The Practice of Uncontested Election

The CCP has been practising elections to select leaders since 1957. Chinese elections are very different from those in democratic countries – it is called “socialist democracy with Chinese characteristics” in China. The uncontested election deng e xuanju) and the contested election (chae xianju) are the two principal types of elections in China. An uncontested election is a type of election that has the same number of nominees and elected candidates. A contested election or differential election refers to those elections that have more candidates than elected seats. Before 1987, the uncontested election was the only type of election in China. The contested election was officially added into the Party Constitution and experimented with in electing the 13th Central Committee members in 1987, and a few high- level leaders including two former ministers of the Propaganda Department, Zhu Houze and Deng Liqun, lost this election. Since then, the CCP has gradually institutionalized contested elections in selecting the Central Committee members (Yan, et al., 2012).25

Figure 22 shows the difference in the proportion of nominated and elected seats in the elected seats of the Central Committee and the Central Discipline Inspection Commission in the past decade. It indicates that this proportion has gradually increased at each Party Congress. In this regard, Chinese elections have been improving – but at a very slow pace. Liberal democracy and competitive elections are still very sensitive in China, and those efforts to practise elections were designed to strengthen rather than democratize the party – although these two are not necessarily contradictory. Nonetheless, the contested elections of Chinese leaders provide a good starting point for practising intra-party democracy. It might be true for the CCP to claim that the immediate implementation of direct elections might cause tremendous social instability. Thus, the gradual process of increasing the proportion of nominees in the elected seats of leaders might find a balance between the practise of party democracy and the maintenance of political stability.

25

The former Premier Wen Jiabao also confirmed that the CCP has been practising the contested election for selecting Chinese leaders when he answered a journalist’s question in (Xinhua, 2011).

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Figure 22: Ratio showing the difference between the number of nominees and the

number of elected seats (cha e bi li) in the Central Committee and the Central Discipline Inspection Commission

The author’s own tabular representation. ource: ata of the 6th

and the 17th Party Congress are from the Xinhua News Agency http://news.xinhuanet.com/18cpcnc/2012-

11/13/c_113680755.htm accessed on December 21, 2012; for data from the 18th Party Congress, see (Shan, 2012)

6.6. Summary

This chapter studies the institutional development of power succession in China over the past three decades. It argues that this institutionalization has developed a power succession system with Chinese characteristics, which has guaranteed the seamless transfer of power that rarely proceeds smoothly in authoritarian regimes. As a result of this institutionalization, the leadership transition since 2002 has been distinct from the previously cruel “life and death” power struggles in Mao’s era. The stable power transition under the authoritarian rule in China provides a dramatic example of authoritarian resilience.

Yet, political reforms – including the institutional development of power succession, in China is under-researched in the English language literature as mentioned in the Introduction Chapter and Chapter 3. As this chapter shows, the institutional development of power succession plays an important role in legitimizing and stabilizing the authoritarian rule in China which strongly supports chubert’s (2008) argument that political reforms have been generating a “critical degree” of regime legitimacy in China.

It must be acknowledged that the current power succession system in China is still less transparent than those in developed democratic countries nowadays. However, the current succession politics in China have no doubt been more predictable, transparent, and stable now than ever before in the history of the PRC. The institutionalization of the Chinese succession system has managed to overcome the fatal weakness of the authoritarian system – how to transfer power successfully at the top without splitting the leadership. This does not mean that the current level of institutionalization is sufficient to guarantee authoritarian rule in the long run – the case of Bo Xilai clearly warned of the potential dangers of division among the elites. For the sake of its survival, the CCP is still under enormous pressure to

5.10% 8.30% 9.30% 5.70% 9.60% 11.10% 5.80% 8.70% _8.50% 0% 2% 4% 6% 8% 10% 12% 16th (2002) 17th (2007) 18th (2012)

Regular members of Central Committee

Alterate member of Central Committee

Members of Central Discipline Inspection Commission

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develop its succession system further. Whether this development will lead to democratic elections or not is in the hands of the CCP (i.e. party cohesion) and – more importantly – the Chinese people (i.e. popular legitimacy).

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Chapter Seven: Conclusions

A Journey to Popular Legitimacy and Party Cohesion 7.1. Introduction

While some scholars have been debating whether – or even when – China will rule the world (e.g. Beeson, 2013; Jacques, 2009), the CCP has been seriously concerned about the continuation of its rule. Not only the collapse of Eastern European communist regimes and the Soviet Union but also and the failure of republicanism and the MT in China’s modern history have constantly alerted the CCP to the consequence of losing popular support and consensus among the elite. As discussed in Chapter 2, after Mao Zedong died in 1976, the CCP realized that its legitimacy was at an all-time low because of the long-term national chaos and the almost collapsed economy. Since then, the CCP has taken a completely different performance-based approach from Mao’s ideology-based one.

Moving away from communist ideologies did help the CCP to promote economic growth. However, as this thesis has frequently stressed, there is a fundamental contradiction between generating economic success by utilizing quasi-capitalist economic policies and the fact that this is a communist party that supposedly justifies its rule by being the vehicle to deliver a communist society. As Chapter 2 shows, this contradiction has generated endless ideological battles within the party. In the late 1980s, this power struggle within the CCP leadership combined with social challenges – led by complaints about negative consequences of economic growth – and almost overthrew the CCP.

In contemporary China rapid economic growth has not undermined the CCP’s concerns about its potential existential crisis. Indeed, various threats to the CCP’s rule such as corruption and socioeconomic inequality, are derived from this rapid growth. Nowadays, addressing the negative consequences of rapid economic growth has become a leading challenge to the CCP’s rule. This challenge does not only involve economic aspects – such as pushing for more economic reforms to generate a more sustainable growth – but also ideological ones. A communist party is not supposed to tolerate problems such as socioeconomic inequality; in this context, the CCP has to produce ideological discourses to justify its rule.

As this thesis shows driven by the CCP’s own concerns about existential crisis, it has taken impressive efforts to modernize its ideologies and institutionalize its power succession system in order to search for popular legitimacy and party cohesion. Yet, the topics of ideology and power succession do not receive sufficient attention in the political science literature of Chinese studies in general.