Historical Dictionary of The Chinese Communist Par... - (Introduction)

Introduction
When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) (Zhongguo Gongchandang) was founded in a girls’
boarding school in the French concession in Shanghai in July 1921, it consisted of 50 members
in a country of several hundred million and was represented by 12 delegates, including its
future revolutionary leader Mao Zedong. Ninety years later, it is one of the oldest ruling parties
in the world that since its takeover of mainland China, in 1949, is still in firm political control
of the largest country on earth, numbering 1.3 billion people. In the interim, the CCP went
through a civil war (1946–49) with the Kuomintang (KMT) and, over the course of nine
decades, has experienced considerable twists and turns in ideology, policy, and leadership.
From 1943 to his death in 1976, Mao Zedong dominated the CCP from his elevation to
“chairman” in 1943 and the promotion of “Mao Zedong Thought” as an ideological equal to
Marxism-Leninism. Throughout this period, Mao guided Party policy, but his leadership was
ultimately tainted by a utopian vision that led to a series of economic and political
catastrophes, including the Great Leap Forward (1958–60), which costs upwards of 30 million
dead from widespread famine, and the “ten lost years” from 1966 to 1976, when the country
was engulfed by the so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Following Mao’s death
in 1976, Deng Xiaoping emerged as China’s paramount leader and, beginning in 1978,
promoted a policy of economic reform that resulted in major economic gains both domestically
and internationally. Under Deng’s successor, the Shanghai-bred Jiang Zemin, these policies
were continued from 1989 to 2002, as both the leadership and rank and file of the CCP became
increasingly dominated by a highly trained technocratic elite, which since 2002 has been led
by General Secretary Hu Jintao, who now oversees the second largest economy on earth and
the world’s largest exporter.
HISTORY
From its formation in 1921 to 1927, the main goal of the fledging CCP was survival, especially
after the collapse of the First United Front (1924–27) with the KMT that led to the communists’
near destruction in April 1927 at the hands of the notoriously anticommunist KMT leader
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Chiang Kai-shek. For the next 20 years, the CCP was forced from China’s cities where, under
the direction of the Soviet-dominated Comintern, it had pursued a strategy of building support
among China’s miniscule working class as the key to winning power and carrying out its plans
for the revolutionary transformation of Chinese society. Holed up in the Chinese hinterland, the
CCP shifted to policies of radical land reform, as remnants of the Party who had survived
Chiang’s purge mobilized support among the peasantry, which, in Marxist terms, was seen as
the embodiment of political backwardness. In the eyes of Mao Zedong, however, the peasants
were potentially a revolutionary force. But it was not until top leaders of the CCP met in 1935
in the midst of the Long March—which ensured CCP survival in the face of punishing attacks
Sullivan, Lawrence R.. 2011. <i>Historical Dictionary of the Chinese Communist Party</i>. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Accessed September 22, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from uts on 2022-09-22 15:22:07.
by KMT armies—that the CCP extricated itself from Comintern domination. Beginning with the
Rectification Campaign pursued from 1942 to 1944, Mao would become the dominant political
and military leader in the CCP for the next 30 years. Ensconcing itself in the northwest base of
Yan’an, the CCP rapidly expanded its membership to over one million, largely as a result of
the mobilizing effects on the Chinese population of Japan’s ruthless attacks, beginning with its
invasion of China proper in July 1937. With a buildup of its military forces under the cover of
the Second United Front (1937–46) with the KMT—who did most of the fighting against the
Japanese while Mao husbanded his manpower—the communists emerged from the war against
Japan with well-trained military forces. Despite its numerical inferiority to the KMT, which
had been equipped with modern weapons largely supplied by the United States, the CCP,
through superior discipline and strategy, emerged victorious in 1949.
It was thus on 1 October 1949 that Mao Zedong announced the establishment of the People’s
Republic of China (PRC) on all except for the island of Taiwan, where the KMT had fled in
the wake of their defeat in the Civil War. Initially, in its Common Program and invoking Mao’s
speech “On New Democracy” given in January 1940, the new communist leadership seemed to
promise a relatively moderate regime that would focus primarily on the awesome task of
national reconstruction and economic development. But beginning with the First Five-Year
Economic Plan (1953–57), China moved to an approach based on the policies pursued by
Josef Stalin in the Soviet Union, emphasizing the rapid development of heavy industry and the
radical restructuring of the agricultural sector. At the same time, the CCP took a turn toward a
more aggressive role toward so-called counterrevolutionaries, who, along with ongoing
widespread corruption, were seen as potential antagonists of the new communist state,
especially the most outspoken element in Chinese society—the intelligentsia. Yet, frustrated by
what appeared as excessively slow growth of “socialist” organization in the agricultural
sector, Mao almost single-handedly pushed for much more rapid growth of the agricultural
producers’ cooperatives (APCs) than most Chinese leaders, especially Liu Shaoqi—Mao’s
heir apparent—found warranted. As the CCP’s agricultural policy waxed and waned from a
radical approach to the socialization of Chinese agriculture (maojin) to an opposition to
excessively rapid growth that had disrupted production (fan maojin), fissures in the once
united leadership emerged, while the first major purge was carried out in 1955 against the
northeast strongman Gao Gang and the Shanghai leader Rao Shushi.
