caramelpence
28th May 2011, 23:40
This is an article that provides an overview of the Chinese political system in terms of the relationship between the party, army, and state, and it is specifically concerned with the change in leadership that is due to take place in the near future as a result of both Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao having spent two terms in their posts as General-Secretarty of the CPC and Premier of the PRC respectively, as informal constraints demand that they both step down after having served for this length of time and that all members of the Politburo retire at the age of 68. It is a long article so I won't post it in its entirety but it does provide some interesting biographical accounts of Hu, Wen, and the main personalities in the leadership transfer that I thought would be worth brining up because of what they suggest about politics in the contemporary PRC and the developments that are likely to take place in the future.
Hu Jintao, age 68, was trained, like many leaders of his generation and the one that preceded him, as a civil engineer. His main power base is the Communist Youth League (CYL), which he led as First Secretary in 1984-85. As he rose up the Party ladder, he gained a reputation for being honest, obedient, and tight-lipped, rarely offering his own views in public, prefering to quietly build coalitions behind the scenes. Some might fault him for lacking personal color and charisma; he certainly can seem uncomfortably formal and stiff when speaking in public. Hu was tapped as Jiang’s successor by Deng Xiaoping, and was only reluctantly accepted by Jiang. As a result, he spent most of his first five-year term unseating Jiang’s proteges from key positions and replacing them with his own (nevertheless, at least three members of the current Politburo Standing Committee — Wu Bangguo (#2), Jia Qinlin (#4), and Li Changchun (#5), the top men besides Wen — were originally considered Jiang loyalists, which gives some idea of the difficulty Hu had in asserting control). Ever since taking over the top position, Hu’s central theme has been to shift the emphasis of economic development away from breakneck growth towards a more even distribution of benefits among regions and social classes (an approach recently dubbed “inclusive growth”), in order to head off social and political unrest (ensure a “harmonious society”). The latest Five Year Plan, ratified by the NPC earlier this month, was the very first to fully reflect these priorities.
Wen Jiabao, also age 68, is a geologist by background, and was serving as Vice Minister in this field when he caught the eye of then-General Secretary Hu Yaobang in the 1980s. Wen’s competence and mastery of detail won him the support of powerful mentors, including HYB and Premier Zhu Rongji. But it’s been his “common touch” that has defined Wen’s reputation since taking over as Premier. Unlike Hu Jintao, and many other Chinese officials for that matter, Wen seems genuinely at ease when talking with everyday citizens, a fact that has earned him great popularity, as well as the nickname “Grandpa Wen.” Occasionally Wen’s popularity seems to have rubbed his colleagues the wrong way — particularly in the aftermath of the Sichuan Earthquake, when his on-the-scene relief efforts, bullhorn in hand, left President Hu feeling upstaged — but they are also keenly aware of its usefulness. [Wen's wife is a very savvy businesswoman who reportedly has made a fortune in the diamond trade. She never appears with him in public, and the topic is considered taboo, for fear it would damage Wen's populist credentials].
Wen’s influence over policy is less clear, despite his ostensible role as China’s top policymaker. On economic matters, his philosophy is ambiguous. On some occasions, he appears to invoke the cause of market reform by noting “serious imbalances” in the Chinese economy. On others, he has lauded China’s state-heavy system of “market socialism” for giving the government direct control over the economy. Over the past year, Wen provoked a great deal of comment and speculation when he spoke, on several occasions, of the need for greater political reform in China. Some have even postulated an internal rift within the Party, with Wen leading a democratic reform camp against hardliners led by Wu Bangguo and Zhou Yongkang (a theory that gained momentum when Wu seemed to contradict Wen’s softer line in their speeches at this year’s NPC). Nevertheless, Wen has never clarified what he actually means by “political reform,” and the practical difference between Wen and the others’ positions may be far less than imagined.
In any event, given that they have little more than a year left in their terms, neither Hu nor Wen are likely to exert a dominant influence over the Party’s future for very much longer.
