Chinese Law & Politics

Explaining Party rules gives me the strange gratification of feeling like a lawyer that I have never felt when dealing with Chinese laws. So here it is. Someone asked on Twitter : are all Party committees the same because they are all called “committees”? Is the Party committee, say, in a law firm or foreign joint venture company the same as to a provincial party committee? Are their members all public employees? To understand the institutional structure of the Party, we need to know there are four types Party organizations: 1. Central Party Organization. 党的中央组织Its core is the Central Committee党的中央委员会. (The power of Politburo and its standing committee is derived from the Central Committee, in principle). 2. Local Party Organization 党的地方组织 in provinces, prefectures, cities and counties. These organizations strictly correspond to the administrative division. Each administrative unit has one and only one Local Party Organization党的地方委员会. Both central and local organizat...

When I wrote the paper The Rise of Party Commission of Discipline & Inspection (1927-2012) three years ago, I thought the CCDI中纪委 rose to power only after it was repurposed for anti-corruption in the late 1980s as corruption started to become prevalent during the reform era. Its activities in the early period of the PRC seemed very elusive. There are official documentations about the establishment of the CCDI in 1949 (including the draft decision with Mao's handwritten remarks published at the official website of the CCP). Then there is also the Party decision to change the Party Disciplinary Commission纪委 to the Party Supervision Commission监察委 in the wake of the very first Politburo power struggle since the Party came to power - the Gao-Rao incident (高饶事件). Other than that, I could not find any information that can tell me what exact these disciplinary institutions had been doing. No primary sources. And all the secondary sources that I had gleaned gave short shrift to this pe...