisions in voting? To cope with this pressure, official “introductions” (jieshao) of candidates with greater biographical detail than there had been during Mao's era are now adopted and résumés are often provided when a cadre is appointed or a candidate is waiting to be elected.

Political measures are also taken or strengthened for the purpose of a “guarantee” (baozheng), for those cadres who are designated members of the next top leadership, of their survival in the CC/CDIC preview elections. A focus of such measures is on delegations, as the preview elections are held at the delegation level, not at the Congress assembly. The organization of Congress delegations in Maoist practice since the 7th Party Congress, as discussed in Chapter 3, was an important component in attaining the “success” of the Party Congress, including the Congress elections. Although this norm has never been reformed through the Mao era to the present day, it was loosened in the practice of the 1980s; however it was revitalized and reinforced at the post-Tiananmen Party Congresses. Institutionally, the size of a delegation is not large; when the total delegate number increases, more delegations are organized, which helps to control the size of delegations. The 12th Party Congress had thirty-three delegations,Footnote ²¹⁴ but the 17th Party Congress organized thirty-eight delegations, and the 18th Party Congress, forty (see Table 3.7). The size of delegations, as Table 3.7 also shows, is usually small. For the latest, 18th, Party Congress, the largest local delegations were from Shandong (with seventy-five delegates) and Shanghai (seventy-three), while the majority of provincial delegations (seventeen out of thirty-one) contained less than fifty delegates, among which seven have fewer than forty delegates. There are three larger delegations, coming from the PLA (251 delegates), State Central Organs (184), and Party Central Organs (108), in regard to which several observations should be noted. First of all, efforts have been made to split them into more delegations. For example, the 18th Party Congress newly organized the Military Police delegation, which had been included in the PLA delegation. In a similar vein, but starting from earlier Party Congress sessions, two more delegations, namely those of the Central Enterprise System and of the Central Finance System, are now organized to reduce the size of both the delegations from Party Central Organs and State Central Organs. Second, as Chapter 3 has investigated, a delegation is further divided into groups for discussion and electoral “fermentation,” and accordingly a larger delegation is divided into more groups than a smaller delegation would be. Third, in terms of voting, the military is, of course, better disciplined in the sense of following the leadership's guidelines and instructions, and the central party-state organs are often less autonomous than local delegations.

Regardless, in comparison with the more than 2,000 individual delegates to recent Party Congresses, the advantages of managing these delegations are obvious, and voting within a delegation is obviously easier to predict, influence, and manipulate than voting at an assembly of the entire Congress. The size of a delegation indicates that most delegates within it are acquaintances of one another, which helps to constrain a delegate's “abnormal” voting behavior – “abnormal” in the sense of straying from the leadership's guidelines. At any given time such behavior occurs, furthermore, it is easier to identify the delegate who might have made trouble. This logic also applies to a delegation as a collective: unfavorable ballots on personnel appointments, when they emerge on a certain scale, are often connected with the delegates’ particular geographical affiliations; thus any serious voting deviations from the Party Center's guidelines would be more easily traced to a specific delegation. Previously the corresponding “doing work” would follow to target the delegation; now the national leadership assigns to provincial Party secretaries, who are always delegation heads, the political responsibility for “implementing” the Party Center's intentions when voting takes place within their delegations. The political repercussions for these secretaries, should any “electoral accident” occur, are obvious and they would be putting their political careers at risk. In this sense, voting within a delegation becomes the “delegation responsibility system,” which greatly increases the predictability of realizing of the Party Center's plans in Congress elections despite the multiple-candidate preview elections.

It should be noted that general political and even political–cultural elements well beyond the Party Congress's institutional and electoral process also work significantly to shape the delegates’ voting behaviors.Footnote ²¹⁵ The 13th Party Congress did not reform the delegation or voting venues, as its CC preview elections were also conducted in delegation units, but autonomous voting by delegates did occur to a degree that caused eminent leaders like Deng Liqun to fail to be elected. It was practiced in a relatively liberal political atmosphere, and no punishment was exercised over those who dared to disfavor Deng. In 1992, when the 14th Party Congress met, the liberal political atmosphere – in the sense of valuing democracy – may have disappeared in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, but in terms of central–local relations there was still a liberal trend of valuing local autonomy.Footnote ²¹⁶ This difference might help to explain an interesting contrast: those eminent figures who lost the 13th Party Congress elections were those marked with clear ideological colors, but those who encountered the same fate at the 14th Party Congress, as in the cases of Xiao Yang and Yu Zhengsheng, were local leaders who were reportedly disfavored by their own localities.Footnote ²¹⁷ Moreover, as nothing happened to punish those autonomously voting delegates in 1987, the 13th Party Congress might have set an example for some delegates to the 14th Party Congress in casting their unfavorable ballots. But, as discussed earlier, the political atmosphere has become different since the 15th Party Congress, and the leadership has since become highly vigilant against such “electoral accidents” and numerous countermeasures have been taken.