Xi Jinping is expected to replace Hu as China’s paramount leader. Xi, age 57, is a so-called “princeling,” the child of a prominent Party official. His father, Xi Zhongxun, was a leading Communist revolutionary who served as Deputy Prime Minister in the early 1960s before being purged by Mao in the Cultural Revolution. After he was rehabilitated by Deng Xiaopeng, the elder Xi served as governor of Guangdong, where he proposed and implemented China’s first “special economic zone” in Shenzhen and emerged as a vigorous advocate of market reform. He once told Deng that “We need to reform China and implement this economic zone even if it means that we have to pave a bloody road ahead and I am to be responsible for it.” Xi Zhongxun later publicly condemned the violent crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
His father’s legacy would seem to place Xi Jinping firmly in the camp of political and economic reform. However, some friends have suggested that the younger Xi endured his family’s humiliation during the Cultural Revolution by becoming “redder than red” — a devoted Party loyalist. (Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew once described Xi as “a thoughtful man who has gone through many trials and tributions,” even comparing him to Nelson Mandela). An engineer and Tsinghua graduate like Hu, Xi has learned – throughout steady rise up the ladder, including key provincial posting to the prosperous coastal provinces of Fujian, Zhejiang, and Shanghai — to keep his cards close to his vest. By and large, he has stayed away from scandal or controversy, focusing on Party-approved campaigns to combat corruption. As a result, Xi’s inner mind, and the priorities he would pursue once in power, remain largely a mystery, at least to outsiders.
Xi is married to one of China’s most famous singers, Peng Liyuan, making her an unusually visible First Lady. Their daughter is currently enrolled at Harvard under a pseudonym.
Li Keqiang, age 55, is expected to succeed Wen as Premier, China’s top policymaker and Xi’s #2. He comes from a far more humble background than Xi — his father was a local official in the poor, rural province of Anhui — but earned a law degree from Peking University, as well as a PhD in economics. In the process, he rose to a top leadership position in the Communist Youth League, Hu Jintao’s main power base, where he became a key protégé of Hu. In 1998, Li became China’s youngest-ever governor when he was appointed to run the rural, heavily-populated province of Henan. His tenure there was marred by several damaging incidents, including a horrendous scandal involving the spread of AIDS through carelessly contaminated blood, which tagged him with a reputation for “bad luck.” His success at improving Henan’s economy, however — along with Hu’s patronage — earned him a promotion to Party Secretary in Liaoning, where he championed ambitious plans to revive the province’s struggling rust-belt economy.
There is a widespread belief that Li was Hu’s preferred pick as successor, but that he lost out to Xi in the ensuing power struggle. Even after Li became Deputy Premier, and Wen’s presumed successor, speculation still raged that rivals such as Wang Qishan and Bo Xilai (see below) were angling to push him aside and claim the prize for themselves. Critics covertly drew attention to Li’s past troubles in Henan and the shadow of ”bad luck” hanging over his reputation. However, a series of successful foreign trips, in which Li performed well, appears to have bolstered his position and cleared the path for him becoming China’s next premier.
Wang Qishan is currently a member of the full Poliburo (but not the Standing Committee) and serves under Wen as Vice Premier in charge of economics and finance. A history student in college, Wang — somewhat in contrast to Li — has a reputation as a real “can-do” guy. In the 1990s, as president of China Construction Bank (CCB) and deputy governor of the nation’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), he helped reorganize China’s banks to cope with a major bad debt crisis. After Beijing’s mayor screwed up the city’s response to the SARS epidemic in 2003, Wang was tapped to replace him and clean up the mess. He went on to manage the city’s highly successful 2008 Olympics. Wang currently serves as President Hu’s special envoy to the US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED), where he has received kudos from foreign counterparts like US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who called Wang “decisive and inquisitive” with “a wicked sense of humor.” Given Wang’s stellar track record, it’s no wonder that many saw him — and many believe he saw himself — as a strong candidate to succeed Wen as Premier, even after Li was designated the heir-apparent. One strike against him, however, was his age: now 62, Wang would only be able to serve a single five-year term before reaching the mandatory retirement age. While he probably won’t win the #2 spot, it’s likely that Wang will be a highly influential player on the new 9-man inner circle for the next several years.