Ultimately, Mao won over enough regional leaders, such as Ke Qingshi, the Shanghai Party
chief, and pushed for an even more radical program of rural transformation in the form of the
huge people’s communes and the even more radical idea of having peasants forge steel in the
infamous “backyard furnaces.” With the Great Leap Forward producing disastrous results in
agricultural production—despite Mao’s promise that innovations like “close planting” of rice
would produce massive increases in production—outspoken leaders, such as the Minister of
Defense Peng Dehuai and one-time pro-Moscow 28 Bolshevik member Zhang Wentian, raised
objections to the policy at the crucial 1959 Lushan Conference. While Mao—as usual—won
the political struggle, ousting Peng, Zhang, and other critics of the Leap, the Party was forced
into a major reduction of its production targets and a radical retreat from its policy of the
“communization” of the countryside that, by the 1960s, led to a return to the moderate
agricultural policies of the early years, which was carried out by Liu Shaoqi and Deng
Xiaoping. Despite widespread privation and starvation in the “Three Bitter Years” from 1960
to 1962, the country recovered rather quickly, but with Mao Zedong forced into an apparent
political retreat when he resigned his position as head of state and acquiesced to the lower
ideological profile accorded his “Thought,” which had been removed from the Party
constitution in 1956. Yet, Mao was anything but politically neutralized as he built support
among the more radical elements of the Party, including his wife, Jiang Qing. Beginning in
1966, Mao launched an all-out assault, mobilizing discontent among the young Red Guards
against the well-entrenched Party apparatus with the support of his new heir apparent—
Marshal Lin Biao—and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Aiming his political gun at
supposed “capitalist roaders” in the Party led by Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and other top
leaders in the CCP establishment, Mao pursued his goal of creating “great chaos under heaven”
until the factional conflict among the anarchic Red Guards led the chairman to call a halt and
announce the “victory” of the Cultural Revolution in April 1969 at the pivotal Ninth National
Party Congress.
With the gradual return to power of leaders such as Deng Xiaoping, who, protected by
elements of the army, had physically survived the political whirlwind initiated by Mao, the
CCP was deeply divided along factional and ideological lines. On the one hand were the
radicals, led by his wife, Jiang Qing, whose political interests lay with continuing the Cultural
Revolution yet without the full backing of Mao Zedong, who threw his support to the relatively
regional and ineffectual leader Hua Guofeng. On the other were the pragmatists led by Deng
and other equally orthodox Leninist leaders opposed to the attacks on the Party apparatus and
committed to a return to national economic reconstruction. In between stood Lin Biao—who
would soon lose Mao’s favor and die in a mysterious plane crash in September 1971, after an
apparent attempt to assassinate the chairman—and Zhou Enlai, who, despite his perpetual
fealty to Mao, joined with Deng Xiaoping in endorsing a plan for China to undergo “Four
Modernizations” in agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology. As
Mao’s health waned, the struggle between these factions intensified as each group maneuvered
for position with the radicals elevating members of their so-called Gang of Four to positions of
authority in the top leadership of the CCP, while Zhou, in his last days, threw his support
behind Deng and the pragmatists.
Following Zhou’s death in January 1976, soon followed by the chairman’s demise in
September, the divisions within the CCP led to the final struggle in which the radicals were put
under house arrest, Hua Guofeng was quickly eclipsed by Deng Xiaoping, and, beginning in
December 1978, at the historic Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee, China
embarked on a radically new path of economic growth and foreign investment. As Deng
consolidated his power and moved to close down the Democracy Wall Movement that had
sprouted up in late 1978 and early 1979, the CCP settled into a regime of promoting economic
growth but maintaining a tight political grip on the country. When the new and last chairman of
the CCP, Hu Yaobang, suggested that China follow up its program of economic reform with
fundamental political change, he was quickly dispatched by Deng, who, despite not holding the
top position in the CCP, still ruled from “behind the curtain.” The same fate would befall
Premier Zhao Ziyang, then general secretary, who, in the midst of the 1989 pro-democracy
demonstrations in Beijing and other major cities, was similarly cashiered for his apparent
opposition to Deng’s decision to use lethal force against the Tiananmen Square demonstrators.