Additional political strategic moves are also invented to help pave the way for those designated leaders to be elected at the forthcoming Party Congress. For example, during recent years the Party Center often made new, important appointments on the eve of the Party Congress meeting, and the appointments involved those leaders who later entered the Politburo and its Standing Committee. A prominent move in this regard took place on October 22, 2002, when the Party Center announced the job transfer of Jia Qinglin and Huang Ju from their posts in the local leaderships of Beijing and Shanghai, respectively, to “working in the Party Center”;Footnote ²¹⁸ about two weeks later, the 16th Party Congress met, through which both Jia and Huang were elected to the Politburo Standing Committee. In retrospect, it is clear that such pre-Congress job transfers of designated top-ranking leaders can send a strong message to the delegates who are coming to attend the Party Congress, making evident to them the Party Center's intentions. In the post-Tiananmen context, delegates would not like to take the risk of opposing the top leadership's now well-known favorites in the CC and CDIC elections.

It is apparent that the introduction of cha-e xuanju to the Party Congress elections has had some effect, but the struggles against it have also been strong, with equally effective outcomes. Such struggles, interestingly enough, do not simply move to abolish cha-e xuanju; they have compromised in choosing to continue it, but they also constrain and contain its operation and its aftermath. The compromise indicates the CCP leadership's need to strengthen its legitimacy through some kind of participatory elections, while also making the traditional Maoist electoral system further complicated and sophisticated. Some earlier Maoist methods of governing elections have now, for the purpose of containing cha-e xuanju, been restored and revitalized; some new measures and procedures have been invented and initiated to cope with the presence of cha-e xuanju and with the changing political circumstances. Together they create further subtleties of institutional manipulation, and despite the superficial differences between the numbers of candidates and posts having increased, which could mean greater opportunity for delegates to choose members of the central leadership organizations based on their individual preferences, these subtle methods of manipulation make the Party Congress elections a continuing formalistic process in which voters’ choices fit the incumbent leaders’ desires and reinforce the new leadership's legitimacy. In this sense, the method of multiple-candidate elections is now well incorporated into CCP electoral institutions that have the Maoist electoral system as their backbone.

How are Congress elections run today? The latest case of the 18th Party Congress and the summary of this section

For a better grasp of the entire process of Congress elections of the central leadership bodies, up to its latest developments, a brief case study of the 18th Party Congress is supplied here, and then a summary of reforms, changes, and continuities from the Maoist electoral system up to current practice will be presented.

The 18th Party Congress was held in November 2012, but the CCP leadership started its process of liangwei (members of the CC and the CDIC) selection in July 2011,Footnote ²¹⁹ long before the election process of Congress delegates began in November 2011.Footnote ²²⁰ This time gap helps to confirm that, from the very beginning, delegates play no role in initiating liangwei candidates. On the other hand, as emphasized by China's official media, the entire process of recommendation, investigation, and nomination of liangwei candidates has from beginning to end been under the leadership of the Politburo and the PSC, as exemplified by Party Chief Hu Jintao's chairing of many meetings of both the Politburo and the PSC on liangwei selections, as well as his frequently giving “important instructions” and listening to relevant reports.Footnote ²²¹

The Politburo and the PSC, accordingly, decided upon “guidelines and fundamental principles” (zhidao sixiang he jiben yuanze) for the purpose of clarifying the general requirements and prerequisites of liangwei candidates; upon so-called “structures” that may mean some prerequisites in terms of the candidates’ age, gender, ethnicity, etc.; and upon the methods to use to carry out recommendations and investigations. It was emphasized that the two committees must be “groups of politicians who rule the Party, the state, and the military” (zhidang zhiguo zhijun zhengzhijia jituan). The quality requirements (suzhi yaoqiu) for the CC full member and alternative member candidates explicitly state that, among other political qualifications, they must first of all “take the lead in upholding Marxism–Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, and ‘Three-Represent’ important thought, all-round carry out and implement the scientific development perspective,” and “firmly keep great consistency with the Party's Central Committee, of which Comrade Hu Jintao is general secretary.”Footnote ²²² There should also be technical prerequisites such as age limits, but such details are not available to the public.