Bo Xilai is emerging as the big wildcard in the upcoming leadership transition. Like Xi, Bo — now serving as the Party secretary of Chongqing – is a “princeling,” but Bo is considered a “crown prince among princelings.” His father, Bo Yibo, was a Long March veteran who later opposed Mao over the Great Leap Forward; during the Cultural Revolution, the elder Bo was tortured and his wife (Bo Xilai’s mother) was beaten to death. Bo Yibo later emerged as one of the “Eight Immortals,” the seniormost PLA generals who were instrumental in backing Deng Xiaoping. In contrast to Xi’s father, Bo’s father was one of the key hardliners behind the imposition of martial law in 1989.
Handsome, articulate, and media-savvy, Bo Xilai is sometimes referred to as China’s Kennedy. As mayor of Dalian in the 1990s, Bo was credited with managing a remarkable renaissance of the then-decaying port city. In 2003, Bo — who graduated in history from Peking University, and is married to a prominent lawyer – took over as Minister of Commerce, where he dazzled his foreign counterparts. Although Bo, now age 61 and a member of the full Politburo, has had an impressive and high-profile career, he so far has been unable to break into to the real inner circle of power — possibly due, in part, to resentment over his charismatic personal style and his willingness to court the media and the public. Admiring profiles of him in the Western press have certainly not won him any friends among China’s more conservative powerbrokers.
When Bo was sent to Chongqing, an urban province of 31 million, as Party boss in 2007, it was seen as his “make it or break it” moment. There’s no doubt he has used it to make an impression. Whether it’s his ruthless crackdown on the city’s mafia (in which a few defense lawyers were thrown in jail for good measure) or his ambitious (and costly) plans to build huge swaths of subsidized housing, Bo has been making news. He has also perplexed Western admirers with a populist campaign aimed at reviving the spirit (if not the chaos) of the Cultural Revolution, including “red songs” and “red text messages” praising Chairman Mao — a rather odd, and some say cynical, maneuver given his tragic family history. Nobody knows quite what it all adds up to, or how Bo far will run with it, but he’s made himself impossible to ignore. Last December, Xi Jinping paid a visit to Chongqing and publicly praised Bo’s neo-Maoist movement.
It may be that Bo’s recent activities, and antics, have earned him a place on the 9-man Standing Committee — if only to make sure this volatile politician is, as we used to say in the Army, “inside the tent pissing out, rather than outside pissing in.” If so — and such a conclusion is far from certain — he will be one of the most interesting people to watch in the next few years.
Obviously there are many other personalities involved in the upcoming transition, even if we look no lower than the possible candidates to fill the top nine slots on the Standing Committee. But for simplicity’s sake, it’s best to focus on these six. I’ll only make one further, broader observation. The 2012-13 transition represents a handoff from the so-called “4th generation” to the “5th”. The first two generations, led by Mao and Deng, were dominated by the generals and cadres who fought in the Communist revolution. The next two, led by Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, were dominated by engineers, who rose to power under Soviet-style central planning but adapted, more or less readily, to market reform as a path to “modernize” China. Out of the current 9-man Standing Committee, seven are engineers, one (Wen) is a geologist, and only one (Li) is a lawyer/economist. While the next President, Xi Jinping, is an engineer, most of the 5th generation expected to serve immediately under him studied law, economics, or history — disciplines that may offer a different perspective on the challenges China faces.
Virtually all of the new generation of leaders, however, completed their studies in China, unlike their children (typified by Xi’s daughter at Harvard, or Bo Xilai’s son at Oxford) who in many cases have studied and even worked or taught abroad. I’ve been told, by several of my Tsinghua students, that studying abroad — while highly desirable from a money-making perspective — is still regarded as a career-killer for anyone hoping to rise within the Party. It will be interesting to see, after a new generation of “princelings” returns to China with Western diplomas in hand, whether this will continue to hold true, and what new perspectives these returnees will bring to Chinese politics.
http://chovanec.wordpress.com/2011/05/08/primer-on-chinas-leadership-transition/
I recommend reading the article in full if you have time, as it is very good, especially as an introduction to how the Chinese political system works. A dominant feature of this system is that the PLA answers directly to the party rather than to the state apparatus. As you would expect, the state apparatus is itself dominated by the party insofar as the party controls all important appointments and guides policy development, in part through a system of party committees that correspond to each unit or level of the bureaucracy including the national-level State Council, and in this respect China is similar to other historic Stalinist states, despite politics now being less personalistic compared to the Mao period. However, the fact that the party's control of the PLA is institutionally guaranteed (the PLA answers to the Military Control Commission, CMC, which is a party organ) makes China different as it means that the party's control of the military is not merely exercised indirectly or informally through the party's dominance in the state. Arguably this system of direct control will have implications for democratic and revolutionary movements in China in the future as it seems likely that the CPC will have a source of armed power to depend on if it faces any challenges to its hegemonic position. Thoughts?
