Abstract
Since Xi Jinping became the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 2012, enormous political changes have taken place in China. While many political measures are supported by the general public and lauded as great successes by the mass media, scholars are divided over their opinions about the nature of Xi’s leadership, with criticism coming from both the extreme right and left of the political spectrum. Liberal critics say that Xi’s leadership tends to be more authoritarian and represents some kind of return to the Maoist period, on the verge of personal dictatorship. In sharp contrast with these negative views, many scholars think that Xi’s leadership has given rise to a cleaner, more efficient government that represents the revival of the Communist tradition, especially the mass line and popular democracy. In this paper, the author will try to avoid such kind of ideologically dichotomous positions and explore the role of the CPC in the governance of China especially under Xi’s leadership. The research question of this paper is, what is pattern of the governance in China, and how Xi’s leadership can be characterized from comparative perspective. I will argue that the party-centred governance based on rule of law has been emerging under Xi’s leadership. This paper consists of the following sections. First, the party-centred approach will be introduced after reviewing the previous approaches in contemporary Chinese political studies. Second, the different and distinctive periods of CPC leadership will be analyzed in terms of the relations between the Communist Party and the State, the rule of man and the rule of law. In the third section, major political measures taken by Xi Jinping leadership will be discussed in detail, especially the state-building based on rule of law and party-building based on the strict discipline. Finally, the implications for democracy and governance in China will be explored and explained from a comparative perspective.
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Guo, D. Xi’s Leadership and Party-Centred Governance in China. Chin. Polit. Sci. Rev. 5, 439–456 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41111-020-00149-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41111-020-00149-y