It is reported that during the period from July 2011 to the following June, the Party Center dispatched fifty-nine investigation groups to all thirty-one provinces, metropolises, and autonomous regions, as well as to 143 branches of party-state organs, financial organizations, and state-owned/national-government-managed enterprises to investigate the candidates. At the same time, the Central Military Commission sent out nine investigation groups to do parallel work within the military and the Military Police. Some complementary investigations later followed up on individual cases.Footnote ²²³ The Party Center selected about a hundred ministerial- and provincial-level cadres to head these groups, while more than 1,000 cadres were summoned from various units to participate in the investigations. All members of the investigation groups received special training before they engaged in investigation (it is not clear who provided the training or what kind of training it was, though it can be speculated that the Central Organization Department might be responsible for organizing the training on behalf of the Party Center). They received a series of documents, including an investigation handbook and materials concerning behavior rules, secrecy, discipline, etc., while some separate documents focusing on investigative procedures, the flow chart of operations, and the standards of future documents and reports to be submitted to the Party Center were also circulated (there seem to have been many overlaps, but the news report lists them as different documents) – all of which indicates the careful and special attention given to the investigations by Party functionaries. The Party Center further summoned the group heads for meetings twice during the investigation process.Footnote ²²⁴

“The political criteria were placed at the top” of the investigation agenda, while various methods were employed to conduct the investigation, such as interviews and analyses, “democratic examinations and comments” (minzhu ceping, but no details on how such things were carried out), and “public-opinion surveys” (but one should be cautious of the real meaning of “public,” as will be discussed below), while statistics, data from auditing authorities, and the reports of the cadres under investigation were also consulted. In terms of “democratic recommendation,” it is said that the investigations paid special attention to increasing its “scientific features” (kexue xing) by “identifying the proper scope of the participants in democratic recommendation,” which implies, to this author, the existence of a vague zone in which the rhetoric of “democracy” could be practically compromised by the careful selection of participants. What is the “proper” scope? What does being “scientific” mean? It is reported that a principle for running “democratic recommendation” was to “let those who know the situations cast their knowing-situation ballots” (rang zhiqing ren tou zhiqing piao).Footnote ²²⁵ In the CCP context of low political transparency, who are those zhiqing ren, or the persons who “know the situations”? The Xinhua report provides an answer: the provincial (or equivalent) Party committees voted upon the acceptance of the preliminary list of liangwei candidates, and those who were opposed by one-third of the ballots would be removed from the list.Footnote ²²⁶ It does not clarify who proposed the preliminary list, however. The democratic recommendation, therefore, seems more to be the subnational leaders’ consent, perhaps with some amendments, of the preliminary list of liangwei candidates than anything resembling bottom-up nominations by lower-level organizations, let alone individual delegates who, in fact, were not yet elected.

Beyond the provincial leaders’ involvement, the preparation of the 18th Party Congress further extended consensus-building around liangwei candidates to lower-ranking cadres. It is reported that more than 42,800 persons participated in “democratic recommendations” of liangwei candidates, while the investigators interviewed over 27,500 personsFootnote ²²⁷ (possibly to collect their opinions of candidates, or perhaps some of the interviewees themselves were candidates – no information is available to clarify this). There must be a fairly significant overlap between those persons who participated in recommendations and those who were interviewed; thus we may roughly determine that in total about 60,000 people were involved in this “democratic” process. The number is larger than those for the 16th and 17th Party Congresses (see earlier discussions), but only accounts for approximately 0.07 percent of total CCP members, which was 82.602 million by the end of 2011.Footnote ²²⁸ If this was “democracy,” it was a democracy in which seven out of every ten thousand had an opportunity to express their comments over (not to decide) candidates. For “public-opinion surveys,” about 29,000 questionnaires were distributed in thirty-one provincial-level administrative regions,Footnote ²²⁹ which meant that less than 100 persons on average participated in each province's public-opinion survey, a truly small scale that can hardly be called “public” in any sense.