His replacement, the Shanghai Party chief Jiang Zemin, would follow Deng Xiaoping’s theory
of building “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which entailed combining liberal
economic policies, such as the “corporatization” of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), with little
or no move in the direction of meaningful political reform. But while Jiang ruled the country
with an iron hand, he did acquiesce to a major change by voluntarily giving up his posts—the
first for a modern Chinese leader—to Hu Jintao, including the all-important chairmanship of
the Central Military Affairs Commission, the body through which the civilian leaders of the
CCP retain control of the army.
Like many of the new “fourth” generation of Chinese leaders, Hu Jintao was trained as an
engineer and has called for giving greater emphasis to raising the educational standards of
leaders and rank-and-file Party members. Hu spent much of his early career in the CCP in the
country’s poorer interior regions, such as Gansu and Guizhou provinces, where he developed a
commitment—coined as “putting people first”—to improve the standard of living of China’s
poor by pursuing a more balanced approach to China’s national development, shifting away
from the favoritism shown to the wealthier coastal regions by his predecessors. Surrounding
himself with like-minded and equally well-trained leaders, such as Premier Wen Jiabao, who
is also an engineer, Hu has kept China on a path of rapid economic growth combined with
maintaining strict CCP control of the country’s politics. While much of China’s population
seems relatively apolitical in the midst of the country’s extraordinary economic advance,
individuals who have dared to challenge CCP authority, such as the Nobel Prize winner Liu
Xiaobo, have been silenced and even jailed. Prior to the October 2007 Seventeenth Party
Congress, which reelected Hu to his leadership position as the Party general secretary (as the
post of chairman had been abolished in 1982), considerable debate among intellectuals on
China’s political future was allowed but, again, without any major move toward real structural
reform by the Congress. With China gaining increased respect on the international scene from
the United States and other major powers and with the country’s unbridled economic growth,
Hu’s major concern is to ensure the implementation of central policies at the local level,
especially reining in the rampant corruption among Party officials, which, as the number one
complaint among the populace, is a source of increasing social protests, particularly in the
countryside. To the extent that Hu and his apparent successor—the current head of the all-
important Party Secretariat, Xi Jinping, who, in his mid-fifties, represents China’s “fifth”
generation of leaders—are successful in these ventures, China, unlike the Soviet Union and
communist regimes in Eastern Europe, will probably remained ruled by the Communist Party
for years, if not decades, to come.
ORGANIZATION
The organization of the CCP is roughly based on the hierarchical model of central control
developed by the Russian Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin. Like its counterpart, the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the CCP follows the Leninist principle of democratic
centralism that, in theory, allows discussion and debate among Party leaders and rank and file
during the formulation of basic policies but demands “iron discipline” once those policies
have been finalized. In reality, the CCP, like the CPSU, has been dominated by a few top
leaders, from the nearly single-handed authority of Mao Zedong, especially from 1958 to 1976,
to the more “collective leadership” (“jiti lingdao”) followed in the post-Mao era (1976–
present) by members of the Party’s top decision-making bodies, most notably the Standing
Committee of the Politburo.
While formal authority over the CCP is granted by its constitution to the National Party
Congress (held every five years) and to its “elected” Central Committee (CC), which meets
every few months in plenary sessions or plenums, these unwieldy bodies, numbering from
nearly 200 in the case of the CC and over 2,000 delegates to the Party Congresses, rarely
exercise decisive influence over Party policy as their membership is generally determined by
negotiation and political give-and-take among the top leaders. Through various departments of
the Central Committee—Organization, Propaganda, International Liaison, United Front,
Politics and Law Committee, and the General Office—the Party maintains tight control over
appointments, the media, noncommunist bodies, and the courts and police, which effectively
prevents the emergence of autonomous centers of power that could ultimately challenge CCP
supremacy.
