Afterword and Reflections

Abstract

In the wake of the Tiananmen debacle in 1989, many Western scholars believed that the Communist Party of China (CPC) had lost its legitimacy and would soon be relegated to the “dustbin of history”. This belief was reinforced by the collapse of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Scholars increasingly looked for signs of centrifugal forces that would weaken the Chinese political system. As a result, the focus of much research shifted to new social strata and groups, non-governmental developments and movements of dissent, tensions in central–local relations, fragmented policymaking and so forth. However, the CPC did not wither away. Instead, it underwent a process of renewal and organisational reform, drawing lessons from studying what had gone wrong in the Soviet Union. Changes were introduced incrementally and were often informed by local experimentation. At the same time, the CPC continued to deliver economic progress and improved income opportunities for the majority of the Chinese population. By the early 2000s, it had become clear that the CPC was not about to collapse. Scholars gradually realised that to do any in-depth study of the functioning of the Chinese body politic and its development trajectory, they had to include research on the CPC. In particular during the era of Xi Jinping, it has become abundantly clear that not only is the CPC at the centre of the Chinese political-economic system, but also that power and functions of the state are increasingly migrating to the Party. In March 2018, at the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress (NPC), an institutional reform programme was adopted. It followed the tradition of introducing major state and government restructuring in a five-year cycle. However, the 2018 programme was unusual as it also involved the Party organisation. For example, the State Administration for Public Service (Gongwuyuan ju) was transferred from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security to the Party’s Central Organization Department. The bianzhi administration, the office in charge of planning and allocating personnel and organisational resources, was also placed under this department. In combination with the Central Organization Department’s control of the nomenklatura system, these transfers of functions and institutions have considerably increased the