These comments, opinions, and survey outcomes did not determine who would become liangwei candidates; the Xinhua report explicitly states that in the investigations the results of “democratic recommendations” were later “scientifically analyzed and utilized,” and this made the process “respectful of public opinion while not too simplistic in choosing persons according to ballots.” It is disclosed that not all candidates were popular in “democratic recommendation” or surveys of “public opinion,” as the Xinhua report boasts that “the majority” of designated liangwei candidates, rather than all, gained high rates of satisfaction in such surveys.Footnote ²³⁰

The PSC held eleven meetings beginning in the latter half of 2011 to hear the reports from all investigation groups; it then proposed the “suggested lists” of both CC and CDIC members.Footnote ²³¹ Xinhua reports that the PSC first selected 727 persons as “reserved nominees for liangwei candidates” (liangwei houxuanren yubei renxuan), and, in October 2012, further narrowed the list to 532 persons. As the numbers elected posts of both the CC and the CDIC were later approved as 506, this shorter list may have been the last slate to be issued to the Congress delegates for discussion and fermentation. It was entitled as the list of those “suggested to be nominated” (jianyi ti-ming), differentiating it from the formal nominee list that must pass the preview elections and the Congress Presidium's amendment.

On October 22, the Politburo adopted the suggested list and decided to send it to the 18th Party Congress for discussion. On November 10, Xi Jinping, an incumbent PSC member and the designated Party chief coming to power at the 18th Party Congress, explained the list to the Congress Presidium, and the Presidium adopted it for all delegates’ yunniang.Footnote ²³² There is no report indicating delegates’ criticism of, or opposition to, anybody on the list, while Xinhua emphasizes “all delegates’ widespread acceptance” of it. It is said that “delegates highly praised the suggested list for its comprehensiveness, maturity, scientific structures, and nominees’ outstanding qualities.”Footnote ²³³ Technically, the delegates were not allowed much time to “deliberate” over the list as they cast their ballots in the preview elections by November 13; no information identifies on which date exactly the preview elections were held, but on November 13 the Congress Presidium adopted the formal candidate slates based on the preview elections’ outcomes. The preview election took place within the units of delegations, and it adopted cha-e xuanju with the margins that Table 6.2 has presented in the bottom column. The total nominees for the preview election were 555 persons, including 224 for CC full members, 190 for CC alternative members, and 141 for CDIC members; twenty-three more than the PSC's suggested list of 532. Why this difference? A possible explanation is that those who were dropped from the CC full-member preview election were added to the alternative-member preview election, and that some of those who failed the CC alternative-member preview election were added to the CDIC preview election; thus some candidates were counted more than once. Was there any possibility that a few new nominees came to the candidate list by way of suggestions either by delegates during the “fermentation” or by the Congress Presidium after the preview elections? No evidence indicates or denies it.

The formal elections were conducted on the morning of November 14 at the Congress assembly in the People's Great Hall. The process, on which Xinhua spends just one sentence, was simple: “Through the circulation of ballots, ballot writing, ballot cast, and ballot count, 2,300-plus delegates and specially invited delegates who attended the meeting elected the new CC and CDIC.” Following this, two passionate paragraphs were devoted to celebrating the new central leadership: “lasting applause,” “congratulations and praises,” and “trust and expectations.”Footnote ²³⁴ It is highlighted that the Party Congress has elected a new leadership that enjoys high political legitimacy.

Concerning the above process of recommendation, investigation, nomination, and election, three points deserve further discussion. First, “recommendation” and lower-ranking cadres’ involvement in this process do provide leeway for decisions on some controversial candidates. For example, an investigation group conducted the simulative (moni) cha-e xuanju particularly in order to make relevant decisions in selecting younger cadres and “representative personalities” (daibiaoxing renxuan)Footnote ²³⁵ – the latter term refers to those candidates with special ethnic, gender, occupational, etc. backgrounds whose nominations would help to demonstrate the CC's overall representation of different groups. As the rule of seniority does not apply to the selection of these persons, it would be more possible than usual to see controversies emerging among the elite over the selection of such persons; additional measures such as simulative elections are thus taken to build up consensus among the given circles of Party cadres. This supports the general observation that this book has made concerning the Party Congress's function, along with its “democratic nuisance,” in creating a solid level of legitimacy among the elite.