Hu Jintao, age 68, was trained, like many leaders of his generation and the one that preceded him, as a civil engineer. His main power base is the Communist Youth League (CYL), which he led as First Secretary in 1984-85. As he rose up the Party ladder, he gained a reputation for being honest, obedient, and tight-lipped, rarely offering his own views in public, prefering to quietly build coalitions behind the scenes. Some might fault him for lacking personal color and charisma; he certainly can seem uncomfortably formal and stiff when speaking in public. Hu was tapped as Jiang’s successor by Deng Xiaoping, and was only reluctantly accepted by Jiang. As a result, he spent most of his first five-year term unseating Jiang’s proteges from key positions and replacing them with his own (nevertheless, at least three members of the current Politburo Standing Committee — Wu Bangguo (#2), Jia Qinlin (#4), and Li Changchun (#5), the top men besides Wen — were originally considered Jiang loyalists, which gives some idea of the difficulty Hu had in asserting control). Ever since taking over the top position, Hu’s central theme has been to shift the emphasis of economic development away from breakneck growth towards a more even distribution of benefits among regions and social classes (an approach recently dubbed “inclusive growth”), in order to head off social and political unrest (ensure a “harmonious society”). The latest Five Year Plan, ratified by the NPC earlier this month, was the very first to fully reflect these priorities.
Wen Jiabao, also age 68, is a geologist by background, and was serving as Vice Minister in this field when he caught the eye of then-General Secretary Hu Yaobang in the 1980s. Wen’s competence and mastery of detail won him the support of powerful mentors, including HYB and Premier Zhu Rongji. But it’s been his “common touch” that has defined Wen’s reputation since taking over as Premier. Unlike Hu Jintao, and many other Chinese officials for that matter, Wen seems genuinely at ease when talking with everyday citizens, a fact that has earned him great popularity, as well as the nickname “Grandpa Wen.” Occasionally Wen’s popularity seems to have rubbed his colleagues the wrong way — particularly in the aftermath of the Sichuan Earthquake, when his on-the-scene relief efforts, bullhorn in hand, left President Hu feeling upstaged — but they are also keenly aware of its usefulness. [Wen's wife is a very savvy businesswoman who reportedly has made a fortune in the diamond trade. She never appears with him in public, and the topic is considered taboo, for fear it would damage Wen's populist credentials].
Wen’s influence over policy is less clear, despite his ostensible role as China’s top policymaker. On economic matters, his philosophy is ambiguous. On some occasions, he appears to invoke the cause of market reform by noting “serious imbalances” in the Chinese economy. On others, he has lauded China’s state-heavy system of “market socialism” for giving the government direct control over the economy. Over the past year, Wen provoked a great deal of comment and speculation when he spoke, on several occasions, of the need for greater political reform in China. Some have even postulated an internal rift within the Party, with Wen leading a democratic reform camp against hardliners led by Wu Bangguo and Zhou Yongkang (a theory that gained momentum when Wu seemed to contradict Wen’s softer line in their speeches at this year’s NPC). Nevertheless, Wen has never clarified what he actually means by “political reform,” and the practical difference between Wen and the others’ positions may be far less than imagined.
In any event, given that they have little more than a year left in their terms, neither Hu nor Wen are likely to exert a dominant influence over the Party’s future for very much longer.