Even as the economic reform that was inaugurated in 1978 led to the emergence of private
entrepreneurs and the “corporatizing” of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), the CCP has proved
very adept at maintaining control of these potentially independent individuals and
organizations, especially through the pervasive structure of “Party core groups” that exist in
virtually every institution, including private firms. An “unholy alliance” between private
entrepreneurs and the CCP has, in fact, emerged, as the former often rely on the latter to secure
bank loans and other resources critical to their operation. At the same time, state-owned
enterprises remain the dominant economic institutions in China—especially in key sectors,
such as steel, railways, telecommunications, banking, and health care—subject to CCP control,
especially over the appointment of top management. And while the Internet and other modern
social communication networks have posed challenges to the authority of CCP-dominated print
and electronic media, the Propaganda Department (rendered in English as the “Publicity”
Department) has also proved itself equally adept by setting up a comprehensive censorship
system for controlling Chinese access to politically sensitive issues via the Internet and
adopting modern public-relations practices for getting its messages across to the Chinese
population. Although greater leniency has, in recent years, been afforded publications to
discuss such sensitive issues as “democratization” by leading intellectuals without, as in the
past, fear of retribution, direct challenges to CCP authority are still not allowed. At the same
time, the CCP has promoted a campaign of increased transparency for dealing with such knotty
and unpopular practices as official corruption by setting up websites for public input to
various Party institutions, especially the Central Discipline Inspection Commission (CDIC),
the CCP’s major disciplinary arm.
While the CCP has embraced, within limits, the policy of “separating Party from enterprise,”
which provides greater leeway to management even in state-owned enterprises, the CCP has
not followed up with the often-discussed policy of “separating Party from state.” The major
institutions of the Chinese state—the National People’s Congress (NPC) and its executive arm,
the State Council, its various ministries and commissions, and the courts and police—remain
under tight CCP supervision and control. Calls by prominent intellectuals, both in and outside
the CCP, for greater independence for the legal standing of the NPC and other state bodies
made in the run-up to the 2007 Seventeenth National Party Congress were essentially ignored.
The same level of CCP control applies to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) through the
Central Military Affairs Commission (CMAC), which was apparently strengthened after the
crackdown on 3 through 4 June 1989 against the pro-democracy demonstrations.
Major decisions affecting the army, especially dramatic reductions in manpower, have been
successfully pushed by leaders from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao, in return for equally dramatic
increases in the military’s budget (reportedly $90 billion in 2010) and major technological
advances in weaponry, including development of China’s first aircraft carrier and an
experimental stealth bomber. As for the ranks of Party cadres whose responsibility it is to
implement CCP policies, greater attention has been paid in recent years to improving and
professionalizing their training (especially through the nationwide system of Party schools and
so-called cadre training academies) and to merit-based promotions, along with dramatic
increases in recruitment of college-educated personnel (around 38 percent in 2007). Yet,
despite these changes, the role of the rank and file in the 73-million-member CCP over major
policy-making remains limited. As for the rest of China’s population, their role in this one-
party, authoritarian state is even more constrained, though popular protests and expression of
discontent in polls commissioned by the CCP have had their effects, especially in encouraging
the leadership to promote a series of campaigns against corruption and the growing gaps
among the population in income.
IDEOLOGY
In concert with the many twists and turns of policy in the CCP so too has the Party’s official
ideology undergone a series of major transformations during the revolutionary period
beginning in 1921 and since “liberation” in 1949. Mao Zedong led perhaps the most important
change in the revolutionary period by arguing in such seminal works as “Report on an
Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan” (1927) for the revolutionary potential of the
peasantry that, in the orthodox doctrine of Marxism-Leninism, were treated as politically
backward and distinctively inferior to the working class.
Mao and CCP leaders, such as Zhou Enlai, also incorporated a more nationalistic undertone
to the communist cause, especially after the Japanese invasion of China proper in 1937, that
challenged the “internationalism” promoted by the Comintern and their masters in the Soviet
Union. Beginning with the 1942 thru 1944 Rectification Campaign in Yan’an and especially
following the CCP takeover in 1949, a distinctively Stalinist cast to CCP ideology was
assumed as notions of “class struggle” and “struggle between two lines” against purported
class enemies among intellectuals, private businessmen, and even some Party members. This
was especially true from the 1956 thru 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign onward, as Mao and other
top leaders, such as Deng Xiaoping, who oversaw that campaign, engaged in harsh attacks and
even executions of the regime’s critics, who were often arbitrarily accused of such ideological
crimes as “bourgeois liberalization.”