The second point is about the “disciplines of personnel reshuffle” (huanjie jilü), which has been emphasized constantly in recent decades. For the 18th Party Congress, the campaign to strengthen discipline accompanied the process of candidate investigation, which might indicate that corruption had already leaked into this process. Both members of investigative groups and those “earmarked candidates” were warned not to do anything such as lobbying, and, to discipline them, the Party Center issued “five strict prohibitions, seventeen nos, and five ‘without-exceptions’” (wuge yanjin, shiqi ge buzhun, wuge yilü).Footnote ²³⁶ Relevant rules explicitly disallowed la-piao, or “soliciting ballots” (from voters), which meant that any kind of candidate campaign was prohibited, while in reality the phenomenon already existed to the degree that the leadership could not ignore it, but had to turn to Party discipline in order to maintain the Maoist tradition.Footnote ²³⁷ Because individual candidates’ campaigns would disturb the actualization of the leadership's electoral intentions, the strengthening of huanjie jilü also implies a warning to delegates, in their voting, not to accept any individual candidate's persuasions, but rather to follow the leadership's instructions.

Third, all of these measures were ineffective in preventing the election of corrupt cadres to the CC and the CDIC, although the investigations emphatically made requests against the nomination and election of those “sick” persons. Such nominations and elections are termed daibing ti-ming (nomination of a “sick” person) and daibing dangxuan (election of a “sick” person), as “being sick” (daibing) clearly holds political meaning. Within about a year of the 18th Party Congress, however, four newly elected CC full and alternative members were charged with corruption and crimes,Footnote ²³⁸ among whom Li Chuncheng fell from power within only three weeks of being elected to the CC. This might indicate that he was elected to the Central Committee after he had been investigated for his wrongdoings and crimes, implying that the delegate and CC member qualification examination mechanisms, at least in the case of the 18th Party Congress, did not work as effectively as they had been expected to or had been boasted about.

Before turning to the concluding remarks of the whole chapter, a summary of reforms, changes, and continuities of the electoral institutions adopted by the Party Congress, from Maoist institutions established at the 7th Party Congress to the latest cases, through the post-Mao decades, should be drawn up to finish this section. Table 6.3 is a simplified version of the summary, with a brief discussion to follow on some specific items.

It is clear that, despite reforms and changes to the Chinese electoral system on other possible occasions, such as in village elections or people's representative elections at various levels, the electoral institutions adopted at the Party Congress have not been reformed or changed to a great extent from the Maoist ones. The most significant reform is the introduction of cha-e xuanju, or elections with multiple candidates, in preview elections, which was instituted in the 1980s and has since taken root. Countermeasures, however, have since the 1990s been invented and developed to contain its impacts, thus entailing relevant changes imbued with a conservative spirit. There are additional reform measures and changes, which may be viewed from a perspective of political rationalization and institutionalization, including the regularization of elections, cadre retirement, and the greatly decreasing occurrence of political purges. Along with these measures, new norms such as age ceilings for candidates have arisen in CCP electoral institutions, which are usually not adopted in democracies. Social change has also affected the operation of the electoral system, as in the example of the increasing difficulty of totally banning candidates’ campaigns, which are now often carried out “underground” via personal networks. In terms of institutions, however, the prohibition of candidate campaigning has not been lifted.

This summary has, to a great extent, falsified the assumption that Maoist institutions, in terms of the Party Congress electoral system, have obsolesced or greatly declined in present day Chinese politics. Instead, the investigation has found a strong Maoist echo in the post-Tiananmen operations of the Party Congress, as institutional revivals and innovations have taken place in this spirit to reduce elections to ceremonial displays of delegates’ loyalty to the leadership rather than of their individual autonomy or a representation of Party members’ willingness to decide Party leaders. Yet with the replacement of deng-e xuanju by cha-e xuanju in the preview elections, pressures have mounted in the direction of reform and change; but development is never linear or evolutionary, and the CCP's capability in terms of political adaptation and institutional maintenance cannot be underestimated.Footnote ²³⁹ With further mixtures of authoritarian essence and “democratic veneer,” the current electoral system practiced at the Party Congress still allows huge space for institutional manipulation and, accordingly, is meant to enhance the manipulated legitimacy of the leadership.