Xi Jinping is expected to replace Hu as China’s paramount leader. Xi, age 57, is a so-called “princeling,” the child of a prominent Party official. His father, Xi Zhongxun, was a leading Communist revolutionary who served as Deputy Prime Minister in the early 1960s before being purged by Mao in the Cultural Revolution. After he was rehabilitated by Deng Xiaopeng, the elder Xi served as governor of Guangdong, where he proposed and implemented China’s first “special economic zone” in Shenzhen and emerged as a vigorous advocate of market reform. He once told Deng that “We need to reform China and implement this economic zone even if it means that we have to pave a bloody road ahead and I am to be responsible for it.” Xi Zhongxun later publicly condemned the violent crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
His father’s legacy would seem to place Xi Jinping firmly in the camp of political and economic reform. However, some friends have suggested that the younger Xi endured his family’s humiliation during the Cultural Revolution by becoming “redder than red” — a devoted Party loyalist. (Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew once described Xi as “a thoughtful man who has gone through many trials and tributions,” even comparing him to Nelson Mandela). An engineer and Tsinghua graduate like Hu, Xi has learned – throughout steady rise up the ladder, including key provincial posting to the prosperous coastal provinces of Fujian, Zhejiang, and Shanghai — to keep his cards close to his vest. By and large, he has stayed away from scandal or controversy, focusing on Party-approved campaigns to combat corruption. As a result, Xi’s inner mind, and the priorities he would pursue once in power, remain largely a mystery, at least to outsiders.
Xi is married to one of China’s most famous singers, Peng Liyuan, making her an unusually visible First Lady. Their daughter is currently enrolled at Harvard under a pseudonym.
Li Keqiang, age 55, is expected to succeed Wen as Premier, China’s top policymaker and Xi’s #2. He comes from a far more humble background than Xi — his father was a local official in the poor, rural province of Anhui — but earned a law degree from Peking University, as well as a PhD in economics. In the process, he rose to a top leadership position in the Communist Youth League, Hu Jintao’s main power base, where he became a key protégé of Hu. In 1998, Li became China’s youngest-ever governor when he was appointed to run the rural, heavily-populated province of Henan. His tenure there was marred by several damaging incidents, including a horrendous scandal involving the spread of AIDS through carelessly contaminated blood, which tagged him with a reputation for “bad luck.” His success at improving Henan’s economy, however — along with Hu’s patronage — earned him a promotion to Party Secretary in Liaoning, where he championed ambitious plans to revive the province’s struggling rust-belt economy.
There is a widespread belief that Li was Hu’s preferred pick as successor, but that he lost out to Xi in the ensuing power struggle. Even after Li became Deputy Premier, and Wen’s presumed successor, speculation still raged that rivals such as Wang Qishan and Bo Xilai (see below) were angling to push him aside and claim the prize for themselves. Critics covertly drew attention to Li’s past troubles in Henan and the shadow of ”bad luck” hanging over his reputation. However, a series of successful foreign trips, in which Li performed well, appears to have bolstered his position and cleared the path for him becoming China’s next premier.
Wang Qishan is currently a member of the full Poliburo (but not the Standing Committee) and serves under Wen as Vice Premier in charge of economics and finance. A history student in college, Wang — somewhat in contrast to Li — has a reputation as a real “can-do” guy. In the 1990s, as president of China Construction Bank (CCB) and deputy governor of the nation’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), he helped reorganize China’s banks to cope with a major bad debt crisis. After Beijing’s mayor screwed up the city’s response to the SARS epidemic in 2003, Wang was tapped to replace him and clean up the mess. He went on to manage the city’s highly successful 2008 Olympics. Wang currently serves as President Hu’s special envoy to the US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED), where he has received kudos from foreign counterparts like US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who called Wang “decisive and inquisitive” with “a wicked sense of humor.” Given Wang’s stellar track record, it’s no wonder that many saw him — and many believe he saw himself — as a strong candidate to succeed Wen as Premier, even after Li was designated the heir-apparent. One strike against him, however, was his age: now 62, Wang would only be able to serve a single five-year term before reaching the mandatory retirement age. While he probably won’t win the #2 spot, it’s likely that Wang will be a highly influential player on the new 9-man inner circle for the next several years.
Bo Xilai is emerging as the big wildcard in the upcoming leadership transition. Like Xi, Bo — now serving as the Party secretary of Chongqing – is a “princeling,” but Bo is considered a “crown prince among princelings.” His father, Bo Yibo, was a Long March veteran who later opposed Mao over the Great Leap Forward; during the Cultural Revolution, the elder Bo was tortured and his wife (Bo Xilai’s mother) was beaten to death. Bo Yibo later emerged as one of the “Eight Immortals,” the seniormost PLA generals who were instrumental in backing Deng Xiaoping. In contrast to Xi’s father, Bo’s father was one of the key hardliners behind the imposition of martial law in 1989.