The height of these highly divisive ideological witch hunts came in the Cultural Revolution
(1966–76), when even top leaders, including Mao’s heir apparent and PRC president, Liu
Shaoqi, and Deng Xiaoping, were labeled as “capitalist roaders” and subject to cruel struggles
that, in Liu’s case, cost him his life. Virtually every realm of Chinese life, especially literature
and the arts, was subject to rigid ideological tests that became the vehicle by which Mao’s
wife, Jiang Qing, emerged as a dominant figure in Chinese political life. Yet, with the attack on
“ultra-leftism” and its ideological proponents in the waning days of the Cultural Revolution,
the predominant left-wing cast of the Party’s ideology came increasingly under attack.
In the aftermath of Mao’s death in September 1976 and the quick purge of Jiang and her
supporters, dubbed as the Gang of Four, attempts were made by Mao’s successor, Hua
Guofeng, to retain the heart of Maoist ideology under the guise of the “two whatevers,” namely
that “whatever policies Chairman Mao had decided, we shall resolutely defend; whatever
instructions he issued, we shall steadfastly obey.” But once Hua was quickly pushed aside by
the more politically adept Deng Xiaoping and with the adoption of economic reform in late
1978, the left-wing bent of official CCP policy was dramatically reduced, especially once the
Party leadership denounced the entire Cultural Revolution episode and rid itself of remnant
leftists among its ranks. The blind loyalty underpinning the concept of “two whatevers” was
quickly replaced by the more empirical concept of “practice is the sole criterion of truth,”
while previously unheard-of slogans, such as “to get rich is glorious” and “socialism with
Chinese characteristics,” were sanctioned, as, ideologically, the CCP stood increasingly for
pragmatism above leftist ideological purity. “Class struggle” and other such terms that
legitimated a civil-war atmosphere in the CCP and Chinese society were largely dropped,
though such ideologically loaded terms as “bourgeois liberalization” were still directed at
dissidents and proponents of human rights and democracy, like Wei Jingsheng.
That the CCP would now become a more representative body of the entire Chinese nation
was especially evident in the concept of the “Three Represents” (“sange daibiao”) promoted
by Deng and his successor, Jiang Zemin, which called for the CCP to represent the “vast
majority” of the Chinese population, even allowing for private entrepreneurs and other
previously politically unacceptable groups to enter the Party. In the aftermath of the collapse of
the Soviet Union, similar ideological changes with a more populist cast have been promoted
by Hu Jintao, whose signature contribution to CCP ideology is his Scientific Development
Concept. Reflecting Hu’s training as an engineer, the concept is designed to promote
sustainable development, social welfare, increased democracy, an advanced socialist culture,
and, ultimately, the creation of a “socialist harmonious society.” Lauded by the CCP as a
successor and extension of the ideology of “Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought,” “Deng
Xiaoping Theory,” and “Three Represents,” the Scientific Development Concept has been
added to the Party constitution while also constituting a major component in the curriculum of
Party schools and CCP propaganda.
At the same time, however, Hu has demonstrated his conservative bona fides by denouncing
the “Three Vulgarities”—vulgar, cheap, and kitsch forms of culture, such as television “dating
programs”—indicating his ideological ties to previous campaigns aimed at “cleansing”
Chinese society, such as the Anti–Spiritual Pollution Campaign (1983–84) and even the
Cultural Revolution, when Red Guards tried, unsuccessfully, to eliminate vulgar slang words
from the Chinese language. While such efforts at cultural purification are probably, as with
similar previous campaigns, doomed to failure, other ideological concepts, such as the “Three
Supremes,” which places Party authority above the rule of law, were, along with the campaign,
launched in 2004 to improve the CCP’s “governing capacity,” designed to ensure the
unchallenged political supremacy of the CCP.
ISSUES AND “CONTRADICTIONS”

As the CCP enters the last decade before its centennial anniversary, several issues and internal
“contradictions” pose a challenge to its legitimacy and capacity to remain the ruling party of
China. CCP leaders have engaged in a process of adapting to changing social and economic
conditions and preventing the Chinese political system from becoming, as in the former Soviet
Union, an ossified Leninist state governed by an even more ossified and intellectually stale
ideology. Perhaps the most serious challenge confronting the CCP is the persistence of
corruption and abuse of power, especially at the local level, where despite a series of
campaigns and high-profile prosecutions of Party officials, these practices remain the number-
one complaint of the Chinese populace.
The continued economic growth in China, from 8 to 10 percent annually, probably mitigates
the political impact of corruption that in 2011 helped overthrow less competent regimes, such
as Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt. Yet, as the CCP’s own spokesmen admit, to the extent the problem
is perceived as intractable by the Chinese people, the very existence of CCP rule is threatened.
