After 75 years of the People’s Republic of China, the party is truly the sovereign
Lecturing in Munich in 1919, German political economist Max Weber spoke of the modern state as a ‘human community that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’. That elegant statement serves to this day as the conventional definition of a national state.
As the People’s Republic of China marks the 75th anniversary of its founding this month, it is clearer than ever that Weber’s definition does not apply to the ‘state’ in China but rather to the Chinese Communist Party, which holds a national monopoly on the legitimate use of force and functions as effective sovereign on behalf of the nation. What’s more, the party is asking the rest of the world to welcome its rise, along with the rise of China, and promoting its values internationally for emulation by others as it seeks to refashion the world in its own image—one where sovereign parties have equal standing with sovereign states.
It is widely acknowledged that the People’s Liberation Army, Navy, Airforce, Rocket force, People’s Armed Police and Peoples Militia are party entities, not state or government ones, subject first and foremost to party authority, direction, and control. PLA officers swear allegiance to the party ahead of the state, and the PLA’s peak unit of civil command is the party’s Central Military Commission, not the state one.
The anomalous position of the PLA has long been overlooked on the understanding that the party would at some point undergo a conventional transition from revolutionary party to party-in-government, at which point authority over the armed forces and armed police would be transferred from party to state. Also, the PLA’s status has been counted exceptional. The CCP leadership has not historically substituted party for government authority over most other functions and agencies of state, which are staffed by a civil service numbering in the millions, and technically separate from the party apparatus.
Whatever their merit in the past, arguments about the transitional character of China’s communist party-state are no longer tenable in the New Era of President Xi Jinping. In this New Era, the party’s jurisdiction over the PLA is matched by the CCP’s absorption of key government agencies into the party structure, and the party structure extending its reach into every non-government institution in business, society, media, culture and education. For example, the country’s National Security Council was set up as a party entity the year Xi took office in 2013 and placed under the party Central Committee, not the State Council, despite the term national state (国家) sitting prominently in its title (中央国家安全委员会). The Leading Small Groups that have expanded in number and importance under Xi, as inter-agency bodies co-ordinating policy execution, report to the party Politburo, not the State Council. Several state agencies overseeing national minorities and religious and united front affairs have been absorbed into party bodies.
A comparable assertion of party control over everything can be found in constitutional and legal affairs and in the day-to-day operations of China’s judicial system. If there is a transition under way in Xi’s New Era, it is not in the direction of the routinisation of state functions and Weberian governmental rationality, but toward recovery of the party’s ‘original intentions’ (初心) as the proletarian vanguard of a global communist revolution requiring the progressive partification of everything.
What makes Xi’s New Era different from what came before is the leadership’s public acknowledgement that the party is no longer transitioning but has arrived—and not just in China. Drawing on the party’s domestic lessons and experience, the leadership is offering a range of ‘China solutions’ (中国方案) to the world for meeting the challenges of democracy and development. In the Foreign Ministry’s words, it is ‘providing a new choice for countries and nations in the world that want to accelerate development while maintaining their independence, and contribute Chinese wisdom and Chinese solutions to solve human problems’. Along with ‘China solutions’, the leadership is selling party values to the world through a series of ‘global initiatives’ promoting the CCP’s ‘core socialist values’ as alternatives to constitutional democracy, and deserving emulation by others.
Looking back, it seems many observers inside and outside China have been laboring under what legal scholar Donald Clarke calls convergence theory bias, attributing anomalies in the structure of party and state to the presumed transitional character of China’s political, economic, social and legal systems on their march toward governmental rationality, if not perhaps constitutional democracy. Clarke argues that we need a theory that can account for apparent anomalies ‘as features, not bugs’.
This would help predict the international behavior of a revisionist revolutionary party seeking recognition as a national state while acknowledging no limits to its authority inside China, and arguably no limits in a world it seeks to refashion in its own image.
The ‘China solutions’ and accompanying ‘global initiatives’ are announcements of the party’s arrival.
We have a party acting as if it were a national state, exercising de facto sovereignty in perpetuity, offering party solutions to the world as alternatives to constitutional democracy, and promoting new-style party-to-party relations as a supplement to orthodox international relations among national states.
Seventy-five years on, the PRC is further than ever from transitioning to a conventional state.
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