Handsome, articulate, and media-savvy, Bo Xilai is sometimes referred to as China’s Kennedy. As mayor of Dalian in the 1990s, Bo was credited with managing a remarkable renaissance of the then-decaying port city. In 2003, Bo — who graduated in history from Peking University, and is married to a prominent lawyer – took over as Minister of Commerce, where he dazzled his foreign counterparts. Although Bo, now age 61 and a member of the full Politburo, has had an impressive and high-profile career, he so far has been unable to break into to the real inner circle of power — possibly due, in part, to resentment over his charismatic personal style and his willingness to court the media and the public. Admiring profiles of him in the Western press have certainly not won him any friends among China’s more conservative powerbrokers.
When Bo was sent to Chongqing, an urban province of 31 million, as Party boss in 2007, it was seen as his “make it or break it” moment. There’s no doubt he has used it to make an impression. Whether it’s his ruthless crackdown on the city’s mafia (in which a few defense lawyers were thrown in jail for good measure) or his ambitious (and costly) plans to build huge swaths of subsidized housing, Bo has been making news. He has also perplexed Western admirers with a populist campaign aimed at reviving the spirit (if not the chaos) of the Cultural Revolution, including “red songs” and “red text messages” praising Chairman Mao — a rather odd, and some say cynical, maneuver given his tragic family history. Nobody knows quite what it all adds up to, or how Bo far will run with it, but he’s made himself impossible to ignore. Last December, Xi Jinping paid a visit to Chongqing and publicly praised Bo’s neo-Maoist movement.
It may be that Bo’s recent activities, and antics, have earned him a place on the 9-man Standing Committee — if only to make sure this volatile politician is, as we used to say in the Army, “inside the tent pissing out, rather than outside pissing in.” If so — and such a conclusion is far from certain — he will be one of the most interesting people to watch in the next few years.
Obviously there are many other personalities involved in the upcoming transition, even if we look no lower than the possible candidates to fill the top nine slots on the Standing Committee. But for simplicity’s sake, it’s best to focus on these six. I’ll only make one further, broader observation. The 2012-13 transition represents a handoff from the so-called “4th generation” to the “5th”. The first two generations, led by Mao and Deng, were dominated by the generals and cadres who fought in the Communist revolution. The next two, led by Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, were dominated by engineers, who rose to power under Soviet-style central planning but adapted, more or less readily, to market reform as a path to “modernize” China. Out of the current 9-man Standing Committee, seven are engineers, one (Wen) is a geologist, and only one (Li) is a lawyer/economist. While the next President, Xi Jinping, is an engineer, most of the 5th generation expected to serve immediately under him studied law, economics, or history — disciplines that may offer a different perspective on the challenges China faces.
Virtually all of the new generation of leaders, however, completed their studies in China, unlike their children (typified by Xi’s daughter at Harvard, or Bo Xilai’s son at Oxford) who in many cases have studied and even worked or taught abroad. I’ve been told, by several of my Tsinghua students, that studying abroad — while highly desirable from a money-making perspective — is still regarded as a career-killer for anyone hoping to rise within the Party. It will be interesting to see, after a new generation of “princelings” returns to China with Western diplomas in hand, whether this will continue to hold true, and what new perspectives these returnees will bring to Chinese politics.
http://chovanec.wordpress.com/2011/05/08/primer-on-chinas-leadership-transition/
I recommend reading the article in full if you have time, as it is very good, especially as an introduction to how the Chinese political system works. A dominant feature of this system is that the PLA answers directly to the party rather than to the state apparatus. As you would expect, the state apparatus is itself dominated by the party insofar as the party controls all important appointments and guides policy development, in part through a system of party committees that correspond to each unit or level of the bureaucracy including the national-level State Council, and in this respect China is similar to other historic Stalinist states, despite politics now being less personalistic compared to the Mao period. However, the fact that the party's control of the PLA is institutionally guaranteed (the PLA answers to the Military Control Commission, CMC, which is a party organ) makes China different as it means that the party's control of the military is not merely exercised indirectly or informally through the party's dominance in the state. Arguably this system of direct control will have implications for democratic and revolutionary movements in China in the future as it seems likely that the CPC will have a source of armed power to depend on if it faces any challenges to its hegemonic position. Thoughts?