Commenting on the problem in February 2011, the head of China’s intelligence and security
services said Beijing should make “social management” its top priority by controlling the
public to prevent protests or other destabilizing incidents. Contrary to the supposedly “iron
discipline” of Party members, on the issue of corruption, the Party Center is often frustrated in
enforcing its will over lower-level cadres, who, despite their own personal rectitude, often
find the lures of corruption in the midst of vibrant economic growth irresistible. That
widespread corruption could produce a dramatic political crisis for the CCP is especially true
if the largely localized, heavily rural social protests, numbering several thousand in the past
few years, become more organizationally cohesive and move into the urban areas. At a
minimum, the CCP may have to renege on such policies touted by the current leadership as the
“Three Supremes” that sacrifice the rule of law to political interference by such Party bodies
as the Politics and Law Committee, a powerful department under the Central Committee that
retains direct CCP control of the courts and police. Transforming the legal system into a more
independent arm of the Chinese state whereby people can have their grievances addressed
without fear of political retribution could perhaps reduce the pressure cooker of social
protests. Yet, so far, the Hu Jintao–Wen Jiabao administration shows no signs of instituting
such reforms as even the president of the People’s Supreme Court of China—a man named
Wang Shengjun, who lacks any real legal training—has endorsed the Party’s hard line.
Another challenge facing the CCP is managing a society that combines major elements of the
free market, especially in pricing and increasingly in determining wages, with an authoritarian
regime whose institutions have changed very little since its takeover of power in 1949. So far,
the leadership has proved adept at combining these two apparently contradictory economic and
political modes, preventing the “inevitable” collapse of CCP rule in the face of dramatic
economic reform that many Western observers and even Chinese commentators have predicted
for years. The fact is that the private entrepreneurs, growing in number, have not emerged as a
social and political force challenging CCP authority but, instead, have chosen to “wear the red
hat” by allowing Party committees and branches to be set up within their companies, including
foreign-owned firms such as Wal-Mart. This could, of course, change if instead of propping up
the regime by, as in some high-profile cases, enlisting in the Party and joining the Central
Committee, private entrepreneurs were to become a potent force demanding real
democratization. Subjecting the CCP to state authority and the rule of law could gain political
strength, if it were to come in the midst of a major economic downturn that might spark
widespread support for such changes as evidently occurred in the pro-democracy movement in
May thru June 1989.
Consideration must also be given to the possibility that some catastrophic event, like a major
earthquake, will, by demonstrating the incompetence of one-party rule, have a dramatic effect
on the political scene. This certainly occurred in the May 2008 earthquake in Sichuan and other
nearby provinces when the collapse of school buildings and other elements of the disaster
brought home to the public the incompetence of many local Party officials. That many
provincial officials were forced to resign and the central leadership, led by Premier Wen
Jiabao, responded immediately by visiting the region and committing substantial resources
largely from the PLA to rescue as many people as possible, the quake, this time at least, did not
create the kind of political crisis that could spark widespread demands for fundamental
political change. The same occurred with the outbreak of the SARS virus in 2002 thru 2003,
when officials responsible for initially covering up the severity of the disease were quickly
cashiered, while Madame Wu Yi—known as the “iron lady” of Chinese politics because of her
tough administrative leadership—was put in charge of the nationwide effort that ultimately
stemmed the epidemic. A one-party system that somehow still retains its competence—by, in
part, recruiting the “best and brightest” from the populace—is more likely to survive and be
relatively immune from the broader forces of democratization that have swept the world, from
the collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to the assault on
tyrannical regimes in the Middle East.
The CCP has also been very effective in winning popular support for its strong nationalistic
stand and preventing the kind of breakup of the Chinese state that befell the former Soviet
Union. While Western observers may denounce the communists for taking a hard-line stand
against Tibet and other potentially restive regions of the country, most Chinese citizens
evidently have little sympathy for any group even appearing to advocate secession, including
former pro-independence leaders of Taiwan. With its dramatic military buildup, successful
incorporation into the PRC in 1997 of Hong Kong, and China’s increasingly powerful influence
on the global economy, the CCP can tout such accomplishments as products of its rule while
assuring the Chinese people and the world that its rise will be “peaceful.” Although the
capacity of the CCP to maintain power in China is still an open question requiring constant
adaptation and institutional flexibility by the Party, so far, at least, the various “contradictions”
confronting one-party rule in China are apparently not severe enough to prevent the CCP from
celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2021.

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Introduction

ISSUES AND “CONTRADICTIONS”

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