Baliyarly Aygun CH23
Week 6
The resilience of the Chinese Communist Party
Recently, China celebrated National Day of the People's Republic of China, preparations for this
significant event were rather impressive, the government wanted to prove again its power and the fact that
can have its own way without following the Western democratic governance model. Now most part of
researchers are not agree with this statement, arguing that already soon China will have to change its
model of power due to modernization and other factors and the main similar case in all the readings
which I have read is the question of the resilience of the Chinese Communist Party, but the main
difference between these readings is the analysis approach. Now I am going to talk rather briefly about
every of my readings and its main ideas.
First of all, I would like to start from the article «The End of the CCP’s Resilient Authoritarianism? A
Tripartite Assessment of Shifting Power in China» which was written by Cheng Li , s director of the John
L. Thornton China Center and a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings , in 2012 year.
The main idea of the article that if the Chinese Communist Party intends to regain the public’s confidence
and avoid a bottom-up revolution, it must abandon the notion of “authoritarian resilience” and embrace a
systematic democratic transition which will include the independence of the judiciary, the opening of the
mainstream media, the destruction of corruption. Moreover, the factor which outraged me during the
reading is is a fact that in order to obtain appointments and promotions, some officials, especially those
who do not have strong family ties or political ties , usually used bribes to “buy an office” , so it
practically impossible to ordinary people to get a high position without connections and money, only
relying on your knowledge.
The second reading use a “historical approach” to answer the question about the resilience of the CCP, it
was written by Ja Ian Chong and the name of the article is «Popular narratives versus Chinese history:
Implications for understanding an emergent China» here we can notice the opposite opinion that the
Chinese experience of success is based on the struggle for political unity and national interests against
great odds. The obvious consequence is that the Chinese people and state must assert what is "right" from
their point of view. The writer is convinced that nationalism is a set of beliefs that emphasize the primacy
and dignity of a common ethnic, cultural and political identity for an individual population. Nationalists
seek to realize the interests of this self-identified group, which often — but not always-leads to the
establishment of Autonomous control over the territory they consider synonymous with this population.
The third article «Reassessing Trust in the Central Government: Evidence from Five National Surveys»
Lianjiang Li, uses a method of statists, this study finds that there is significantly less popular trust in the
Chinese central government than five national surveys suggest, people do not trust government, especially
if we are talking about people who live in the city center not in the village, as there the level of education
higher and people more are aware of political processes inter China.